The Antibiotic Resistance Crisis Has a Troubling Twist
WiredNov 26, 2022
The Facts
Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped a team of scientists discover a new antibiotic that can be lethal to a strain of deadly superbug. The US-Canadian team said that the finding may greatly speed up the process of discovering new treatments.
On Thursday, the results from the team from McMaster University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to combat Acinetobacter baumannii — the superbug determined to be a "critical" threat by the World Health Organization — were published in Nature Chemical Biology.
The Spin
Narrative A
In search of new medical treatments, the old way was to test one chemical at a time. This is slow, labor-intensive, and costly. Modern computational approaches using artificial intelligence can assess the antibacterial properties of hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of molecules, enabling scientists to develop new drugs much faster and cheaper. AI has resulted in a true medical breakthrough here.
Narrative B
Artificial intelligence may be used in healthcare systems to reduce costs and relieve clinicians of some workload, but its use also raises important concerns. While rendering some research jobs redundant is one of these, there are also other more major downsides too — the risk of missing data, excluding important social variables, and vulnerability to cyberattacks. AI must be used with caution and regulation.
