Premiered Thursday March 5, 2015 on CBC Television’s “The Nature of Things”

Most of us take antibiotics for granted. They seem to be a kind of miracle drug – medications that can get rid of a whole range of infections in our bodies. But because they’re prescribed for so many different ailments, they’re easy to overuse. And the more we use them, the less effective they become. So now we’ve reached a crisis point with antibiotics, because many of them simply don’t work anymore.

Already, thousands of people are dying every year from simple infections that were once easily cured. Scientists are hunting urgently for new antibiotics – a challenge that is taking them to some remote and unusual places.

The Antibiotic Hunters sends us to an ocean reef, a rainforest canopy, an icy cave and even the mouth of a giant lizard. Any one of these locations might offer up the kind of killer molecules that could act as the backbone for new families of antibiotics.

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 The Antibiotic Hunters on CBC’s
“The Nature of Things”