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40 Years Without A New Antibiotic. Why? - Video học tiếng Anh
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40 Years Without A New Antibiotic. Why?
40 Years Without A New Antibiotic. Why?
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0:00
Most medical science moves at super-speed; researchers are
0:03
constantly developing new medications, techniques, surgeries, you name it.
0:08
Except for antibiotics: we haven’t gotten a single
0:11
new type of antibiotic ready to give to patients in over 40 years.
0:16
Hi, I'm Cameron, and this is MinuteEarth.
0:19
Almost a hundred years ago, scientists figured out that microbes have evolved
0:23
all sorts of chemical weapons to use against other microbes,
0:27
AND that we humans can co-opt these weapons for our own use; thus, “antibiotics” were born.
0:34
And almost all our antibiotics have been discovered in the exact same way: scientists
0:39
take a sample of soil – which tends to contain tons of microbes – and grow those microbes on a
0:44
petri dish to see if they produce any chemical weapons that could possibly be useful to us.
0:49
Early on, this approach kept turning up new types of antibiotics: some that attack bacteria’s
0:54
cell walls, others that attack their protein production, still others that attack their DNA.
0:59
But in the 1970s, these discoveries stopped; instead, researchers just kept finding new
1:06
variations of the same old types of antibiotics they already knew about.
1:11
Now, the problem had to do with the basic discovery process. See,
1:15
growing microbes in a lab is a lot like breeding animals in a zoo.
1:19
Some animals – and some microbes – multiply and thrive just fine in human-made confines.
1:25
But most microbes are like pandas, which are notoriously difficult to keep happy in captivity.
1:31
Only about 3% of known microbes actually reproduce in petri dishes.
1:36
Plus, like zoo animals, microbes don’t necessarily behave the same way in
1:41
captivity as they do in the wild; like, if they aren’t around a lot of competitors,
1:45
they might not produce all the chemical weapons they’re capable of making,
1:49
so we might be missing out on potentially-useful weapons.
1:53
Scientists have tried other antibiotic search strategies – they looked to
1:57
human-produced chemicals in search of ones that might kill bacteria,
2:01
and even tried to synthesize new antibiotic drugs – but most of them haven’t worked
2:06
as well as the chemical weapons that have evolved in nature over millenia.
2:09
Because of this discovery drought,
2:11
doctors haven’t been able to prescribe a new type of antibiotic in nearly 40 years.
2:16
And in the meantime, bacteria have been evolving resistance to the antibiotics we DO have,
2:21
leaving some of these weapons –that were once great– powerless.
2:25
So scientists are switching up their search strategies.
2:28
They’re going back to looking for microbes in the wild, but this time with fancier
2:31
tools that don’t require breeding them in petri zoos; for instance,
2:35
some new devices allow researchers to grow and observe bacteria in their natural environments.
2:40
And these days, researchers don’t even have to grow microbes to see what they’re capable of;
2:45
they can simply sift through their DNA to identify potential antibiotic-making genes.
2:50
Scientists are also looking for microbes in places other than soil,
2:54
like the ocean, which is full of unknown – and potentially useful – microbial life.
3:00
And these new methods may be starting to pay off: in 2025,
3:04
a group of scientists identified a completely new type of antibiotic,
3:09
which just so happens to be shaped like a little molecular lasso.
3:14
I hope it means we can round up many more new antibiotics in our future.
3:22
This video is brought to by the Science Awareness Project,
3:25
which showcases a snapshot of today's scientific medical research from across the
3:29
country including the search for new antibiotics using the methods we talk about in this video!
3:34
On the website for the Science Awareness Project, you can learn about some of the
3:38
medicines and treatments scientists are currently working to discover.
3:41
Check it out at www.scienceawarenessproject.org
