On Superbugs, Quantum Dots and the Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse

Quantum dots glowing with visible light 

Photo: Tayfun Ruzgar / Shutterstock

As we all know, antibiotics revolutionised medicine in the twentieth-century, allowing doctors to treat and prevent a whole range of nasty and potentially deadly bacterial infections.

However, as many of us also know, laziness and stupidity on the part of healthcare professionals, farmers and consumers, resulted in their misuse and overuse. Ultimately, prescribing and popping antibiotics as if they were medicinal Smarties, allowed bacteria to develop increasingly effective resistance; to become, in tabloid parlance, superbugs.

Antimicrobial resistance is now such a serious concern that England's chief medical officer, Prof. Dame Sally Davies, has taken to the airwaves to warn that modern medicine as currently practised is under threat and that many thousands of lives are already being lost due to drug-resistant infections.*

Indeed, somewhat hysterically, Davies refers to the possibility of a post-antibiotic apocalypse and demands that governments around the world take immediate action to prevent this. Otherwise, no more organ transplants, hip replacements, or caesarian sections. Cancer treatments would also become far riskier in the future - won't somebody please think of the children?

Thankfully, there is some good news to report; science might be able to meet the challenge of the superbugs not just with newly developed antibiotics, but with nanotechnology in the form of so-called quantum dots, or artificial atoms ...     
 

Thanks to these strange, nano-sized crystals - invisible to the human eye - we have a significantly more potent weapon against drug-resistant microbes. In fact, QDs can supercharge traditional antibiotics making them up to a thousand times more effective.

Reacting as they do to certain frequencies of light, QDs can be photo-stimulated in such a manner as to disrupt vital chemical reactions that microbes - including superbug strains of E. coli and MRSA - require for their own well-being. It also appears that the dots can produce a compound known as a superoxide, which is readily absorbed by bacterial cells, further fucking-up their ability to produce energy and to develop.        

It was discovered that QDs best carry out their murderous work when subject to green light. Unfortunately, green light can only penetrate a few millimetres beneath the surface of the human body, which means that QD-enhanced antibiotics can at present only treat skin infections or open wounds. The idea is that, eventually, hard-working biophysicists will work out how to trigger them with infra-red light.

Still, it's good to know that, thanks to quantum mechanics, there's hope that we won't all die off in the bacterial apocalypse imagined by Dame Sally and certain doom-mongering members of the World Health Organization.

As for those with concerns about using nanotechnology to fight disease, well they may continue to drink their own urine, perform caffeine enemas, or dabble with dragon's blood as is their wont ... 


*Presently, the number of lives lost each year to drug-resistant infections is estimated to be 700,000. Failure to address the issue, however, is likely to see this figure increase globally to 10,000,000 by 2050.

Skinny Mannequin Sparks Outrage

The curious and often heated debate over the size and shape of shop-window dummies is raging once again, following the appearance of a new model in Topshop (second from left in the above image) and a tweet from outraged customer Betty Hopper.

Now, whilst I understand the issue here and can see how display units might (somewhat naively) be thought of as plastic versions of real women and thus, like fashion models, be caught up in the discussion around body image and eating disorders, are stores really promoting anorexia as an aspirational lifestyle by using skinny mannequins? I don't think so. 

In fact, I have more than a little sympathy with those who argue that solid fibreglass mannequins are not meant to be viewed as ideal role models and have more in common with clothes hangers than they do with flesh-and-blood women. Usually, any realistic elements are outweighed by the abstract and frequently headless nature of the design.

In a statement issued by Topshop with reference to the mannequin in question, it's calmly pointed out that "the form is a stylized one designed to have greater impact in store and create a visual focus". The statement continues by saying that the mannequin primarily exists to display clothes and its dimensions simply enable faster dressing and undressing; "it is therefore not meant to be a representation of the average female body".

That's a little disingenuous perhaps, but it's by no means false or an outright lie and I think those who get overexcited on social media and start speaking about 'impressionable teens', or body-shaming those girls who are happily waif-like with their offensive assertion that real women have curves, need to keep things in perspective and be careful what they say.

Not that it's just possibly envious members of the twitterati who make nasty remarks about those girls judged to be underweight; I was surprised and disappointed to read Pascal Bruckner's negative characterization of fashion models as "flat-chested beanpoles". Is the woman with a "fuller-figure" he appears to lust after really a taboo in our society? Again, I don't think so.

Finally, if "emaciated mannequins" (another of Bruckner's pet peeves) cause anorexia and represent the triumph of ascetic idealism's dream of disembodiment, then mightn't plus-size dummies promote obesity?

The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, certainly thinks so and recently warned that the increasing use of larger mannequins (along with size inflation of labelling) were starting to normalize overweight. This might be a slightly absurd and simplistic claim, but no more so than the one made about the Topshop mannequin.