Compounds that kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria, first developed from natural mold extracts in the 1920s–1940s and now among the most widely used medicines in human history — responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives, enabling modern surgery and cancer treatment, and generating the crisis of antimicrobial resistance that threatens to reverse their gains.
Before 1945, a scratch from a rose thorn could kill you. Childbirth was genuinely dangerous. Surgery on the abdomen was a near-death sentence. Antibiotics changed all of this within a generation. They are now so ubiquitous that we are losing them — and may be returning to the world they replaced.