Les Bonnes Choses

I just stumbled across this article on Wired, based on a recent article in Nature, the journal to which Gill and I aspire to be published in the near future. In it, the article briefly discusses the overuse of antibiotics, which is widely believed to be responsible for the proliferation of drug-resistance among various nasties.

I've alluded in the past to random ideas I've had that, despite their naivete, turned out to be pretty good -- good enough that others who have also had them have gone on to make something out of them. For example, after I learned how viruses work, I thought, "hey, that would be a good way to screw around with cancer cells" (1998).

Okay, so, aside from religious fundamentalists, we're all pretty much up-to-speed on the concept of survival of the fittest, right? That's how those nasty buggers came about in the first place. We keep making conditions that promote the survival of only those organisms that survive antibiotics. So what if, instead of disinfecting our hospitals, we infected the hell out of them? Like, with the old-school lame versions of those superbugs? Bugs that compete for the same resources. It would be like flooding the market with cheap knockoffs. In my head, at least, it seems just so crazy, it just might work.