AI Is Discovering New Antibiotics — A Task Previously Deemed Extremely Challenging For Humans.
A Deep Dive Into How AI Helped Humans Discover Two New Antibiotics — ‘Halicin’ & ‘Abaucin’
It’s a bright sunny day.
Imagine a jolly child who goes out to play football in a lush green field.
An opponent team member tackles him harshly, and he falls down to scratch his knee.
The scratch never heals. Instead, it grows.
It spreads deep into the joint.
The child is dead in a few days.
Sounds horrifying, right?
This was an everyday reality before the beginning of the 20th Century. Infectious diseases were rampant. People died of minor scratches and wounds.
The average life expectancy, even in the industrialized world, was just 47 years.
A simple unignored observation changed it all for humanity.
In 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish physician and Microbiologist had just returned from his summer vacation.
To his horror, he found his lab bench a mess, and many of the Petri dishes containing staphylococcal bacterial culture had developed mold.
However, to his surprise, the mold was preventing the bacteria around it from growing.