On the Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week, Martin Blaser from New York University argues that narrow-spectrum antibiotics and new diagnostics are needed to better home in on pathogenic bacteria while leaving beneficial members of the microbiome alone.
"We have so much genomic information, we can harness that to make better medicine," says Blaser, who was there promoting his new book Missing Microbes.
"We need to develop the drugs that our kids and our grandkids are going to use so that these epidemics can be stopped," he adds.
HT: Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life