Liam Shaw

In the 1880s, the Danish bacteriologist Hans Gram was working in the morgue of the Berlin city hospital, trying to identify bacteria in sections of lung tissue under the microscope. But there was so much blood that the bacteria were ‘impossible to see’. He used a dye – gentian violet – to stain the whole sample, then rinsed it with alcohol to wash out the purple colour. The bacteria appeared ‘an intense blue (often almost black)’ while the human cells were unstained.

Thirty-nine asylum seekers were received onto the Bibby Stockholm, moored off Portland, on 7 August. The opening of the barge had been delayed by fire safety issues including a door being fitted the wrong way around, but Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, told Sky News: ‘I can absolutely assure you that this is a safe facility.’ On the day the asylum seekers arrived preliminary results suggested the presence of Legionella in the water supply – the bacterium that causes the form of pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease. They were not evacuated until four days later.

On 18 July 2003, Johnson & Johnson filed a patent for bedaquiline, a new antibiotic against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It was first approved as a medicine in the US in 2012 and is now listed as an essential medicine by the WHO. What should a fair price be for an essential drug? J&J sell bedaquiline at tiered prices around the world: it is more expensive (but easily available) in wealthy countries and cheaper (but hard to come by) where it is most needed. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, in late 2022 it was nearly three times as expensive as it would be in low-income countries if generic forms were available.

It has been reported that a new antibiotic was ‘discovered using AI’. This needs a bit of unpacking. Finding any new drug means searching through ‘chemical space’ – the many possible configurations of atoms that can make up molecules. It’s difficult to get a grip on how vast this universe of possibility is. Most drugs consist of molecules with fewer than thirty atoms and a molecular mass of less than 500 daltons (a hydrogen atom has a mass of one dalton, give or take). It’s hard to estimate, but even if you restrict yourself to a handful of elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur) there are at least 10⁶⁰ possible molecules that fit these criteria. This is a big number, more than a thousand times the number of hydrogen atoms in the Sun. Exploring this chemical universe in its entirety is impossible. The hope is that using predictive algorithms from machine learning can help guide you to the right galaxy.