The Antibiotic Arms Race

Antibiotics are probably the most important medical advance of the 20th century. Medical professionals at the time chronicled the transformation: You had patients who were choking to death with pneumonia or wasting away with tuberculosis, and then suddenly, a few days later, they were cured. If you're a fan of the James Herriot books about working as a veterinarian in 1930s Yorkshire, you'll already have a sense of what I mean. This scientific advancement, in practice, looked like magic.

Unfortunately, our magic powers are eroding. Antibiotics face a worthy, endlessly adaptive enemy: bacteria. The more we use each drug, the less effective it becomes. That means that we need a constant flow of new antibiotics. And we're not getting them, in part because the market for developing these vital drugs is broken.