Thomas A. Steitz Quotes

When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we'd have the resistance problem we face today. We didn't give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.

You better have your disease program in line. The bugs are evolving quicker than our anti-biotics.

We've been scared from using antibiotics and antivirals out of some kind of weird sense of communal responsibility to keep bugs naive to our powerful weapons.

Antibiotic resistance is as old as the dirt that coats our planet.

In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.

Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

My goals over the decade include to develop new drugs to treat intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology and to conduct clinical trials using it on a few patients with Parkinson's diseases, diabetes or blood diseases.

Antibiotics vary greatly in their chemical nature, mode of action upon different organisms, and effect upon the animal body. The selective action of antibiotics upon bacteria and other microorganisms is known as the antibiotic spectrum. Some antibiotics are characterized by a very narrow spectrum, whereas others possess a wide range of activity.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

What's great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they're so fast, they grow overnight.

New drugs and surgical techniques offer promise in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's, tuberculosis, AIDS, and a host of other life-threatening diseases. Animal research has been, and continues to be, fundamental to advancements in medicine.

The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

The old ethic for medicine [regarding new drugs] used to be: Is it safe and what are the risks? That is no longer adequate. Now people ask, "What goal are we reaching for?

Efforts to approach zero risk through exhaustive pre-release testing are extremely expensive and time-consuming. New drugs are delayed in reaching those who need them, and marginal drugs may not be developed at all.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.

Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.

The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are. It basically shows us that the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics.

The importance in what we're seeing in countries around the world is a poorly regulated and poorly functioning private sector using irrational and ineffective medications that result in the emergence of drug-resistance tuberculosis. What we've done is begun a program to rapidly improve infection control in places that are treating TB patients.

Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.