BoBeard27

Hello Dr. Zetland. I am a research scientist volunteering in Nepal for 6 months and I am transitioning my career to global health, specifically drinking water contamination. I am very interested in drug resistant gram-negative bacteria and the growing issue of co-selection of heavy metal/metalloid resistance and antibiotic resistance. There is some survey data that has described water supplies contaminated with arsenic seem to increasingly co-select drug resistance in gram-negative bacteria. This is likely due the selective pressure of arsenic and the genetic linkage of arsenic resistance genes and drug resistance genes on plasmids or other extra-chromosomal elements.

Now to my question, to do this work I need to get some seed funding. Do you have any suggestions about organizations that might be open to funding a small pilot study to get started?

What are your thoughts about Michael Burry (The Big Short) starting to look at water* as an investment/commodity that can be traded?

*More specifically the food that is grown with water

How will this affect the economics of water?