DEREK LOWE ON WHAT JON STEWART DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT ANTIBIOTICS:

There’s a persistent explanation for the state of antibiotic therapy that blames drug companies for supposedly walking away from the field. This has the cause and effect turned around. It’s true that some of them have given up working in the area (along with quite a few other areas), but they left because nothing was working. The companies that stayed the course have explored, in great detail and at great expense, the problem that nothing much is working. If there ever was a field of drug discovery where the low-hanging fruit has been picked clean, it is antibiotic research. You have to use binoculars to convince yourself that there’s any more fruit up there at all. I wish that weren’t so, very much. But it is. Bacteria are hard to kill.

So the talk later on in the interview of spending some tax dollars and getting a bunch of great new antibiotics in ten years is, unfortunately, a happy fantasy. For one thing, getting a single new drug onto the market in only ten years from the starting pistol is very close to impossible, in any therapeutic area. The drug industry would be in much better shape if that weren’t so, but here we are. In that section, Jon Stewart actually brings to life one of the reasons I have this blog: he doesn’t know where drugs come from, and that’s no disgrace, because hardly anyone else knows, either.

Lots of things are harder than people who don’t understand them think.