In 1968, researchers at the National Communicable Disease Center (NCDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, warned of the spread of a new strain of the venereal disease gonorrhea that Was resistant to the most common treatment, penicillin. Dr. Leslie C. Norins, director of the Venereal Disease Research Laboratory at the NCDC, traced the spread of the new strain to the war in Vietnam. The highly resistant cases were the result of women turning themselves into, Norins said, "living culture tubes." The Vietnamese women contracted gonorrhea and treated themselves with small, inadequate doses of bootleg penicillin. As a result, they became carriers of strains that were resistant to any level of penicillin. When troops returned to the United States, the new strains were introduced to the United States. The rise of penicillin-resistant gonorrhea in the late 1960s prefigured a more serious wave of antibiotic- resistant viruses in...