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lot of people com-
plain that there’s
more bad in life
than good, there is more evil
in the world than pious, there’s
more gloom around than joy
and so on. And most probably
they are not entirely wrong too.
For a moment just abandon
your pedestals at the pinnacle
of evolution and descend to
the more humble beginnings
at the bottom.
In short, welcome to the world of
microbes. Let’s consider life from their
perspective for once. If you happen to
be a microbe you are in a world of cut-
throat competition, fighting with your
own kind and others for the severely
limited nutrients around. In such a sce-
nario, enter antibiotics. KABOOM!!
it’s a catastrophe for, an invitation to an
almost certain death.
So how do you manage to stay alive
in such a ruthless world? Enter evo-
lution (which according to me is the
world’s most fascinating and revolu-
tionary idea)! It makes sure that you
stay prepared well in advance by doing
what you do best, mutate. But it’s not
that simple. While mutations lie at the
core of the ever increasing load of
drug-resistant pathogens what we of-
ten don’t see is the struggle behind the
success (yes, success, did you forget we
are looking from a microbe’s perspec-
tive now?), i.e. for that one meaningful
lifesaving mutation, several thousand
of your brethren have lost lives. Yes!
Mutation is an omnipresent phenom-
enon, occurring at a greater or lesser
frequency in all forms of life. But the
rates of mutations in microbes is as-
toundingly high- the Escherichia coli
in our intestines generate 10 million
new mutations each day while an en-
tire human generates only three new
mutations on an average in his/her
lifetime (of course the phenomenal-
ly high replication rate and short life