YouSaid · the spoken record

Liam Shaw

lines on the record: 39
first: 2025-08-17
most recent: 2025-08-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just kind of organize this huge manufacturing program where they got different companies and universities together and said, right, you're all going to collaborate. The government is backing this. You're going to share knowledge openly because we really want to make as much of this as possible because we're a nation at war. So something like a kind of wartime footing for the challenge is where we see these huge statist enterprises. And I think that something like that for antibiotics at an international level would be really cool to see. Of course, in the current geopolitical environment, does that seem very likely? Perhaps not, but there's nothing to stop certain groupings of nation states or whatever or international arrangements of other sorts getting started with that anyway. And I think that would be hugely beneficial.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clear that patents don't work for antibiotics. The idea that you get currently is normally a 20-year period of exclusivity over a molecule where if you discover it and patent it, you then have 20 years to charge sort of you're the sole producer. You can license it to other people if you want, but you have a monopoly. And after that point, the price tends to go off a cliff because other manufacturers can make it and you can't stop them. That really doesn't work for antibiotics. It's really proving a disaster. So the options for doing drugs differently would be to have a public institute that makes drugs where we all own the patent or maybe there's no patent at all and drugs are made that way. Now that sounds like”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a minority of cases, you're not going to make very much money. So instead, we could pay for antibiotics on a subscription model where we just pay a company a fixed amount a year and say we will have access to the antibiotic, however much of it we use doesn't matter. You're getting this fixed amount of money. And that has been trialed as a pilot scheme in England for two new antibiotics where the companies are paid 10 million pounds a year, flat rate. The NHS can use NHS England can use as much or as little as the antibiotic as doctors choose. And that's been calculated to still work out as good value for money. I think that's actually really interesting and kind of suggests that maybe that model could work for other drugs as well. You know, there's actually nothing fundamental that's limiting that to antibiotics. So I think that's quite promising. And then the final one is developing drugs in a different way altogether, I think is pretty...”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their portfolio that do make money, that inevitably ends up costing more than just giving them a big pot of money straight off. But it sort of doesn't show up on the government's budget or whatever. So it's attractive for those reasons. Again, I think that's obvious problems. And a checkered history of there's a checked history of attempts to kind of intervene in drug prices in this way. The second one, changing how we pay for them, I think is a bit more interesting. At the moment, antibiotic reimbursement for companies works like any other drug, sort of pay per dose. It's a simple capitalist model where they have a product, they sell it, they get paid for how much of the product they sell. With antibiotics, we want to use them as little as possible. So it's not good if you develop a new antibiotic and the healthcare system says, fantastic, we're going to put that in a special cabinet and we're basically never going to use it apart from.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can develop them in a very different way to the current model of pharmaceutical development. So to go through those briefly in turn, changing how much we pay for them, governments could just decide that we're going to start paying much, much higher prices for antibiotics. So when somebody discovers a new antibiotic and patents it, we could give them an extra big cash prize, you know, if the antibiotic meets certain criteria. So that's something that's been proposed. There are problems with that. Obviously, people don't like the idea that we'll give even more money to big pharmaceutical companies. I certainly don't. One way to get around that is, oh, maybe let's not give them a big pot of money. Let's give them some intellectual property rights, which aren't actually worth, you know, there's no cash value right now, but the value is over several years. So giving them the option to extend their patents on maybe other drugs that they have.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, for example, that's not to condemn people in other parts of the world where taking antibiotics at huge levels, you know, without prescription, which is something that's very frowned upon and not possible in Britain, I don't think we should look at that and say, oh, that's really bad. They shouldn't be doing that because often the reasons that people are doing that is because that is the healthcare system. There isn't actually, you know, national healthcare system as we have in Britain where we can go and get treatment for free. There's very fewer numbers of doctors and so on. So people are self-medicating because they believe that it's important for their health. But in terms of actual collective actions, I think the economic challenge of antibiotic research can really be solved in three ways. We can either change how much we pay for antibiotics, we can change how we pay for them, or we”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I noticed when reading existing work about antibiotics is that a lot of it tends to focus on individual actions as if we all just did this when we took antibiotics we could solve the problem. I think that's just wrong. I'm not saying that that doesn't help, but there's a saying actually in the context of climate change that I like, which is if everyone does a little, we'll achieve a little. So it's not about summing up individual contributions as the way to tackle a crisis. It doesn't mean that awareness and changing your behavior as part of that isn't important, but it's not how you're going to address the problem. We do see that antibiotic use actually varies massively between different countries and regions of the world, and that's cultural. But our level of control over the social norms that dictate our lives is very minimal actually ourselves.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into different areas. Some of the people who work to that company do still work in antibiotics research and are trying to choose particular examples and cases of infections where they think it's commercially possible to make a new antibiotic. And I think that's very, that is a laudable thing to do because it would be much easier to work in other areas. But yeah, it's very, very challenging to deal with those economic realities of scientific research.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was developed by a startup called Achaeogen in the mid 2000s in San Francisco. And it was a really promising antibiotic that they'd hit upon by modifying an existing type of antibiotic to make it sort of effective against resistant bacteria. And they employed deliberately a research fellow who was in his 60s who had just been around for a long time and knew about the chemistry of this particular type of antibody. And probably without him and other people in the company, it would have been very difficult to take it through all the challenging stages to make it an approved drug. But then when they won approval for the drug from the FDA in America, they then went bankrupt soon after because investors realized they weren't going to make any money. So all of that expertise as well, you know, in developing that drug was probably eventually lost as researchers percolated.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then those researchers have to find another job. Now, if they need to jump ship and stay in antibiotics research, quite often the same thing happens again. So inevitably end up leaving antibiotics research to work in more stable areas of drug development. So it's a problem that exacerbates itself because as those people leave, their experience goes with them. I hadn't quite appreciated this myself before writing the book because I'm not a drug developer, but from talking to drug developers, you realize that those decades of experience”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a brain drain from antibiotics research. There's been a number of reports on this, but one that came out last year kind of highlighted the starkness of the problem, which is that not only are there kind of globally only a few thousand researchers actively working on the problem compared to tens of thousands for cancer research, for example, but that if those people are working at commercial companies, very often those are small companies. So because large pharmaceutical companies have mostly abandoned antibiotics research themselves in R&D departments, the way antibiotics research is done at a commercial level is with these small startups that have very small numbers of employees and they have cash flow problems. So, you know, if they suddenly encounter difficulties and run out of funding, the whole thing in...”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To other molecules, but also was structurally in a chemical sense very different, suggesting that it would be a kind of new class of antibiotics because antibiotics work in all sorts of different ways. And we want ideally new, very different ways that won't be prone to the same forms of resistance. So they're currently still trying to take that forward as a medicine as far as I understand it. And I don't think at the time of writing it's yet made it into a human patient. So it was greeted with huge fanfare at the time. But yeah, unfortunately drug development is a very slow process and lots of medical chemists who looked at the structure of halicin, that new antibiotic, said that in their opinion, it actually wasn't very promising because it looked like just another toxic molecule. So it's quite easy to find molecules that are toxic to life. You know, think of bleach, but we can't take bleach as a medicine. And that's really the challenge for antibiotic development.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At scale cheaply, you have to work out if you give it to animals, does it have toxic side effects? Then you start giving it to people in little amounts, and then you slowly scale that up. And at any stage along the way, a kind of single bad result will doom that whole research program. So pharmaceutical companies experts are doing that and academic researchers aren't. So the model that we currently have is that they're kind of cutting edge of research people will find something and then they hope that it will be commercialized and taken forward. And that really isn't working at the moment. One example of an AI developed antibiotic that I talk about in the book is something called Halicin, where researchers at MIT in 2020 used AI to basically predict a molecule that was predicted to kill bacteria based on its similarity.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are lots of promising avenues for developing new antibiotics. It's a very, very difficult problem and the funding issue, as mentioned, the profitability of antibiotics, that's sort of something we'll put to one side for now. Maybe we can talk about it later. But scientifically, there are new ideas about different ways of targeting bacteria. People have inevitably and quite understandably turned to using AI to try and predict which molecules will kill bacteria more effectively. Now, that's very good. It seems at finding promising molecules for the kind of starting point for a new drug. But the real difficulty of drug development is not finding that first kind of promising thing. It's all of the stages that come afterwards where you actually have to work out if you can manufacture.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably the case now that we know that, for example, blood scream infections in humans in England, those aren't the same type of bacteria as the related bacteria that we find in cattle or in pigs in England. But that's not to say that around the world where there are different links between agriculture and human populations, that that can't be a problem. And so it's just another example of how antibiotics enabled this kind of intensification and mass scaling up of technological prowess, but actually that was kind of time limited and the sustainable aspects were forgotten in the pursuit of economic growth and profits.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their movement, try to maximize the weight gain by using antibiotics and so on, and make it sort of more rational and scientific. That had previously been tried in the past. But when you put animals very close together, if one of them gets an infection, the other will get infections as well. So antibiotics help with that as well. And this definitely led to the selection of resistant bacteria in agriculture.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Antibiotics enabled lots of advances in medicine. They also enabled huge advances in agriculture. So people might have heard of a phenomenon called growth promotion. And it turns out that when you give small amounts of antibiotics to animals that you're rearing for food, whether that's chickens or pigs or whatever, it tends to increase the amount of weight gain that they have. And so when this was discovered in the late 1940s by a guy called Thomas Jukes, everyone was ecstatic because in the post-World War II world, people were worried about famine and the human race running out of resources. So it seemed like, hey, Presto, we have this magical property of antibiotics that we can use to intensify agriculture, make it more efficient. And so really antibiotics are entwined with the birth of the factory farm as a concept where you cram animals really, really close together, minimize.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drugs that we see coming onto the market now, those are things that patients are going to take for years. In contrast, a new antibiotic will probably only be taken for days by a patient. And so it just represents a very bad investment from that perspective. But I think there's been complacency on the part of governments as well. It's ultimately in the power of governments, one would hope to regulate this kind of behavior and to force things to be done differently. But governments, I think the regulatory situation has become very entwined with pharmaceutical companies. And as I mentioned, they've been able to influence all sorts of things related to intellectual property and so on. So that's contributes to the situation we find ourselves in.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But understandable given the structural forces that were kind of at play there, that was how pharmaceutical capitalism was working. What we saw as the decades went on is that the low hanging fruit of antibiotics that had once been very easy to discover in soil got much harder and that there were fewer antibiotics, it seemed to be discovered through that route. And there wasn't really a pressing need for new antibiotics as much anymore. So pharmaceutical companies largely abandoned developing new antibiotics in favor of the more sophisticated advanced medical treatments perhaps for things that we wouldn't consider as urgent. Pharmaceutical companies understandably are machines for making money and they're interested in drugs that can be given for long periods of time. So for example, the wave of anti-obesity.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Antibiotics had very few side effects. So you could encourage them with aggressive advertising to be given for all sorts of conditions. And they went from being a kind of life-saving medicine to something you should take for very minor ailments. And there was no real evidence to support that being a good idea. And in fact, we now know that it's not a good idea. It disrupts the normal bacterial microbiome that we have inside us and promotes the development of resistance in many of those organisms, not just the one that you're treating the infection against. So pharmaceutical companies were really keen to make a lot of money and they participated with each other in complex ways, which their critics at the time called a cartel. So they used complex cross-licensing agreements to make sure that they stabilized prices and so on. So that was, I think, very disappointing.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bear responsibility certainly for contributing to the situation we find ourselves in. And I think you see that most clearly if you look at the 1950s when the pharmaceutical industry was really booming, particularly in America, and I look at that in some detail in the book. And there you saw that these antibiotics, which came from the soil or from other natural sources, they challenged things like patent law, where historically patents had been for things that you invented, not things that you discovered, but pharmaceutical companies successfully first lobbied and then changed patent law in order to make it possible to patent naturally occurring substances. And that change was really seismic because it meant that basically you could get a patent for an antibiotic was really a license to print money because”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Older because when you're older, you're kind of going into hospital, and that's exactly where all of the antibiotics being used at large amounts, selecting for resistant bacteria. So it makes treatment of old people particularly challenging as well. And it's estimated that two-thirds of all of the deaths from resistant infections are in people over 65. So particularly in countries like Britain where we have an aging population, I think that poses real serious challenges for how our healthcare system is going to cope.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can use, and DOPS will typically kind of go along a scale where they'll try the first one. If that doesn't work, they have other options. We know now that there are bacteria that can resist the whole list of antibiotics you would typically use. And those are very concerning. And those get a lot of high profile attention, particularly in the medical literature when they happen. At the moment, they're not by any means common, but they could become common. And we see that cases of antibiotic resistant infections are rising in most of the countries that we look at. So we basically face a sort of steadying worsening of odds in that war of attrition that bacteria and infections”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that we invented is misguided because there are natural, they're mainly natural molecules and also they kind of themselves built on previous advances in public health. So if antibiotics suddenly all of them stopped working, we wouldn't be returned to the medieval period. We'd have many other things that we could do to help. However, it is a concerning future and we already know that around the world probably about a million people each year die directly because of antibiotic resistance. So many more than that die with bacteria and infections, but we estimate that about a million of those, if their infection to antibiotics, they would have survived. So antibiotic resistance also isn't a binary thing. It's not that a bacterium is resistant to all antibiotics. We have a range of antibiotics for most infections that we”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of the rhetoric about antibiotic resistance has tended to be quite apocalyptic. And I suppose there's an extent to which my book leans into that argument a little bit because it gets people's attention. However, I think it's really important to remember that the pre-antibiotic era was the 1920s, not the 1320s. It's not that we had ravages of the Black Death and everything in the early 20th century. yet we still had huge falls in death due to infectious disease and that was because of better public health, better sanitation, you know, improved nutrition of the general population. It didn't require antibiotics. So antibiotics have probably been credited with a bit too much. And I think that feeds into my view that our kind of desire to claim them as this technological solution to everything.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paracetamol or morphine or things like that, and start thinking of them as a natural resource that needs to be conserved and thought about in that way, more like fossil fuels. I think that changes the way we should approach the problem. And so I wanted to contribute to that reconceptualizing of antibiotics as a shared natural resource that we need to manage and safeguard for future generations.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the analogy with fossil fuels is something that has been made elsewhere by other people, but I really wanted to extend that out because I think it's very, very helpful to think of antibiotics as a natural resource. So like fossil fuels, there's something which we didn't invent. It's kind of there latent in the earth, literally in the soil. It's light fossil fuels. Antibiotics took millions of years to be developed slowly, in this case by evolution rather than by geological forces. And like fossil fuels, there's kind of a finite amount. Although we could theoretically make infinite amounts of any antibiotic we chose, there's a kind of finite amount of effectiveness of an antibiotic. The more we use it, the more that is depleted. And that affects people in the future. So once we stop thinking of them as medicines in a category like”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was kind of a division, if you like, between two extremes. Some people were very optimistic and they said, okay, bacteria can resist this antibiotic, but we'll be able to develop new antibiotics and we'll just keep going. And that cycle will continue. So bacteria will evolve resistance. Humans will develop new antibiotics. And that's how we'll solve the problem. Other people are pessimistic and said, we're all doomed. And I think, of course, the reality lies somewhere in between those two extremes and it varies for different types of infections and all other sorts of complexities like that.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found this natural resistance. And then as penicillin was introduced, doctors in hospitals saw that the resistance rates, that is patients who just didn't respond to treatments and then you could measure the ability of the bacterias to survive, those climbed very, very quickly as penicillin was widely used. But people just, I think,”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The very start of antibiotics, people were aware that resistance was a natural phenomenon. So Paul Ehrlich, who I mentioned, who sort of was leader of the team that developed Salvasan, he was aware of antibiotic resistance, but he sort of thought of it more as a way of exploring behavior of the cell. He didn't think of it as a clinical problem. But then as soon as antibiotics were being introduced at large scale, doctors noticed that the drug stopped working. So even in 1940, before penicillin had actually been used in a human patient or there are some attempts before then, but I think that's fair to say. Scientists had noticed in Oxford found that there was an enzyme in bacteria that was capable of breaking apart the antibiotics already.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bacterian infection is kind of a solved problem that we have antibiotics that we can use to prevent it and to treat it if it happens. Now the problem of resistance is that that assumption stops being valid. And then as I put it, yes, this whole edifice starts to crumble because you can no longer assume that if you're going for surgery, you're not going to contract a resistant infection that could kill you.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To understanding how we got to where we are today. Sure. So we think of modern medicine's most advanced kind of treatments as things like surgery and cancer treatment. And all of those involve messing with the body in various ways. So with surgery, you cut open the skin and the skin is a protective barrier that protects us from infection and from bacteria invading our organs and getting where they shouldn't be. That's very risky historically. You can see that surgeries before the advent of antibiotics were very, very dangerous. And its remit was kind of limited. You couldn't delve deep inside the body. You know, something like a heart transplant would have been really inconceivable. But with antibiotics, you can then prevent infection during those procedures. So what the advent of antibiotics in the”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Penicillin and worked out how to enhance the yield. And that kind of prompted that and other discoveries prompted a wave of new antibiotics through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, where natural molecules, mainly from soil, were harnessed mass manufactured and given to huge numbers of people around the world. Unfortunately, the bacteria that could evolve antibiotics could also evolve resistance. And that leaves the situation where we find ourselves in today. And that's what my book is trying to explore. Absolutely. And a big part of your book's argument is about how we've got to this situation, isn't it, where we have these incredible drugs and yet we also have bacteria that are becoming resistant to them. And I want to come on to that in a minute or two. But just before we get there, one of the things that you say in the book is really that the entire edifice of modern medicine was built on the foundation of antibiotics. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Because I think that's really critical.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so penicillin is probably the antibiotic most people have heard of, was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming through contamination of a petri dish. Many people have heard that story. In fact, other scientists had noticed that behavior of the molds that makes penicillin before him and even Fleming himself was interested in its capacity as a medicine, but he couldn't actually isolate the molecule. what he called penicillin was just a kind of moldy juice and he wasn't able to turn it into a medicine. But with the advent of these new drugs like Prontosil, people were very interested in exploiting natural molecules. And then with World War II, there was huge interest and government backing to scale up production of drugs like penicillin and a mass manufacturing program ensued where basically they brewed huge vats of the fungi that made”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For example, Paul Ehrlich developed in around 1910 a medicine called Salvasan, which was a modified arsenic containing compound that worked to treat syphilis. But it was also toxic for the person you gave it to. So it was a delicate balance of how much you would give to try and cure their infection without killing them. But then in the kind of 1930s people got very interested in soil bacteria and found that they made these natural compounds that worked to kill pathogenic bacteria, the ones that cause infections in humans, and prompted by the large success of synthetic molecules, such as one called prontosil, which is made in Germany in the 1930s, people got very excited about maybe we can mass manufacture or maybe we can do mass manufacture of these natural molecules ourselves.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those microorganisms in soil or in molds make molecules that would attack bacteria which could cause infection. So in fast forward to the 20th century, in the early 20th century, there was a lot of interest in trying to develop medicines against bacteria, which had been identified in the 19th century as the cause of many infectious diseases with the advent of germ theory. So think of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and many other scientists. But the kind of reasoning that scientists use to try and kill bacteria was let's poison them. So let's use poisonous substances such as arsenic or mercury. And let's try and tweak those poisons so that they don't kill the patient, but do kill the infection. Unfortunately, that proved quite difficult to do. There were some scattered success.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, most of the antibiotics we use today are based on natural molecules that were evolved by single-celled microorganisms like bacteria and fungi, evolved in nature to compete with each other and kill or incapacitate each other. And it was only really in the 20th century that humanity learned to harness that power in kind of concentrated form. So before that, we know there's scattered examples throughout history of different people in different cultures all around the world using, for example, molds to treat wounds. We have evidence perhaps from ancient Egypt that that happened and many other kind of folk remedies where people would suggest things like putting bits of soil into wounds to pack them or stuff like this. And that's part of the reason that that worked is that, or obviously had variable success, but part of the reason for that, you know, we would understand that scientifically now is that”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm looking forward to talking to you about your book. I'm coming at this from a rather different perspective. I'm kind of a historian, so I've come from the historical angle. And this is very much a history of antibiotics, as you say, in the title. And since their advent, of course, antibiotics have saved millions of lives. They're not one of the greatest medical advances in our history. But often I think people think of them as a product of science. And I was really fascinated to learn they kind of come out of a more natural origin. Could you take us back to beginning and walk us through that incredible first discovery of antibiotics? Yes. So as you say, you know, I'm a biologist and I'm not a historian, but this is my interest in the history of antibiotics and my attempt to write that history in a slightly different way to what's been written about previously. So we think of antibiotics as drugs that humans invented, but”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Caroline Dodds Penneck, and our guest today is Liam Shaw. Liam is a biologist researching the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance. For the past four years, he's been a welcome-funded research fellow at the University of Oxford, and he's also currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Bristol. Liam's writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Morning Star, and Private Eye, and today we'll be discussing his new book, Dangerous Miracle, A Natural History of Antibiotics and How We Burn Through them. I was delighted to be able to read a preview copy of this. Welcome to Intelligent Squared, Liam. Thanks. It's nice to be here.”
2025-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · How can we win the battle against antibiotic resistance? With Liam Shaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT