Antibiotics are among the most important advances in the history of modern medicine. They turned often acutely fatal infections into treatable indications with radical cures. Antibiotics continue to enable nearly all of the medical and surgical advances that we turn to as treatments for every human and animal disease. Yet our ability to develop safe and effective antibiotics is out-competed by natural selection as well as increasingly difficult challenges in identifying new, clinically-validatable targets and high value chemical starting points for new therapeutics. Some new strategies and technologies are allowing us to gather a deeper understanding of the biology of microorganisms both pathogens and resident flora as well as means to test chemical hypotheses to guide antibacterial SAR. The time is right and the tools are available or within reach for scientists within all types of organizations to make an enormous collective impact on this challenging field!