The search for an answer

Newark Star-Ledger
December 10, 2003

Overuse of antibiotics during the past half-century has allowed mutant germs to survive and thrive, giving rise to increasingly virulent and pathogenic bacteria that no longer respond to traditional antibiotic therapy.

Today, 70 percent of all bacteria are resistant to at least one of the drugs most commonly used to treat infection. For the first time since the advent of the golden age of antibiotics in the 1940s, healthy people are becoming seriously ill -- and dying -- from what once were highly treatable diseases.

PETER GREENBERG has been studying the how, when and why of bacterial communication since the late 1970s when he worked with Hastings at Woods Hole, Mass. In the mid-1990s, Greenberg, a professor of molecular pathogenesis at the University of Iowa, was at a conference where he met with a colleague, Bill Costerton, from the Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University.

"We went out to dinner after meeting all day and talked about what we do and we realized that we had a lot in common," says Greenberg. "We were both thinking about how microbes work together as groups and we got to wondering immediately whether my signaling had anything to do with his biofilms."

Biofilm is made up of cellular communities that congregate on seemingly everything -- from the lungs and urinary tract to ship hulls and heating ducts.

The research by Greenberg, who runs the university's Microbial Communities and Cell Signaling Lab, has personal implications. His 17-year-old daughter, Barbara, has cystic fibrosis, an incurable, inherited disease.

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