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  Anonymous

  23 December 2008 | 11:19

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  The podcast of Bill’s excellent introduction is now available on the British Library website.

  I came across this interview with Paul Ewald which tackles some of the issues raised in the discussion.

  For example, one of the topics that was raised was how our interventions (antibiotics, vaccinations etc.) impact on the evolution of the pathogen. Maybe sometimes our actions inadvertently select for more virulent strains of pathogens. Ewald suggests that we can use those interventions to control the evolution of the organisms – instead of pathogens evolving around our interventions (e.g. developing antibiotic resistance), we can get the organisms to evolve to be less harmful than they have been in the past.

  He states “people have been thinking about evolution as a source of problems rather than a source of solutions. For example, when people are looking at the antibiotic resistance problem, they see evolution as sort of the bad guy — it’s the evolutionary process that’s led to antibiotic resistance. That’s true, but just as easily we can have evolution being the solution. In other words, we can have evolutionary processes leading to organisms becoming more mild over time, and if organisms become more mild, then we’ve solved the problem. Not by getting involved in some kind of arms race in which we’re using one antibiotic weapon against the organism, and [the organism] evolving a defensive weapon against that antibiotic, and then we have to shift to another, and so on, indefinitely. Instead, we have a sense of where we want evolution to end, and we adjust the environment so that the organism freely evolves to that endpoint, which is in its interest and also in our interest.”

  This is a great idea but what kinds of mechanisms can we employ to achieve this?