Antibiotics, Pesticides, and the War on Terror?

It seems to me that a weird paradox has emerged in science, where people are now advocating that less is more when it comes to antibiotics and pesticides. Carl Zimmer issues this worrying blog post in Discover magazine about rapid methods weeds are developing to circumvent death-by-Roundup.

For a while, it seemed as if glyphosate would avoid Melander’s iron rule. Monsanto scientists ran tests that showed no evidence of resistance. Glyphosate seemed to strike at such an essential part of plant biology that plants could not evolve a defense. But after glyphosate-resistant crops had a few years to grow, farmers began to notice horseweed and morning glory and other weeds encroaching once more into their fields. Farmers in Georgia had to cut down fields of cotton rather than harvest them because of infestations of Palmer amaranth.

What’s striking is how many different ways weeds have found to overcome the chemical. Scientists had thought that Roundup was invincible in part because the enzyme it attacks is pretty much the same in all plants. That uniformity suggests that plants can’t tolerate mutations to it; mutations must change its shape so that it doesn’t work and the plant dies. But it turns out that many populations of ryegrass and goosegrass have independently stumbled across one mutation that can change a single amino acid in the enzyme. The plant can still survive with this altered enzyme. And Roundup has a hard time attacking it thanks to its different shape.

What I find interesting is how this seems just like worrying documentation of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It seems every time I turn on the TV I see news of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, or staph, and how more and more diseases need stronger and stronger antibiotics...the old guard has failed.

Many are calling for organic farming, suggesting that diligence and hard work can produce farms as productive as farms gassed with massive doses of Roundup (these are mostly people who have not worked on a farm). Many (who have never had to take care of a child with severe fever) also call for reduction in antibiotic use, suggesting that people should just "tough it out" when they get a non-lethal infection (see here and here). The argument, as Melander put it over 100 years ago, is that by letting the some of pesticide-susceptible bugs live, some of the time, then they spread their genes out and pesticides work better.

It's funny, really. In the War on Weeds, and the War on Bacteria, more and more people think that we should just let the weeds win. Let the bacteria win. Unless, you know, things get really bad. Then we should step in with our antibiotics and herbicides and show 'em who's boss.
But somehow this doesn't really play out when it comes to terrorism. You just don't see people on TV saying "the smarter we get in the War on Terror, the smarter the terrorists get. We should give up the fight and let as many terrorists come to our country as want to. We'll deal with the really dangerous terrorists...but let most of the low-key, Times Square bombing-level terrorists do their thing. They really aren't a threat to the majority of America."
For some reason, the "surrender to win" thing doesn't really work in this case.

But then again, it doesn't work with antibiotics either. Did you know that in Africa, places without clean water have an appalling literacy rate below 25%? Give those areas clean water, and studies show the literacy rate jumps above 90%. Why? Because kids aren't missing school with water-borne illnesses.
The same is true for antibiotics. How many kids would miss school, even here in America, if they were down with a 100+ fever that lasted weeks? How far behind would kids be if they missed a month of school with whooping cough? Maybe only a few people would die if they didn't get their antibiotics...but our society would inevitably fall behind.
And could you afford to miss two weeks of work due to your upper respiratory infection? Do you have that luxury? Most don't, and so they need antibiotics so they can bounce back in just a few days.
No, we just can't put down the War on Germs. Surrender here does not mean victory, it means setbacks, suffering, and slowdown. Instead of lamenting bacterial resistance, we should be ever more aggressively searching for new and stronger medicines.

Essentially the same is true for herbicides. Can you really look a farmer in the face and tell him that he should only produce 2/3 of his potential crop because he shouldn't use herbicides? If I told you that I wanted you to work at your job just as hard (or harder, given you'd have to go back to walking beanfields), but from now on you only got paid a fraction of your former wage...would you be upset? Would you tell me to screw off?
How can anyone honestly tell farmers to intentionally be less productive? America's very foundation was built on the concept that innovation allowed more and more productivity from farms...which allowed more and more people to move to the cities and innovate.
No, less herbicide (and subsequently less crop) is no answer to the War on Weeds. Smarter herbicides, smarter crop plants is the better answer. The same is true for pesticides. Do you think that if farmers stop using Bt corn...the corn borer will agree to stop eating corn?

It just seems to me that although humans and evolution seem locked in an eternal arms race, laying down our weapons would not solve the problem. Nature does not negotiate, Nature does not sign treaties. And so we cannot blink first.


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