what is an antibiotic and how does it’s work?
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Antibiotics are classes of chemicals which do something to interrupt the life cycle of bacteria, but nothing to animal cells. As a result of this, if you flood your system with them, the bacteria all die and your own cells don’t notice.
Most antibiotics are derived from chemicals produced by other organisms. Penicillin is named after the *penicillium* mold in which it was first isolated. It was noticed that this mold formed a clear ring around itself on a petri dish otherwise completely covered in bacteria because it was emitting this chemical to drive off competition. Most other antibiotics have similar origin stories.
Antibiotics aren’t perfect, though. They work more like throwing a wrench into a specific part of a delicate machine than a hammer smashing that machine to bits. Penicillin, for instance, only weakens the cell walls of certain, specific bacteria by inhibiting a specific chemical reaction. When this works, it causes the weakened cells to explode. But if something random happens to the bacterium which changes how that reaction can occur, the bacterium will no longer be susceptible to this attack. That’s how we get antibiotic resistance.
The “good” thing about resistance genes is that they are mostly terrible for the bacteria in a vacuum. The penicillin resistance gene straight-up weakens the cell wall on its own, just not enough to kill the cell, and in a way which penicillin won’t make worse. If you stopped using penicillin entirely, the bacteria which didn’t have this gene would outcompete the ones which do, and the same goes for most other antibiotic resistance genes as well. But doing this would take massive organization on the part of every doctor in the world to keep using the antibiotics we have in a ~10 year cycle to prevent any bacterium from catching up again, and also banning the use of antibiotics in animals. Which isn’t happening unless a lot of things change really fast.
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