 Many important questions in our society depend on answers from science. For example, how to respond to climate change, whether wine is good for you, how to prevent disease with vaccination, how to prevent collapse of the bee population, and many, many more. Government policies on these issues are and need to be informed by science. How science informs government policy can, however, be a complicated process. Let's use the response to antibiotic resistance as an example. The story of antibiotics begins in London in 1928. A window carelessly left open by Alexander Fleming lets in a mold, penicillium, that proceeds to grow amongst his bacteria. All of the bacteria around this mold started to die, leading our intrepid scientists to study why this occurred. In 1940, penicillin, the first antibiotic, was isolated from this very mold. The discovery of penicillin revolutionized medicine. Antibiotics were initially able to treat merely all bacterial infections. They were a miracle cure. As a result, antibiotics have saved countless lives. Over time, antibiotics were co-opted for many other purposes, and now they are used everywhere, including in farming, plastic toys, toothpaste, hand soap, and even toilet handles. Around the same time as penicillin was isolated, scientists had their first encounter with antibiotic resistance. The bacteria was discovered that could destroy the new wonder drug. Within 10 years, penicillin resistance was widespread, and people wanted a solution. It seemed the best way to counter antibiotic resistance was to develop new antibiotics, and so a second round of antibiotics were developed. Neomycin, empacillin, erythromycin, all great drugs, but they weren't always effective for long. Resistance developed rapidly. Indeed, resistance to erythromycin appeared so rapidly in Boston hospitals that this new drug had to be abandoned less than a year after it was introduced. While development of new antibiotics sounds like a great way to win the fight against infectious bacteria, it's becoming harder and harder to develop new antibiotics, and we just cannot keep up with the spread of resistance. So we need to know more about how antibiotic resistance occurs. Scientists have been researching this very question. Scientists found that rare bacteria naturally develop tools that allow them to grow in the presence of antibiotics. With increasing antibiotic use, these rare resistant bacteria outgrow bacteria killed by antibiotics, making antibiotic resistance more and more common. But how this resistance spread surprised everyone. Scientists discovered that the genes causing antibiotic resistance can be transferred from one bacteria to another, and some genes can even confer resistance to multiple antibiotics. Understanding that the more bacteria are exposed to antibiotics the faster they develop resistance helped scientists recommend limiting the use of antibiotics when possible to prevent this. However, antibiotics are still widely used with very little oversight, and today antibiotic resistance is everywhere. If something isn't done, we risk turning the clock back to the pre-antibiotic era when simple infections could kill you. But what to do? There are several possible solutions informed by what we have learned so far about the science of antibiotic resistance. We can keep trying to develop more antibiotics, reduce their use in non-essential areas like promotion of animal growth and farming, improve how the spread of antibiotics is monitored to improve responses. Finally, use combinations of antibiotics to treat people with resistant infections to make it less likely bacteria will survive to spread their resistance genes. Many of these solutions are being tested around the world, but none will solve the problem in isolation. Instead, a combination of policies will likely be needed. Importantly, future research will be necessary to evaluate how effective these policies will be. This evaluation will then help inform the next round of policy decisions in the fight against antibiotic resistance. How we should combat antibiotic resistance is just one of many important issues that depend on answers from science. As such, scientific research is critical to create a sustainable environment for all.