Opinion: Crocodiles and curiosity

Crocodiles fascinate me. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs, and until we came along and made weapons, they were a top-tier predator.

Recently I watched the end of a wonderful documentary from the BBC called Dragons Alive . Although my wife didn’t really want to discuss it at 12:30am, it really got me thinking about the nature of curiosity and its importance in how we advance science and through it, society.

Scientific advances through child-like questions

Most awesome advances in science seem to come through people asking seemingly child-like questions. Some of the ones presented at the end of the show were great examples.

Some that really stuck with me were about crocodiles.

For example, we all know they can live in quite stagnant water without a big issue. But how do they live there without getting sick?

Now if you had have asked me, I would have guessed it was something to do with their tough outer skin. But there’s more to it than that. With a few moments of reflection, we might wonder why don’t they get infected and die when they get injured? If we exposed our injuries to stagnant water, it’d probably be the end of us.

There has been lots of work on that over the last few years and it looks like that work might yield antibiotics stronger than anything we’ve ever seen before. And we need better and different antibiotics if we are going to survive.