Antibiotics - the miracle drugs of the 20th century - are beginning to fail. The solution to the looming problem is simple, if hard to implement: First, we need to be far more conservative about how we use antibiotics in order to slow the development of resistance and prolong their usefulness; second, we need to find ways to create new antibiotics that bacteria can’t yet resist. To that end, last month Harvard chemist Andrew Myers published a study in Nature describing a novel method for creating fully synthetic, designer versions of specific antibiotics - drugs that can be tweaked, maybe endlessly, to outwit the resistance mechanisms that develop in nature. Most antibiotics we have today were found in nature.