• Question: How do we beat bacteria?

    Asked by saugaat12 to Shona, Philip, Luke, Catherine, Angeline on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Shona Whittam

      Shona Whittam answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      This isn’t really something I know much about but last years infectious disease zone answered this well: https://diseasej14.iasuk.ddev.site/2014/06/23/how-do-we-beat-bacteria/

      An interesting point is that we have good bacteria so we don’t want to beat all bacteria.
      They also said that an easy way to kill bacteria is to heat it up to high temperatures or bleach it but of course we cannot do this if it is in the human body!
      It can be very hard to beat bad bacteria in the body and the bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics so we have to keep developing new antibiotics.

    • Photo: Angeline Burrell

      Angeline Burrell answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      It would be cool to invent nano-robots and have them take out bad bacteria like little assassins, but I think Shona has got a much better handle on the problem.

    • Photo: Philip Moriarty

      Philip Moriarty answered on 19 Mar 2015:

      I like Angeline’s answer. I’d love to think that nanobots could be developed to do this. The problem is that they won’t end up looking like this:

      There are many reason swhy evolution hasn’t led to structures that look like miniature Transformers floating in our bloodstreams and that’s because the physics for really small things is very different than the physics of the everyday world. If you were the size of a red blood cell, for example, swimming in water would feel like swimming through honey or treacle.

      So the answers will ultimately come from biotechnology and biochemistry rather than nanotechnology.

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