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Science Friday > Archives > 1997 > August > August 8, 1997

Hour One: Economics and Global Warming/Antibiotic Resistance Update

The traditional view of the global warming debate usually pits big businesses and environmental action groups against one another. Now, in a surprising move, fossil fuel producer British Petroleum has made a statement that the time has come to act, and has joined forces with the Environmental Defense Fund to study practical ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Delegates are meeting in Bonn this week to continue negotiations on reducing greenhouse gases as part of the five-year old treaty on global warming. More action on all fronts is expected by December, when the negotiations will conclude in Kyoto, Japan. But where does industry fit into the picture? Should we impose mandatory controls on emissions, or is that task best left to voluntary guidelines? And can U.S. industries survive the hardships that tougher environmental controls might bring?

Plus... Two months ago, we told you about a new strain of bacteria that had surfaced in Japan with a resistance to vancomycin, one of the medical community's last lines of defense against other types of drug-resistant bacteria. Now, a group of researchers at Yale University has come up with a method that offers hope of a new way of dealing with resistant strains. 

The team inserted plasmids, small rings of genetic material, into drug resistant bacteria. The plasmids contained sequences of RNA, genetic material chemically similar to DNA, that bound to the genes responsible for drug resistance in the bacteria. The bacteria's own enzymes then interpreted markers on those RNA sequences as instructions to cut up the attached drug resistance genes. After treatment with the procedure, the bacteria succumbed to chloramphenicol and ampicillin, two widely used antibiotics that they could previously withstand. Although the procedure is still only in the test tube stages, it's an interesting new spin on a serious problem. We'll look at the procedure, as well as other methods for dealing with the drug-resistant threat. 

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Guests:
Daniel J. Dudek
Senior Economist, Environmental Defense Fund
New York, NY

William O'Keefe
Chairman
Global Climate Coalition
Executive Vice President
American Petroleum Institute
Washington, DC

Sidney Altman 
Professor of Biology 
Yale University 
New Haven, CT. 

Stuart Levy 
Author 
"The Antibiotic Paradox: How Miracle Drugs are Destroying the Miracle" (Plenum, 1992) 
Director of the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance 
Tufts University School of Medicine 
Boston, Massachusetts 

Books/Articles Discussed:

"Phenotypic conversion of drug-resistant bacteria to drug sensitivity." Cecilia Guerrier-Takada, Reza Salavati, Sidney Altman. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, Vol 94 (August 1997), pp 8468-8472. 

Related links:

British Petroleum

The Environmental Defense Fund's response

Global Warming:
Info from the Climate Institute
Info from the EDF

Earth Summit info
Earth Summit info from the UN
And from an outside organization

Antibiotic Resistance: Whyfiles at the University of Wisconsin 

The World Antibiotic Resistance Network (may be slow) 
Vancomycin Resistance 
Staphylococcus Info 
Info on other forms of resistant staph from the CDC