INFECTIOUS FUTURES Stories of the post-antibiotic apocalypse
FOREWORD “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin.” No, this is not a warning from one of the army of doctors fighting superbugs today but, remarkably, from a speech given by Alexander Fleming in 1945, when he accepted his Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin. Doctors of his generation knew all about the nightmare of the post-antibiotic era because they had witnessed first-hand the horror of the pre-antibiotic era, when a tiny cut could leave you fighting for your life; in 1930 infant mortality - deaths of children before their first birthday - stood at around one in 20; and opportunistic infections snuffed out the lives of the elderly and vulnerable. Today we are more dependent on antibiotics than ever before in much of modern medicine, from organ donations to hip transplants, but our antibiotic arsenal is becoming increasingly ineffective with the rise of resistant microbes. Over the years the alarm about superbugs has been sounded many times by a wide range of influential bodies, such as World Health Organisation and US Centres for Disease Control. Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer and Longitude Committee member, now talks of a “catastrophic threat”; one that, as the Prime Minister put it, threatens to send us back “into the dark ages of medicine”. In a world where we are inundated with impersonal facts and headlines routinely warn of impending doom, narrative offers a visceral way to explore an issue. There’s meat machinery in our heads to find narratives. One can speculate that, as our ancestors evolved to live in groups, they told stories to make sense of increasingly complex social relationship and to help us make sense of threats. And today one of the biggest threats of all is that of antimicrobial resistance. With this in mind, Nesta, an innovation charity, has invited established and emerging sci-fi writers to explore the future of antibiotic resistance to help underline the urgency of the £10 million Longitude Prize, which aims to spur
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