Where have all the antibiotics gone?

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0:00Almost all our antibiotics have been discovered in the exact same way: scientists take a sample

0:05of soil – which tends to contain tons of microbes – and grow those microbes on a

0:09petri dish to see if they produce any chemical weapons that could possibly be useful to us.

0:15Early on, this approach kept turning up new types of antibiotics: some that attack

0:20bacteria’s cell walls, others that attack their protein production, still others

0:24that attack their DNA. But in the 1970s, these discoveries stopped; instead, researchers just

0:31kept finding new variations of the same old types of antibiotics they already knew about.

0:37Now, the problem had to do with the basic discovery process. Only about 3% of known

0:43microbes actually reproduce in petri dishes. Because of this discovery drought, doctors haven’t

0:49been able to prescribe a new type of antibiotic in nearly 40 years. And in the meantime, bacteria

0:54have been evolving resistance to the antibiotics we DO have, leaving some of these weapons –that

0:59were once great– powerless. So scientists are switching

1:03up their search strategies. And these days, researchers don’t

1:06even have to grow microbes to see what they’re capable of; they can simply sift through their

1:10DNA to identify potential antibiotic-making genes. Scientists are also looking for microbes in places

1:17other than soil, like the ocean, which is full of unknown – and potentially useful – microbial life.