While this blog is not energy specific, it is science related. I thought that it was worth
discussing as the general population continues to apply stress in many areas –
related or unrelated. In the Sunday,
August 4, 2013 Star Tribune, in the Health Section of page A11, they had an
article entitled, “Is Meat Making You Sick?”
I would like to digress for a minute.
My father was a pediatrician in the 1960s. He loved medicine and read the latest medical
articles.
I can remember asking him about antibiotics and how they
worked. He said that antibiotics worked
on bacterium, but not on a virus. The
use of antibiotics for bacteria and common ailments, were routinely used and
increasingly prescribed by physicians for many bacterial infections. He said that someday the bacteria would beat
out antibiotics. I naively asked why
and he said the rapid reproducibility of bacteria would evolve faster than the
scientist’s ability to manufacture succeeding antibiotics. The graph below depicts the exponential
growth of bacteria in numbers, not in generations.
The graph below shows the how bacteria reproduce by binary
fission. Each binary fission is another
generation. Each generation is evolution
and with it comes adaptive changes to its molecular structure.
As you can see, one bacterium multiplies to eight bacteria
in 60 minutes. That is 4 generations in only 60 minutes.
In the below chart, one can see the explosive development of
antibiotics from the 1940s, peaking in the 1960s and significantly tailing off
into the new millennium. This is a
function of fewer antibiotic discoveries and a more onerous FDA approval
process. This is a very negative and
disturbing trend.
While I am not an epidemiologist, a geneticist, a
statistician, mathematician, etc., I can recognize diverging charts. The bacteria growth remains on an exponential
growth and binary fission (generational) path, while antibiotic discovery and
implementation appears to be on a declining asymptotic path.
I try to identify trends and analyze markets and
companies. I typically employ mosaic theory
to identify trends. As the name implies,
a mosaic is made up of many colored tiles.
While viewed individually, they are meaningless. As more and more tiles are added, a picture
emerges. The same can be done with pieces
of data. For instance, the honey bee
population is being decimated by a bee virus and other environmental factors,
not well understood. Honeybees are
required for pollinating just about everything fruit and vegetable. If they become extinct, then how are we to
grow fruits and vegetables? While this
is just one tile, that may suggest is a one-off event. However, when it is added to the next three
tiles, a picture begins to emerge. 1) The
meat article, mentioned above, describes the overuse of antibiotics in animals,
where 70% of all antibiotics in the US is consumed. 2) Genetically modified organisms (GMO) have
been developed to produce an increase in the yield of row crops to better feed
an increase in the protein consumption of emerging markets. 3) The increase of staph infection, in
particular, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA), which is
resistant to methicillin, oxacillin, penicillin, and amoxicillin.
This mosaic has in common a bacteria or viral component (and it is only 4 tiles), in
which, we are engineering genetic traits into seeds, or developing antibiotics
to fight increasingly antibiotic resistant bacteria. How do you outrun a bacteria or virus that
replicate and evolve at an exponential rate?
My father was correct.
