?On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world by launching into space the first satellite, Sputnik1. The launch galvanized the United States out of complacency, leading to increased funding of the space program and the formation of NASA. The public responded as well, including a group of concerned women in Southern California, who established a foundation, Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS), with the mission of supporting the next generation of leaders by providing scholarships to graduate students in science, medicine and engineering. In the years following Sputnik, the U.S. emerged as a world leader in science and technology.
Currently, the U.S. is in danger of losing its preeminence in science – without a highly visible event such as Sputnik, the country is once again slipping into complacency. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman writes in his book, “The World is Flat,” that “if current trends prevail, countries like India and China and whole regions like Eastern Europe are certain to narrow the gap with America, just as Korea and Japan and Taiwan did during the Cold War.”
Federal funding of research in physical science, as a percentage of gross domestic product, was 45 percent less in 2004 than it was in 1976, and 50 percent of college engineering degrees in the U.S. were awarded to citizens of another country.
ARCS is attempting to counteract these trends by finding additional funding for graduate students. Since the San Diego chapter’s inception in 1985, it has awarded more than $5 million to graduate students at the University of California, San Diego; The Scripps Research Institute; San Diego State University and the University of San Diego.
On Friday, Nov. 17, ACRS honored its scholarship winners at the annual scholars luncheon. Graduate students supported by ARCS scholarships presented posters of their research into a broad variety of topics, including number theory, the growth of kelp forests, the structure of atomic nuclei, congestive heart failure, the spread of dengue fever in Thailand and cancer diagnosis and treatment with gene therapy.
The keynote speaker of the luncheon, Dr. Bill Fenical, a Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, warned of a medical emergency arising from complacency in another area: the spread of drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Before the discovery of antibiotics in 1929, simple bacterial infections such as pneumonia meant almost certain death for anyone who caught one. Penicillin – and the more than 120 other antibiotics that have been discovered since then – allow us to survive bacterial infections.
However, bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics, and some strains are becoming entirely resistant to standard antibiotic treatment. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization both recognize that this is an exponentially increasing problem; the rate of resistance rises 15 to 20 percent per year.
At the same time that bacteria are gaining resistance to existing antibiotics, pharmaceutical companies have stopped developing new treatments. Since 1987, only two new antibiotics have emerged.
The reasons for this shortage are twofold. First, antibiotics are not profitable; treatment only lasts for a few days until the infection is cured. As a result, pharmaceutical companies have little motivation to invest millions of dollars in new antibiotics.
The second reason is that the source of new antibiotics has been almost entirely exhausted. Most were discovered in other bacteria living in the soil, but pharmaceutical companies have taken samples from soil all over the world without producing results.
“Pharmaceutical companies realized in 1995 that the diversity was no longer there – the same drugs were being discovered over and over again,” Fenical said. “We now rely on old drugs which are at least 50 percent ineffective, and in some cases 100 percent ineffective, and the trajectory of human concern is not being recognized.”
As a solution to the second problem, Fenical is part of a new, interdisciplinary program at UCSD and SIO to search for antibiotics in bacteria living on the ocean floor. Just as he expected, they have found entirely new species of bacteria living in the ocean that produce entirely new compounds. Some of these new molecules are toxic to drug-resistant bacteria and might one day be developed into new antibiotics.
Excitingly, two of the molecules discovered so far are effective at treating cancer and are currently in clinical trials.
“We’re looking at a source of chemical novelty and unique molecules that transcends into all areas of medicine,” Fenical said. “These are a new chemical resource for us to look at in the next century.”