Scientists have pinpointed a molecule that accelerates the evolution of drug-resistant microbes. Now they’re trying to find a way to block it. The British chemist Leslie Orgel reputedly once said that “evolution is cleverer than you are.” This maxim, now known as Orgel’s Second Rule, isn’t meant to imply that evolution is intelligent or conscious, but simply that it’s inventive beyond the scope of human imagination. That’s something people who fight infectious diseases have been forced to learn again and again. Over the past 90 years, scientists have discovered hundreds of antibiotics—microbe-killing drugs that have brought many pernicious diseases to heel. But every time researchers identify a new drug, bacteria inevitably evolve to resist it within a matter of years.

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