"Deep in the bowels of a pristine New Mexico cave, microbiologists have discovered nearly a hundred types of bacteria that can fight off modern antibiotic drugs."
Even though they have been isolated thousands of feet below the Earth's surface for millions of years, these bacteria exhibit resistance to antibiotic drugs, even newer, synthetic derivatives.
The discovery serves as an intriguing lead in the quest to understand how drug-resistant diseases emerge. It is now hypothesized that "drug resistance" genes may have evolved millions of years ago to confer resistance to other, naturally occurring substances.
