Antimicrobial resistance is a critical threat to public health. The value of antibiotics for human health is immeasurable, but were one to try to measure, a plausible estimate of the increase in life expectancy attributable to antibiotics might be 2 to 10 years. If we multiply this increase by 300 million Americans, and a dollar value of, say $100,000 per life-year, we arrive at an estimate for the worth of the current stock of antibiotics of $60 trillion to $300 trillion in the United States alone.