Bill Gates (left) and journalist Richard Besser (right)TWITTER, VINCENT RACANIELLO
Antibiotic resistance, CRISPR (and its antidotes), flaviviruses, biosafety, and identifying new antimicrobial drugs were among the most-discussed topics at this year’s American Society for Microbiology (ASM) conference, held in Boston.
The last 1 percent is very, very hard.
—Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates on eradicating polio
The development of a vaccine against Zika virus is an international emergency.
—Pedro Vasconcelos of the Evandro Chagas Institute in Brazil
You can never reduce risk to zero.
—Joseph Kanabrocki, associate vice president for research safety at the University of Chicago, on working with hazardous pathogens
Chikungunya virus is now hiding under the umbrella of Zika, whereas, in the past, it was hiding under the umbrella of dengue. . . . This is going to limit the potential perceived market for [vaccine developers].
—Pathologist, microbiologist, and...
In the Anthropocene, we have lost millions of tons of soil fungi due to conversions of forests to cropland.
—Soil microbiologist Sophie Zechmeister-Boltenstern of the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU)
Have to have multiplicity [of new antimicrobial candidates] in the pipeline in order to have any chance of getting a clinically usable drug out the other end.
—David Hooper, chief of the Infection Control Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital
You never cure an infectious disease; you just keep putting it off.
—Case Western Reserve University’s Robert Bonomo, discussing clinical cases involving multidrug-resistant bacteria
They published this as the last figure of their paper, which probably today would have been a supplementary figure.
—Rockefeller University’s Luciano Marraffini on the first CRISPR sequence reported—by Yoshizumi Ishino and colleagues at Osaka University, Japan—in the Journal of Bacteriology in 1987
If the bugs are paying attention to this thing, we should be paying attention to this thing.
—Molecular geneticist Alex Ensminger of the University of Toronto, on conserved mobile genetic elements in pathogens like Legionella bacteria
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