IT’S ONE of the most famous stories of serendipitous discovery in science: in 1928 Alexander Fleming left some bacterial cultures on the lab bench when he went on holiday, an oversight that led to the development of penicillin when he returned home and made his observations of the contaminated plates.
In the decades since, antibiotics have saved countless lives and have been cited as one of the main reasons for increased life expectancy in some parts of the world.
But even while receiving the Nobel nod from Stockholm in 1945, Fleming struck a note of caution. During his speech accepting the prize he said: “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”
He was making an important point. Today we share the world with several strains of disease-causing bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics, including MRSA, strains of E.coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa . We often refer to these as superbugs, though not everyone is fond of the term.
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Source:CLAIRE O'CONNELL (Irish Times)
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