Bacteria can develop resistance to drugs they haven’t encountered before − scientists figured this out decades ago in a classic experiment

By Qi Zheng, Professor of Biostatistics, Texas A&M University

Do bacteria mutate randomly, or do they mutate for a purpose? Researchers have been puzzling over this conundrum for over a century.

In 1943, microbiologist Salvador Luria and physicist turned biologist Max Delbrück invented an experiment to argue that bacteria mutated aimlessly. Using their test, other scientists showed that bacteria could acquire resistance to antibiotics they hadn’t encountered before.

The

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