Remembering Dr. Stuart Levy: 40 Years Ahead of the Curve!

A Message from ARAC Director Lance B. Price

We recently lost one of my professional heroes, Dr. Stuart Levy.

Stuart was a Professor of Medicine at Tufts Medical School in Boston, he was a microbiologist, an impact entrepreneur and a tireless advocate for preserving the utility of antibiotics. Stuart was 40 years ahead of the curve in calling for clinicians and food animal producer to use antibiotics more judiciously – we’ve only had antibiotics for 80 years, so Stuart was way, way, way ahead of the curve!

It couldn’t have been easy to be that far ahead of virtually everyone else. With few allies, Stuart took on some of the most powerful interests in the country to make antimicrobial growth promotion illegal in the US – and he nearly did it! It literally took an (underhanded) act of Congress to stop his efforts. Yet, despite this major setback, Stuart never lost his warm smile and determination. He just straightened his signature bowtie and fought on for decades, laying the foundation for the antibiotic stewardship movement that finally gained traction only a few years ago.

One of the things that made Stuart so effective, was that his advocacy was always based on sound science – and in many cases on studies that he designed and conducted himself. Most people probably don’t know how uncommon this is. The best scientists are infrequently the best communicators and vice versa. But Stuart was one of the rare individuals who excelled at both, and some of his earliest experiments are still among the most influential in my field.

One of Stuart’s early studies showed that when you feed food animals antibiotics, the bacteria living in those animals rapidly develop resistance to those antibiotics and then spread to the people raising those animals. A few years ago, after my colleagues and I published a paper on the origins of livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a reporter asked me if we’d finally found the “smoking gun” connecting antimicrobial use in food-animal production with antimicrobial-resistant human infections. I laughed and said, “Our study certainly provided some new insights, but Stuart Levy showed us the smoking gun 40 years ago!”

As we slip into an era of medicine marked by bacteria that are resistant to all of our best antibiotics, I’m certain that Stuart’s prestige will continue to grow and future generations will ask, “Why didn’t those fools listen to him?!”