“It’s a “carefully done study,” adds George Church, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Non-scientists (and even scientists) forget how important it is to confirm ideas that are widely accepted,” he writes in an e-mail. Church’s only gripe is that the samples were 30,000 years old, even though antibiotic resistance genes have likely been around for a billion years. It’s “analogous to a super-elegant proof that humans have been using weapons for at least the past 30 years,” he writes.”
Ok, so for me, this is a given: antibiotic resistance has been around for a long time. I never thought that resistance was in response to modern chemicals. Nonetheless, these researchers did lots of work to isolate microbes from 30,000 years ago (Including spraying florescent E coli on the probe. That’s got to violate something.) And, leave it to the inimitable George Church to praise and poke in the same comment.
