Watch Bacteria Become Resistant to Antibiotics in a Matter of Days: A Quick, Stop-Motion Film

in Biology | September 16th, 2016 1 Comment

The video above should ter­ri­fy you a lit­tle. Record­ed at Har­vard Med­ical School (HMS), the time-motion film lets you see “bac­te­ria [Escherichia coli] devel­op resis­tance to increas­ing­ly high­er dos­es of antibi­otics in a mat­ter of days.” And it amounts, says Har­vard, to “the first large-scale glimpse of the maneu­vers of bac­te­ria as they encounter increas­ing­ly high­er dos­es of antibi­otics and adapt to survive—and thrive—in them.” You can learn more about the exper­i­ment itself, and the video tech­niques used to make the stop motion, over at HMS. The exper­i­ment is also described in the Sep­tem­ber 9 issue of Sci­ence. 

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon. If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

An Artis­tic Por­trait of Stephen Fry Made From His Own Bac­te­ria

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Har­vard Thinks Big 4 Offers TED-Style Talks on Stats, Milk, and Traf­fic-Direct­ing Mimes

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es


by | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (1)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • L. Grishman says:
    September 17, 2016 at 7:30 pm

    I have known about this since the 1960’s. My late sis­ter and broth­er-in-law owned a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny in South Africa. They only man­u­fac­tur­ing anal­gesic pain med­ica­tion. How­ev­er, they made sure that if any­one was pre­scribed an antibi­ot­ic in our fam­i­ly we need­ed to com­plete the entire course, even if we felt bet­ter. The rea­son being that unless the pre­scribed course of meds was com­plet­ed, our bod­ies woulld build up a resis­tance and this would cause germs to become resis­tant to antibi­otics…
    It seems to me that few physi­cians heed­ed this warn­ing. AND here we are in 2016 and fac­ing the inevitable.

    C’est la vie.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.