I read this interesting submission and the comments to date while I thought about this issue. I see the HN participant posting this story is new here, making hi

I read this interesting submission and the comments to date while I thought about this issue. I see the HN participant posting this story is new here, making his first article submission. Some of the comments surprised me, as they seem to assume that antibiotics as a category of substances are only a few decades old. In fact, many of the first antibiotics in clinical use were "natural" substances, namely mycotoxins secreted by fungi in an endless chemical warfare arms race for living in a world full of bacteria. The reason that antibiotics are useful for human medicine is that fungi are much more biochemically similar to animals (like us) than bacteria are, being our comparatively near evolutionary cousins as fellow eukaryotes, and as such they are naturally selected to produce antibacterial mycotoxins that may be highly effective against broad groups of bacteria while being largely harmless to most animal tissues. But as the article notes, and as we would expect from evolution by natural selection, various strains of bacteria have been selected by differential survival to be more or less resistant to current antiobiotics. Silver as an adjuvant for antibiotics may have some clinical usefulness. The research reported in the article here is laboratory rather than clinical research. There are many more steps to take before knowing whether or not this is a useful approach for human medicine, including carefully controlled clinical trials of safety and effectiveness. The reporter who wrote this news brief was careful to interview another scientist who warns that silver is toxic to human tissues as well as too bacteria, so dosage will be a crucial issue. The obligatory link for any discussion of a preliminary research finding like this article is the essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission. Here we still need to wait for actual human clinical trials to know if the addition of silver to antibiotic treatments will have adequate safety and effectiveness. AFTER EDIT: I'm going to an appointment for my children, so I'll be away from the discussion for a while. I'm not sure what the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on this comment means so far, as replies haven't explained yet what other readers think about this comment.