Last night, at a gathering in Boston, a crew of scientists and altruists offered a prize for achieving a technology so novel, no one can yet imagine it.

The last time this was tried, it took almost 50 years for someone to win.

This time, the organizers hope it will take only five. The Boston gathering was a reception at Harvard Business School to introduce American inventors to the Longitude Prize, a British initiative to stimulate innovation in order to reduce antibiotic resistance. The Prize is fairly well-known in England—it is backed by the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and was broadly publicized by the BBC—but has gotten little attention in the US. Which meant that, before last night’s