Here is the part that should worry you.
A single gram of soil holds something like ten billion microbial cells and thousands of distinct species. Ōmura’s method was to collect it, culture it, and screen whatever grew.
But less than one percent of soil bacteria will grow in a laboratory dish. It has a name, the great plate count anomaly, and it has been known since the 1980s. Everything the entire golden age of antibiotic discovery ever found, it found inside that one percent.
So the story is not that they got lucky searching a haystack. They got lucky searching one percent of a haystack, and the other ninety nine percent was never opened.
Then we stopped looking altogether. Through the 1990s the industry moved off natural product screening and onto synthetic chemical libraries, because robots are faster than dirt and a synthetic molecule is easier to own. Most major pharmaceutical companies closed those programmes.
One bag of soil produced a medicine given away more than two billion times. Nobody is filling bags anymore.
There is a small counter-movement worth knowing about. In 2015 a group grew soil bacteria in situ instead of in a dish and pulled out a new antibiotic class from organisms nobody had ever cultured. The ninety nine percent is starting to open.
One last thing, because it belongs in this story and it did not fit in the video. The royalties from this discovery went back to the Kitasato Institute. Ōmura used them to rebuild it, and to fund a hospital. He also built an art museum in his hometown.
He did not keep the dirt money.
#microbiology #drugdiscovery #medicalhistory #nobelprize #ivermectin
#antibiotics #globalhealth #scienceexplained
#naturalproducts #parasitology #evidencebased #biologics #publichealth #shorts
