Dangerous Miracle

Antibiotics: one of humanity’s greatest achievements – but invented by microbes. This title tells the epic narrative of discovery and innovation – but also of extraction and exploitation. This is the story of how we have burned through the fossil fuels of medicine. Since their advent, antibiotics have saved millions of lives, marking one of the greatest medical advances in our history. ‘Dangerous Miracle’ weaves together the grand arc of the evolution of antibiotics over millions of years with a history of the past century: first as we mined the earth for naturally occurring antibiotic molecules, then as we learned to synthesise our own.