I remember back when I was just learning about the biology of germs how confident we were at being able to eradicate them from the face of the earth. We were optimistic of the tools we had developed to find a way to kill them one by one, our vaccines, our antibiotics, but I guess we forgot that there is something called … evolution.
The mathematician character in the Jurassic Park movie, who is actually based on real life biologist Stuart Kauffman, so’s I’ve heard, said as he poured a drop off water over his wrist, “life will always find a way..” well something like that, I don’t remember exactly. It was over a conversation of how they had developed ways to genetically manipulate the dinosaurs so that they can’t reproduce other than by the hand of the scientists who fertilized the eggs in the lab, and also.. duuhh.. like the dinosaurs were all females! So there is no way the dinosaurs can collude and make babies and escape from the high voltage fences and go on to develop a taste for human flesh!
So what the mathematician character with the drop of water tried to show was how the curves on his hand just tilted a certain way can make the water droplet go this way and that, but we can’t really be sure where it will go, we can’t really predict the path of the droplet, which way it chooses to take, we can’t really predict what can happen exactly. All we know is the water will drop, and it’ll surely find it’s way.
This unpredictability is what has allowed life on earth to flourish in it’s variety, exploiting every possible niche from the hot seabeds to the frozen arctic, this process of using such unpredictable outcomes is the raw material by which the process of evolution happens so that life can find it’s way.
Back to the germs. We are now, passing the Millennium, with our complete human genome, our supercomputers to crack them and the robotic arms to sequence your own within a few weeks and a few dollars, realizing that we have been running on something like the old nuclear arms race. We might have gotten ahead of the germs some 50 years or so since the first polio vaccination, but now we have discovered, the germs aren’t just standing around taking it. Life will find a way, and as it goes, the germs, just like us, will figure out a way to keep on living. We are suddenly finding ourselves with increasing numbers of supergerms resistant to antibiotics known to man. This is the germs doing it’s natural thing, what it is meant to do as a living organism, evolving and adapting, finding a way to live.
So did we fail in our germ warfare? I’d like to see it as a maturation process of science. That we are realizing that life and the process of science that allows us to piece it together and somewhat understand it will always be an endless unraveling. Once we had gotten the tools to crack open one safe, another one is waiting just around the corner. It is playing an endless catch up game that we did not volunteer to be a part of. This is life that can feel unsettling. But what is more unsettling, for me, is to have it all finally be solved and there is nothing more for the human being to fight for. Surely though, I’d hate to be infected by those new superbugs.
Did we fail? Can’t really say, because we can only keep on running and the germs keep on too.
Interesting science on post-antibiotic era from Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antibiotic-resistance-is-now-rife-across-the-globe/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
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