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Most medical science moves at super-speed; researchers are constantly developing new medications, techniques, surgeries, you name it. Except for antibiotics: we haven't gotten a single new type of antibiotic ready to give to patients in over 40 years. Hi, I'm Cameron, and this is MinuteEarth. Almost a hundred years ago, scientists figured out that microbes have evolved all sorts of chemical weapons to use against other microbes, AND that we humans can co-opt these weapons for our own use; thus, "antibiotics" were born.
And almost all our antibiotics have been discovered in the exact same way: scientists take a sample of soil - which tends to contain tons of microbes - and grow those microbes on a petri dish to see if they produce any chemical weapons that could possibly be useful to us. Early on, this approach kept turning up new types of antibiotics: some that attack bacteria's cell walls, others that attack their protein production, still others that attack their DNA. But in the 1970s, these discoveries stopped; instead, researchers just kept finding new variations of the same old types of antibiotics they already knew about.
Now, the problem had to do with the basic discovery process. See, growing microbes in a lab is a lot like breeding animals in a zoo. Some animals - and some microbes - multiply and thrive just fine in human-made confines. But most microbes are like pandas, which are notoriously difficult to keep happy in captivity. Only about 3% of known microbes actually reproduce in petri dishes. Plus, like zoo animals, microbes don't necessarily behave the same way in captivity as they do in the wild; like, if they aren't around a lot of competitors,
they might not produce all the chemical weapons they're capable of making, so we might be missing out on potentially-useful weapons. Scientists have tried other antibiotic search strategies - they looked to human-produced chemicals in search of ones that might kill bacteria, and even tried to synthesize new antibiotic drugs - but most of them haven't worked as well as the chemical weapons that have evolved in nature over millenia. Because of this discovery drought, doctors haven't been able to prescribe a new type of antibiotic in nearly 40 years.
And in the meantime, bacteria have been evolving resistance to the antibiotics we DO have, leaving some of these weapons -that were once great- powerless. So scientists are switching up their search strategies. They're going back to looking for microbes in the wild, but this time with fancier tools that don't require breeding them in petri zoos; for instance, some new devices allow researchers to grow and observe bacteria in their natural environments. And these days, researchers don't even have to grow microbes to see what they're capable of; they can simply sift through their DNA to identify potential antibiotic-making genes.
Scientists are also looking for microbes in places other than soil, like the ocean, which is full of unknown - and potentially useful - microbial life. And these new methods may be starting to pay off: in 2025, a group of scientists identified a completely new type of antibiotic, which just so happens to be shaped like a little molecular lasso. I hope it means we can round up many more new antibiotics in our future. This video is brought to by the Science Awareness Project, which showcases a snapshot of today's scientific medical research from across the
country including the search for new antibiotics using the methods we talk about in this video! On the website for the Science Awareness Project, you can learn about some of the medicines and treatments scientists are currently working to discover. Check it out at www.scienceawarenessproject.org
