By selectively altering key enzymes in bacteria's chemical weapons factories, he hopes to redesign microbes so they are more likely to produce compounds that can fight human disease.
Soil bacteria and fungi are particularly proficient at producing natural chemical weapons, apparently as part of a subterranean arms race to spew out toxic chemicals to kill rival species.
Frighteningly lethal and insidiously efficient, these bacteria replicate and mutate prodigiously, turning out variants that elude most of the chemical weapons--antibiotics--that medicine has invented over the past century.