Jacob Kimmel

To your point, we could synthesize them.

They're just metabolites largely of other bacteria and fungi.

You think about the story of penicillin, what happens?

Alexander Fleming finds some fungi growing on a dish, and the fungi secrete this penicillin antibiotic compound, and so there's no bacteria growing near the fungi.

And he says he has this lightbulb moment of, oh my gosh, they're probably making something that kills bacteria.

There's no prima facie reason that you couldn't imagine encoding an antibiotic cassette into a mammalian genome.

I think part of the challenge that you run into is that you're always in evolutionary competition.

There's this notion of what's called the Red Queen hypothesis.

It's an allusion to the story in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where the Red Queen is running really fast just to stay in place.

So when you look at sort of pathogen host interactions or competition between bacteria and fungi that are all trying to compete for the same niche, what you find is they're evolving very rapidly in competition with one another.

It's an arms race.

Every time a bacteria evolves a new evasion mechanism, the fungus that occupies the niche will evolve some new.

And so part of why that there is this competitiveness between the two is they both have very large population sizes in terms of number of genomes per unit resource they're consuming.

There are trillions of bacteria in a drop of water that you might pick up.

So there's trillions of copies of the genome, massive analog parallel computation.

And then at the same time, they can tolerate really high mutation rates because they're prokaryotic.

They don't have multiple cells.

So if one cell manages to mutate too much and it isn't viable or it grows too fast, it doesn't really compromise the population and the whole genome.

Whereas for metazoans like you and I, if even one of our cells has too many mutations, it might turn into a cancer and eventually kill off the organism.

So basically what I'm getting at, and this is a long-winded way of getting there, is that