Tracking the Wily Compound

It must be simple coincidence. Somehow, just as the year rolls into the dark and cold depths, I keep finding interesting stories about research in the tropics.

Scientific discoveries anywhere have implications for people everywhere, though, so reporting news of science at work in the warm zones isn't purely self-indulgent. The item that caught my eye this time involves a promising arrangement between Merck & Co. and Costa Rica's Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad. Unlike many arrangements between massive international companies and developing nations, this one sounds good for everybody.

First, some background: Costa Rica is a model among the economically less well off nations for its attempts to preserve its lands and living things. The "biodiversity" in the national institute's name is appropriate, because this little Central American country has a huge array of different kinds of plants and animals. Costa Rica has rain forests and savannahs, mountains and sea coasts---varied habitats to support varied organisms. It also has a burgeoning human population, most of them struggling to make a living. But, while trying to find ways to support the people. Costa Rica has also tried to support and protect at least some of its natural wonders. The government has set aside large nature reserves and has plans for more.

The reserves do provide some immediate benefit to the economy---through tourism, for example---but their costs in lost farmland or timber revenues are more obvious. The agreement with Merck offers some new immediate benefits with at least a hope for greater ones in the future. Thanks to that accord, Costa Rica may become the new bonanza for chemical prospectors.

Like the mineral prospectors important in Alaska's history, chemical prospectors hunt for useful substances in unexplored territory. But there's a significant difference. The territory chemical prospectors search is alive. They work with biology rather than geology.

Merck will spend $1 million to train local biologists to explore Costa Rica's nature reserves. The chemical prospectors will be on the lookout for such things as plants unaffected by leaf-eating insects or insect eggs that molds won't attack. These signs of antibiotic activity will be followed up by laboratory screening to identify the active compounds. The laboratory work is to be led by experts from the United States, Cornell University biologist Thomas Eisner and chemists Jon C. Clardy and Jerrold Meinwald.

To help get things started, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation donated $800,000 to train and equip Costa Rican scientists to work with the Cornell team. The MacArthur Foundation money is a grant, but the Merck funds are an investment. Merck gets the rights to new drugs that may be found by chemical prospecting in the reserves.

If any of the potential drugs pan out, the company has pledged part of its profits to the national institute's conservation efforts. This pleases biologist Eisner, who has worked for years to interest private entities in the potential of chemical prospecting in Costa Rica. Quoted in Science magazine, he said the arrangement will compensate the expensive process of conservation in advance, and could lead to Costa Rica's offering "chemical prospecting training sites for scientists from other developing nations."

Hunting for new pharmaceuticals in nature offers potential benefits to people every-where, of course, but chemical prospecting might be something Alaskans should take seriously. It's true that the northern biota is not so diverse as that found in the tropics, but that doesn't mean we'd find nothing of value. In fact, chemical prospectors have already found one substance with great potential in a plant that grows in Southeast---the Pacific yew. Taxol, found in the yew tree's bark, appears to be an effective treatment for some kinds of cancer.

Who knows what else of value might be out there? We won't know until we look for it.