That point makes it a bit clearer. I suppose we are (were?) lucky in a way to have the antibiotics we do.
Is it possible there will be a Star Trek/SF type future where we can just engineer antibiotics as required, in a far more instrumental and directed way than we can now? (is it currently more a case of 'discovering' them than 'making' them?) Or is the potential variety limited in a more fundamental way, so that even if we had better tools for creating them in a made-to-measure fashion, we could still run out of usable ones?
Because they _are_ going to stop working eventually, it seems. It just doesn't seem possible, given politics and human nature, to prevent their ever being carelessly used somewhere in the world, hence bugs are going to slowly become resistant to the ones we currently have.
We are in a bit of a jam as far as antibiotics go. Certainly improved methods of production and specificity of action so that the "bugs" are better targeted but this is a race without a finish line, at least that we know of and we certainly don't know what we don't know.
My sense of things is that compared to chemistry and physics, the state of knowledge of biology is somewhere around 1900, with Maxwell's equations and Thomson's discovery of the electron. That's not bad really, but the challenges are different. Physics in large part is a quest for the bottom of reality, with equations and a perception that there is some "simple" solution to reality.
Biology goes in the opposite direction. Knowledge brings complexity and a major problem is collating everything into a fully contextual and complete understanding which is possibly fundamentally impossible for the human brain to fully grasp. Well, we're already at that point. People in their own fields find themselves unable to keep up with everything and so that leads to focus deeper and narrower and meaningful communication outside a handful of people becomes difficult to impossible. A possible solution? A machine intelligence "smarter" than we are, and of much greater capability than currently exists. Such a device can look for correlations in incomprehensibly large data sets, sifting for new knowledge and bringing it to our attention for further examination.
Massive digression perhaps but it's all relevant is a larger sense of what answers lurk not only in future discoveries but what we already have. I should not be surprised if a cure for a major disease already exists in the knowledge, but it's in the form of many pieces in a titanic jigsaw puzzle of unknown size.
Anyway, a lot of money is being spent on the problem and cash is the paradigm under which things get done.