Critical mass: Bacteria with multiple drug resistance kill around 23,000 people per year in the US alone, and a similar number across Europe. That figure corresponds to the capacity of the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York shown here, or the O2 Arena in London. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/davidwboswell) The US Food and Drugs Administration once proposed a regulation to ban the use of three antibiot...

neurodegenerative disorders such as huntingtons disease, alzheimers disease, parkinsons disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy, friedreichs ataxia, and others are multi-factorial illnesses in which many pathways (still poorly understood) act serially and in parallel to give a determined pathologic phenotype. thus, presently there are no effective cures for these disease...

* Gerarden: Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: [email protected]); Newell: Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, 140 Science Dr., 101 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708 (email: [email protected]); Stavins: Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: [email protected]). This paper draws in p...