In his 1941 novel The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagines a universe made entirely of books – every possible 410-page combination of 22 letters, a period, a comma and a space. Somewhere within are all the meaningful works ever written, but the vast majority are nonsense.
That’s how it felt when our team began a systematic evidence map on antibiotic resistance, screening over 13,000 manuscripts to find the few relevant ones to our scope. All solid research, but it was a number that could make even our most enthusiastic collaborators go pale. We were wandering our own virtual Babel. The scale reflects the urgency of tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – a global threat to human health, food security and agriculture that could cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050, outstripping cancer’s current toll of 8.2 million.
