Michael Levin had just started working as a paediatric infectious-disease doctor in London when he received an urgent call from a hospital in Malta. It was the early 1980s, and a young boy had been brought in with symptoms of a severe infection that was spreading through his body, damaging multiple organs and tissues. But his doctors could find no trace of a pathogen.
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The boy was flown to Levin’s hospital for further tests. To the surprise of Levin and his colleagues, the culprit was a common bacterium: Mycobacterium fortuitum, which lives in water and soil, and is usually harmless. “Everyone’s exposed to them, but almost no one gets ill,” says Levin, who is now at Imperial College London. Despite aggressive treatment, the boy eventually passed…