Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years

terrapyn writes "Infoworld is reporting: 'A group of British computer scientists have proposed a number of grand challenges for IT that they hope will drive forward research, similar to the way the human genome project drove life sciences research through the 1990s.' Did they get it right? What are some other worthy computing challenges?"

Comments

Re:Biggest Problem in that Scenario

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Here's a very simplified explanation:

The problem is that resistance isn't either/or -- that is, it's not as simple as saying a particular strain of bacteria is resistant or it's not. All strains have greater or lesser degrees of resistance; more precisely, individual bacteria within the population have greater or lesser degrees. When you're on antibiotics, the bacteria tend to die off in, pretty much, an exponential decay curve. Once the curve drops below a certain level, the remaining bacterial population is insufficient to maintain the infection; your immune system is fighting the infection too, of course, and it can take care of the remaining bacteria, which are the more resistant ones, one the less resistant ones are killed off by the antibiotics.

So what happens when you stop taking the course of antibiotics halfway through? Well, where you previously had a bacterial population consisting of some bacteria with weak resistance, some with moderate resistance, and some with strong resistance, now you only have the latter two categories. And these are going to continue breeding, and your immune system is going to spend its resources fighting them equally, without preference as to which is more or less antibiotic-resistant -- which means more of the bacteria with greater resistance will survive and grow. OTOH, if you'd finished the antibiotics, only the most resistant bacteria would be left, and your immune system could probably finish them off on its own.

To top it off, resistance requires an expenditure of energy on the part of the bacteria -- you're quite right that many such critters have non-expressed resistance genes already in their genomes; the reason these genes aren't usually expressed is because doing so takes energy the bacteria would usually prefer to devote to feeding and reproducing. So in a patient who doesn't take antibiotics at all, the percentage of resistant individual bacteria is going to be very low. This means that taking half a course on antibiotics is the worst possible course of action: if you take the whole thing, you'll probably end up killing off the entire infection; if you take no antibiotics, you'll either get better or you won't, but either way you won't encourage the formation of a resistant strain.

And the reason that shorter courses of antibiotics are being prescribed is that, quite simply, many newer antibiotics work more quickly. That's the only reason. It has nothing to do with some magical discovery that the traditional ten-day course was longer than it needed to be.