Playing the Big Fiddle while Rome burns?

We've seemed to have forgotten the trust-busting era that was necessary to control monopolistic acquisition of resources.  That was over a century ago, and now we're again allowing already huge companies to merge and coalesce.  It's rationalized in various ways, naturally, by those on the gain.  It's the spirit and the power structure of our times, for whatever reason.  Maybe that explains why the same thing is happening in science as universities coo over their adoption of 'the business model'.

We're inundated in jargonized ways of advertising to co-opt research resources, with our  'omics' and 'Big Data' labeling.  Like it or not, this is how the system is working in our media and self-promotional age.  One is tempted to say that, as with old Nero, it may take a catastrophic fire to force us to change.  Unfortunately, that imagery is apparently quite wrong.  There were no fiddles in Nero's time, and if he did anything about the fire it was to help sponsor various relief efforts for those harmed by it.  But whatever imagery you want, our current obsession with scaling up to find more and more that explains less and less is obvious. Every generation has its resource competition games, always labeled as for some greater good, and this is how our particular game is played.  But there is a fire starting, and at least some have begun smelling the smoke.

Nero plucks away.  Sourcc: Wikipedia images, public domain

The smolder threatens to become an urgent fire, truly, and not just as a branding exercise.  It is a problem recognized not just by nay-saying cranks like us who object to how money is being burnt to support fiddling with more-of-the-same-not-much-new research.  It is an area where a major application of funds could have enormously positive impact on millions of people, and where causation seems to be quite tractable and understandable enough that you could even find it with a slide rule.

We refer to the serious, perhaps acute, problem with antibiotic resistance.  Different bugs are being discovered to be major threats, or to have evolved to become so, both for us and for the plants and animals who sacrifice their lives to feed us. Normal evolutionary dynamics, complemented with our agricultural practices, our population density and movement, and perhaps other aspects of our changing of local ecologies, is opening space for the spread of new or newly resistant pathogens.

This is a legitimate and perhaps imminent threat of a potentially catastrophic scale.  Such language is not an exercise in self-promotional rhetoric by those warning us of the problem. There is plenty of evidence that epidemic or even potentially pandemic shadows loom.  Ebola, zika, MRSA, persistent evolving malaria, and more should make the point and we have history to show that epidemic catastrophes can be very real indeed.

Addressing this problem rather than a lot of the wheel-spinning, money-burning activities now afoot in the medical sciences would be where properly constrained research warrants public investment.  The problem involves the ecology of the pathogens, our vulnerabilities as hosts, weaknesses in the current science, and problems in the economics of such things as antibacterial drugs or vaccinations.  These problems are tractable, with potentially huge benefit.

For a quick discussion, here is a link to a program by the statistical watchdog BBC Radio program MoreOrLess on antibiotic resistance  Of course there are many other papers and discussions as well.  We're caught between urgently increasing need, and the logistics, ecology, and economics that threaten to make the problem resistant to any easy fixes.

There's plenty of productive science that can be done that is targeted to individual causes that merit our attention, and for which technical solutions of the kind humans are so good at might be possible. We shouldn't wait to take antibiotic resistance seriously, but clearing away the logjam of resource commitments in genetic and epidemiological research to large weakly statistical efforts well into diminishing returns, or research based on rosy promises where we know there are few flowers, will not be easy...but we are in danger of fiddling around detecting risk factors with ever-decreasing effect sizes until the fire spreads to our doorsteps.