A radically different incentive structure seems necessary...
A recent example of a new antibiotic:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-antibiotic-...
Or how about this: a break-through that goes beyond classic antibiotics. Something that hasn't been thought of yet. Not like humans have a history of accomplishing such feats, right? Not like the entire last century of medicine falls into that category.
I can't think of a single example in modern history, in which our species has failed to think its way out of a major problem. X Y Z bad thing was supposed to take us down, or impede our progress, and we thought our way out of it. We'll continue to do that, and the overly dramatic forecasters of doom will continue to be wrong as they always are.
So what should the BBC headline read, then? "We're running out of antibiotics, but surely some clever person will think of something!"?
It's difficult to recoup your investment costs for a drug that has an effective use window that small.
Been the government that threw a few billion bucks and saved thousands of (electorate) lives is a good vote winner.
The cost of developing antibiotics is large (in the billions) but US defence spending is 600bn dollars, UK defence spending is 60-odd bn dollars.
Governments should already be funding this stuff (imo) since the defence of the realm is theoretically their first goal.
It actually varies significantly across antibiotics. I can't find the source right now, but there was a neat diagram that showed the introduction of each antibiotic and when resistance was first identified.
Some resistance was found in less than a year after the antibiotic was introduced and some were found 20 years later.
War. Poverty. Hunger.
The point being, we're not solving our most important problems, we've been merely leaving them out for later. If we hadn't found that "oil" card, we'd already be fucked, per what "overly dramatic forecasters of doom" were saying. Lucking out of a problem is not something you should attribute to your skills.
Moreover, problems we had in the past weren't serious. And we haven't thought our way out of them - we just let them happen. War? Famine? Floods? Oh, people died. So what, there are people elsewhere, and civilization didn't fundamentally change since the ancient history anyway. Only after the industrial revolution, when the progress of technology finally gained its pace, we've entered the times in which we actually have something to lose if we fail to maintain our civilization. We've also entered the era when for the first time in history, we're creating extinction-level problems for ourselves.
I love science and I do believe in human power to solve even most difficult problems. But let's not pretend that we got here by something else than just being lucky. And let's not treat serious problems as if they were child's play.