But here's the kicker. This bacterium has been isolated from people, society — and drugs — for 4 million years, scientists report Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.
That means it hasn't been exposed to human drugs in a clinic or on a farm that uses them. But it has the machinery to knock out these drugs. And that machinery has been around for millions of years.
...
Because, Barton says, the bacterium is helping scientists understand where antibiotic resistance comes from and, hopefully, new ways to stop it. And the bacterium — called Paenibacillus (pronounced "penny-bacillus") — isn't pathogenic. It won't hurt you. It's just capable of evading many, many antibiotics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:22PM
it didn't magically have defenses to antibiotics made by humans that it has never encountered
Even if the bacteria was resistant to drugs that it never encountered, magic isn't necessary because drug-resistance sometimes is broad (up-regulation of export pumps, general stress responses, sporulation, etc.).
I mention this because drug-resistance isn't something that is intelligently designed and I can imagine that some may think it is an irreducibly complex problem.