Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed

Author:Kathryn Lougheed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER NINE

Killing the Unkillable

The streets of London are eerily silent. Smashed cars with their doors and boots open make rusty traffic jams; weeds sprout from the cracked pavements. An escaped zoo lion tentatively pads across a scattering of broken glass and peers inside Cool Britannia at the shelves of London bus snow globes, Union Flag umbrellas and rubber ducks wearing bearskin hats. It’s the only shop that’s not been looted because, when the zombie apocalypse hits, the last thing anyone needs is a plastic policeman’s helmet and a mug featuring a picture of Prince George. The sound of a bolt crunching open sends the lion loping back to its den. A door creaks ajar and a pale, vitamin D-deficient man blinks up at the grey sky. He’s middle-aged with a scraggly beard and army fatigues stained with the tinned beef stew that he’s lived off for the last six months. Let’s call him Jeff. Jeff is one of the few survivors who are going to repopulate the decimated planet. Jeff is the future of humankind.

Among every population of bacteria, there are Jeffs. Individuals who, genetically speaking, are no different from all their friends and neighbours. Maybe if bacteria could speak, they’d call their Jeffs ‘a bit strange’ or they’d accuse them of wasting their life preparing for an apocalypse that was never coming. Hiding indoors, avoiding crowded areas, stocking up on meals in a tin and bottled water. Jeffs are the bet-hedgers, the survivalists, the preppers. But when the end of the world actually does arrive, Jeffs are the ones who don’t die. In the microbial world, Jeffs are the ‘persisters’. Persisters make up a small proportion of a bacterial population and, thanks to rearrangements of their cellular machinery, can survive high doses of antibiotics. But there’s nothing in their DNA that makes them special. Once the danger has passed and they get back to multiplying, their progeny is still as susceptible to the antibiotic as the majority of the original population. They’re not genetically resistant but their continued survival can give a bacterial infection the opportunity it needs to develop resistance. They’re why it’s so important that we take the full course of an antibiotic. Because if we don’t make sure all the Jeffs are dead, they’re just going to re-multiply, and next time round, they might come better prepared.

Persister cells are not unique to M. tuberculosis but a global phenomenon employed by all species of bacteria. Everyone, it seems – from humans right down to tiny microbes – knows someone like Jeff. The formidable penicillin expert Gladys Hobby was the first to identify these cells in 1942, but Joseph Warwick Bigger coined the term ‘persister’. My research into Bigger hints, sadly, at him not being a particularly large man. Bigger was an Irish scientist who, in 1944, showed that penicillin kills only 99 per cent of a staphylococcus culture, leaving behind a stubborn 1 per cent that somehow survives. Bigger’s cells weren’t genetically different from the 99 per

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