[00:00] Almost all of our antibiotics have been discovered in the exact same way. Scientists, they take a sample of soil, which tends to contain tons of microbes, and they grow those microbes on a petri dish in order to see if they produce any
[00:12] chemical weapons that could possibly be useful to us. Early on, this approach kept turning up new types of antibiotics. Some that attack bacteria's cell walls, others that attack their protein production, and still others that attack their DNA. But in the 1970s,
[00:27] these discoveries stopped. Instead, researchers just kept finding new variations of the same old types of antibiotics that they already knew about. Now, the problem had to do with their basic
[00:40] discovery process. Only about 3% of known microbes actually reproduce in petri dishes. Because of this discovery drought, doctors haven't been able to prescribe a new type of antibiotic in nearly
[00:52] 40 years. And in the meantime, bacteria have been evolving resistance to the antibiotics we do have, leaving some of these weapons that were once great powerless. So scientists are switching up their
[01:04] search strategies. And these days, researchers don't even have to grow microbes to see what they're capable of. They can simply sift through their DNA to identify potential antibiotic-making genes. Scientists are also looking for microbes in places other than soil, like in the ocean,
[01:19] which is full of unknown and potentially useful microbial life.