| <p><strong>Alexander Fleming</strong> warned, in his 1945 Nobel Lecture, that widespread access to antibiotics without supervision may lead to antibiotic resistance.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-11-2362"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-11-2362" title='“The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drugmake them resistant.” “Wayback Machine,” March 31, 2018.<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180331001640/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf"> https://web.archive.org/web/20180331001640/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf</a>.'><sup>11</sup></a></span> We are uncertain of the impact of Fleming’s warning, whether he took additional action to mitigate the risk, or how widespread within the scientific community such concerns were, but our impression is that it was not a widely known issue, that his was an early warning, and that his judgement was generally taken seriously by the time of his speech. His warning preceded the first documented cases of penicillin-resistant bacteria by more than 20 years, and the threat of antimicrobial resistance seems to be broadly analogous with AI risk on most of our criteria, though it does seem that feedback was available throughout efforts to reduce the threat.</p> | <p><strong>Alexander Fleming</strong> warned, in his 1945 Nobel Lecture, that widespread access to antibiotics without supervision may lead to antibiotic resistance.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-11-2362"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-11-2362" title='“The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drugmake them resistant.” “Wayback Machine,” March 31, 2018.<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180331001640/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf"> https://web.archive.org/web/20180331001640/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf</a>.'><sup>11</sup></a></span> We are uncertain of the impact of Fleming’s warning, whether he took additional action to mitigate the risk, or how widespread within the scientific community such concerns were, but our impression is that it was not a widely known issue, that his was an early warning, and that his judgement was generally taken seriously by the time of his speech. His warning preceded the first documented cases of penicillin-resistant bacteria by more than 20 years, and the threat of antimicrobial resistance seems to be broadly analogous with AI risk on most of our criteria, though it does seem that feedback was available throughout efforts to reduce the threat.</p> |
