I think all the current antibiotics are based on natural antibiotics discovered in various organisms.
There are machines screening millions of compounds for antibiotic, antitumor and other medicinal virtues.
Yes, but if the bacteria is already resistant - then we'd find what we already have... right?
Just about all antibiotics are derived from bacteria or fungi.
very few are just “chemical conglomerations” Supposedly this
is due to the chemical wars going on between competing
microorganisms and we are using weapons which the
bacteria and fungus have already. (As a sidebar, does that mean that war is “natural”
and just like any behaviour which is overlooked cuz it is
“natural”, is war OK too? Should we accept the diversity that
is present with warlike folk?)
As far as resistance goes, most of the genetic information
is present in the world (pre human antibiotic development),
sometimes, it is passed on through
viral transmission of the gene, or by “bacterial” sex(there is
a way for bacteria to inject part of it’s genome into a
different bacteria) or rearrangement of genes already present.
Or by plasmids....From my understanding of this
subject, there may be some genome which develops
new genes which code for “resistance”, but it is certainly
not the main way “resistance” occurs. Since we didn’t know
the bacterial genomes before, we don’t know if the
resistance genes are new developments, at least yet.
The main reason why they say that resistance “develops” is
cuz it is now noticed to a greater extent than what was
thought previously.
Everyone talks about MRSA (i.e. methicillin resistant
staph aureus)...but when the drug methicillin first was
introduced in the early 60’s..there were already resistant
organisms...they just hadn’t spread around to the point
where they were clinically significant...Now they is.