[timr]

"But this pessimism rests entirely on one assumption: that we have no realistic prospect of developing new classes of antibiotics any time soon, antibiotics that our major threats have not yet seen and thus not acquired resistance to."

Uh, no. The "pessimism" (as it were) doesn't extend from that assumption. It extends from the fact that very few people are doing the basic research anymore, and even fewer companies are willing to invest the enormous amounts of money necessary to shuttle candidate drugs from promising lead to clinical approval. It's not as if this is the only story of a candidate antibiotic. Most don't become drugs.

And in any case, the "pessimism" isn't really pessimism, so much as a community of knowledgable people sounding the alarm about an impeding crisis. To the extent that it gets people doing innovative things to solve the problem, it's a good thing, not something to be criticized. I don't even know why you would write this kind of piece -- the caveats at the end notwithstanding, it makes it sound like we don't have to worry anymore, because things are "speeding up". But they aren't speeding up. This is a good discovery, but it's just a start.

[21]

When people will start dying en masse from this you'll see how suddenly the priorities will change. Sure, it's a tragedy right now that the incentives are not properly aligned, but I wouldn't worry about doomsday scenarios.

[stcredzero]

When people will start dying en masse from this you'll see how suddenly the priorities will change.

Someday, I hope to live in an educated, industrialized, humanist society that can change policy direction without large numbers of people dying. (Of course, I already do. The answer is lots of $$$, as usual.)

[zamalek]

If things are speeding up (or eventually do), it would likely be thanks to all the "pessimism." With public outcry comes funding.

[timr]

Yes, precisely. The first part of science is the identification of problems. It doesn't do much good to look at a serious problem through rose-colored glasses.