This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Yesterday, January 24th, 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos,

Scientific American Editor-in-Chief Marriott

Mariet de Christina, ran into Ben Farringha. He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize for

chemistry for designing and creating molecules that function as microscopic machines.

Ben Perringa and I are walking through Davos, about to go to our next appointment,

and I was just asking Professor Ferega what was exciting to

him right now. Yeah the most exciting thing probably we're working on now is to

make antibiotics that we can switch with light.

So we have, you know, antibiotics is a real big problem,

eh? Antibiotic resistance.

And what we do is we build in light switches in antibiotics and they are off and that we can switch them

on with light and after 24 hours when they have done the job they switch off automatically

and the bugs don't build up resistance.

That's what works.

And recently, because they don't with red light,

and that's really exciting because now we can get light

into the body.

And because red light goes deeper.

Very deep in the body. And that gives us a lot of opportunities to develop

these smart drugs. For a video of a longer conversation between Marriott de Cristina and Ben

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