"The end of modern medicine as we know it." That's how the then-director general of the World Health Organization characterized the creeping problem of antimicrobial resistance in 2012.
For nearly 25 years, Dr. James Kirby has worked to advance the fight against infectious diseases by finding and developing new, potent antimicrobials, and by better understanding how disease-causing bacteria make us sick. In a recent paper published in PLOS Biology, Kirby and colleagues investigated a naturally occurring antimicrobial agent discovered more than 80 years ago.