Today, I’m thankful for those instances that remind us that our greatest creations need to be treasured and preserved.
Today, we owe a debt of gratitude to Leonardo da Vinci. In his lifetime, he created masterpieces that have helped revolutionize our study of fine arts, architecture, and science. How would it feel if his most recognizable work of art, the Mona Lisa, was truly lost forever?
Well, it turns out it almost happened.
Back in August 1911, three petty thieves sauntered out of the Louvre in Paris with this small painting shrouded in a blanket. They had stolen da Vinci’s magnum opus one evening after all the museum patrons had departed. In those days, Paris’ most eminent museum lacked alarms, laser detectors, or even night guards, so the theft was pretty simple.
For the next 28 months, Parisian detectives searched near and far, high and low, for this painting, but to no avail. Well, the story ends well, as the painting was discovered on this exact day (December 11, 1913) in Florence by an astute art dealer. The same brazen larcenists who engineered the heinous crime tried to sell it to the dealer in his studio. The painting was eventually returned to the Louvre, where it now hangs in glorious display in the Denon Wing. Close to ten million well-wishers queue up annually to pay tribute to this depiction of a previously unknown woman and wife of an affluent Florentine merchant – Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo.
Sometimes, we really don’t appreciate what we have until it is gone.
Take for instance our antibiotics – a brilliant invention heralded by Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin in his rather messy laboratory nearly a century ago. Yet, despite Fleming’s serendipitous finding in 1928, the discovery and development of a new antibacterial agent in the modern world is not for the faint at heart. Although the world has seen incredible advancement in antimicrobial agents since the discovery of penicillin and the sulfa antibiotics over eight decades ago, few antibacterial drugs with novel mechanisms of action have been identified in the last three decades; unfortunately, many of the low-hanging fruit were picked nearly four to five decades ago. Moreover, antibacterials are unique in the sense that their development is laborious, expensive, and extremely complex; the pricing model is not highly attractive; and most newly approved agents are placed in high reserve as an appropriate stewardship measure, in an effort to avoid resistance from overuse. To put it bluntly, antibacterials are not blockbusters for the pharmaceutical industry.
Ironically, the problem is compounded by the fact that the development of novel antibacterials needs to iterative, as all new agents will eventually lose their efficacy due to a bacterium’s rapid adaptation – this culminates in something scientists call antimicrobial resistance (or AMR, for short).
So, it should really not come as a surprise that many pharmaceutical companies have left this field in the last few decades, and the mass exodus has only been amplified in the last few years. Yet, the unfortunate reality is that AMR is on the rise, with new resistance mechanisms identified, on a yearly basis, that even hinder the use of what have historically been our agents of last resort, the carbapenem class of antibiotics. Many have resorted to using older agents, such as colistin, which have suboptimal efficacy and notable safety concerns. Epidemiologists estimate that if we do not change the trajectory we are currently on regarding novel antibacterial development, AMR will have massive public health implications. Some experts, like the British economist Jim O’Neill, even go so far as to predict that by 2050, ten million people will die annually as a result of resistance to diseases like bacterial infections, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV, unless a global response to the problem is mounted. Incidentally, that number is the exact same as the number of individuals who normally queue up to visit the Mona Lisa – at least in the pre-pandemic period. All this has created a ‘perfect storm’ that impacts our own lives and the lives of future generations.
But, our antibiotics are not alone in this fight of their life. So is the environment.
Unlike the Mona Lisa, it’s not like we can “take all our trees and put them into a museum,” as the Canadian folk singer, Joni Mitchell, warned us exactly fifty years ago in her never-fading hit, Big Yellow Taxi. If we insist on taking our natural paradises and converting them all into parking lots, we’re bound to be left without anything. No wonder so many musicians – from female soloists like Amy Grant and Sara McLachlan to bands like the Counting Crows and Bob Dylan – have performed covers of Joni Mitchell’s classic melody to remind their listeners of the costly repercussions of our endless destruction of the rainforests, the oceans, and the atmosphere. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t what you’ve got until it’s gone? The key is to prevent it from disappearing in the first place.
So, with this notion in mind, world leaders convened on this day (Dec 11) back in 1997 in an ancient Japanese city to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty dedicated to decreasing the global emissions of greenhouse gases. This consensus statement was the first coordinated effort to curb global warning. Eventually, after nearly 20 years in existence, the Kyoto Protocol has now given way to the Paris Agreement, a good-faith social accord signed in 2016 by 189 nations to continue to address the destructive impact of methane, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases. Sadly, the care of our environment has somehow become a polarizing political issue. Many leaders transform into metaphorical ostriches, willing to place their own heads in the sand at the expense of our planet’s health and the survival of future generations of all species.
Today, we carefully preserve the Mona Lisa behind glass, so she can no longer fade, weather, or be stolen. What will we do when our antibiotic armamentarium is gone? Or the Great Barrier Reef? Or the ozone layer? Or the endangered gorillas in Africa? Or even the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal? It’s not like we can put these things in some first-floor wing of that Parisian museum? We need to preserve our creations, whether natural or man-made, because nothing lasts forever without our dedicated attentiveness.
I’m grateful for all those who advocate for the conservation of the world’s more prized treasures. But, the truth be told, we really cannot rely on others. The preservation really starts with me, and it starts with you. Singing about it, with all respect to Joni Mitchell and the many cover bands that have followed, is simply not enough.
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