Staphylococcus aureus is a microbe found commonly on human skin and in nostrils. Generally it does no harm, but it is an opportunist, and when the immune system is weakened, it can slip in and wreak havoc. By the 1950s, it had evolved resistance to penicillin, but luckily another antibiotic called methicillin had become available and it stopped S. aureus infections in their tracks. But just two years after methicillin’s introduction, two people at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, near London, developed S. aureus infections that would not respond to methicillin. S. aureus had,
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