Abstract
The development of safe, effective antimicrobial drugs has revolutionized medicine in the past 60 years. Morbidity and mortality from microbial disease have been drastically reduced by modern chemotherapy. Unfortunately, micro-organisms are nothing if not versatile, and the brilliance of the chemotherapeutic achievement has been dimmed by the emergence of microbial strains presenting a formidable array of defences against our most valuable drugs. This should not surprise us, since the evolutionary history of living organisms is concerned with their adaptation to the environment. The adaptation of micro-organisms to the toxic hazards of antimicrobial drugs is therefore probably inevitable. The extraordinary speed with which antibiotic resistance has spread amongst bacteria during the era of chemotherapy has been due, in large measure, to the remarkable genetic flexibility of this group of organisms.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Franklin, T.J., Snow, G.A. (1998). The genetic basis of resistance to antimicrobial drugs. In: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Antimicrobial Drug Action. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4599-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4599-3_8
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