All Things Wise and Wonderful

Organisms evolve; bacteria are organisms; bacteria evolve. Since their numbers are great and their generations short, the evolution of bacteria takes place rather rapidly in human terms. These elementary truths, which have been self-evident to most thinking human beings for decades, and were expounded with exemplary clarity in a noted horror novel sixty years ago, have now apparently begun to dawn even upon the Cabinet Office. Allowances must be made, of course: being the Cabinet Office, they probably thought evolution was something that mostly happened millions of years ago, had its entire aim and culmination in Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and has been going downhill ever since. Even so, vague worries are starting to dawn about the possibility of antibiotics failing even those who will still be able to afford an operation or an organ transplant twenty years from now; and a spokesbeing for the Department of Health and News Corporation quoted the chief medical officer for England to the effect that nothing can be done until the foreigners get their act together.