What lurks in a drowned forest in Alabama | Hacker News Reader

What lurks in a drowned forest in Alabama

nautil.us

71 pointsdnetesn12 comments

The next antibiotic is in a pile of dirt somewhere. The next virus antibody is in an animal somewhere. Nature is way better than humans at scale for biochemistry and has been doing it way longer. Before modern computer or X-ray based drug design there were whole animal and collect-and-test. Chemists can tune better than nature but evolutionary pressure is amazing and can be harvested.

There's an animated piece on Netflix called Midnight Gospel. In it, the ability to simulate universes is invented.

As a result, there are technology farms that harvest technologies developed in the simulated universes (rather than invent their own).

How we harvest nature's "technology" reminds me of this.

It's a pretty good strategy to be honest... much better than hoping to get lucky in the lab by yourself (even with a handful of postdocs)

There's an old Theodore Sturgeon story about this, where a man makes a tiny, ultra-fast civilization 'in his basement' and then learns from them, not-quite passing off this inventions as his own.

Oh, the writers of Rick and Morty have an arc with this premise. Fun to know they got the idea from Sturgeon.

Pretty sure the image at the top is of Wistman's Wood in Devon, UK. In case anyone was wondering!

https://www.google.com/search?q=wistmans+wood&rlz=1C1ONGR_en...

Ancient wood is very valuable and unfortunately people will stop at nothing to get it.

In 2019 the fuel pipeline supplying our largest airport was cut by a Digger being allegedly used to dig up ancient wood (Swamp Kauri).

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/marsden-pt...

Hopefully these ancient forests do not end up being mined.

It seems that almost every story about wanting to protect some natural, undeveloped area includes some line about maybe the next antibiotic will be discovered here.

However, I think we are beyond that now. I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in the last 20 years in such circumstances.

Now, most antibiotic development is based on knowledge of chemistry/biochemistry and understanding resistance mechanisms.

And looking at "natural" antibiotics, many of even the effective ones have very bad toxicity profiles (see streptomycin and kidney and ear toxicity) or have resistance quickly develop (see penicillin).

Although not an antibiotic, it is interesting that the most effective Covid treatments were not ones discovered in nature (for example Ivermectin and quinine), but rather the vaccine, engineered with mRNA precisely targeting the spike protein which was known through sequencing and protein folding analysis.

Although we should conserve the diversity of our natural world, I don't think that new antibiotics are one of the major reasons to do so.

    I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant 
    antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in 
    the last 20 years in such circumstances.

It's difficult to know if this is because we've exhausted nature's supply of antibiotics, or if we haven't found any because we haven't been looking.

Over the past 10-20 years there have been many articles about how pharma companies have largely abandoned the quest for better antibiotics in favor of more profitable lines of medicine.

As a total outsider, I have no way to judge which one is true.

> However, I think we are beyond that now. I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in the last 20 years in such circumstances.

IMO, the main reason is IP law. You can't patent a natural phenomenon so there is no incentive for companies to go looking for drugs out in nature. There might be a huge societal upside but there is basically no profitability.

mRNA in vaccines doesn’t target anything, but encode the antigens (the spike protein in the case of SARS-CoV-2 ones) that will be used by the host immune system to synthetize the antibodies that will target precisely the same antigen present in natural viruses. These antibodies are, in a way, still being discovered by natural processes.

If you're looking for the images, they are from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKm0eRfFFfo

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