Squire Booker, PhD

The Rise of Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance

Description:

The discovery of antibiotics revolutionized medicine, significantly reducing morbidity and mortality from bacterial infections. However, the mismanagement and overreliance on antibiotics have inadvertently led to the emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria, which pose a critical threat to human health, rendering once-treatable infections challenging to manage and potentially fatal. In this lecture, I discuss the initial discovery of penicillin and its large-scale production, which ushered in the golden age of antibiotics. I also discuss strategies bacteria deploy to resist antibiotics, including modifying 23S bacterial ribosomal RNA, which confers resistance to more than five classes of currently used antibiotics. Lastly, I discuss my laboratory’s efforts to develop compounds to combat this worrisome mechanism of antibiotic resistance.

Bio:

Squire J. Booker is a Richard Perry PIK Professor of Chemistry and of Biochemistry & Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus at The Pennsylvania State University. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Booker received a BA in Chemistry from Austin College in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. After postdoctoral studies at the Université René Descartes (Paris, France) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he moved to Penn State University in 1999 as an independent investigator before assuming his current position at Penn in 2025. Booker’s research focuses on enzymes that catalyze reactions using radicals. He is an Associate Editor for Biochemistry ACS and Deputy Editor for ACS Bio & Med Chem Gold. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.