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NO MATTER HOW CLEVER THE FIXES, SPAM WILL ALWAYS BE HARD TO STOP
GERMAN PHYSICIAN Paul Ehrlich once famously described himself as searching for a "magic bullet" drug that would kill germs without harming people. Ehrlich, who died in 1915, never found that bullet; his arsenic-based treatment for syphilis was effective but hardly benign. Thirteen years passed before Alexander Fleming stumbled on the naturally occurring antibacterial agent he named penicillin, and another dozen before Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford developed it into a clinically significant drug.
The antibiotic story holds some interesting lessons for today's spam fighters, whose increasingly complex arsenal Jon Udell analyzes in our cover story (see "Canning Spam," page 40).
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