Few would argue that natural selection is not one of the major and potent forces in nature. In medicine, one of the most dynamic examples is the interaction between bacteria and antimicrobial drugs. Some 60 years of use (a mere blink in evolutionary time) has generated resistance to many compounds in nearly all pathogens. What does the future hold? There are pessimists such as Steve Jones, who suggests that "bacteria are bound to win the war against medicine ... Nowhere else does the evolutionary battle take place in an area where one player (the bacteria) holds all the cards ... medicine's finest days may soon be over, but antibiotics, in their brief flowering, have revealed as can nothing else what evolution needs to do its finest work!"
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