Scientists Are Looking for Medical Cures in Toxic Waste
Superfund sites take many forms: abandoned mines, shuttered manufacturing facilities, former military bases, and, in the case of New York City’s infamous Gowanus Canal, waterways. These places are so contaminated with hazardous waste they pose a serious risk to human health and the Environmental Protection Agency has made cleaning them up a national priority.
Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has been a basin of industry waste for decades—arsenic from tanneries and runoff from cement and oil lamp factories. It’s still on the receiving end of Brooklyn’s sewage system and since 2014, at least three human corpses have been found in its waters. Scientists, however, think the Gowanus Canal and places like it could harbor new medicines.
Chris Mason, biochemist and chief researcher at Cornell University’s Mason Laboratory, is among them. He says the organisms that thrive among the pollution could hold treatments for any number of maladies, from cancer to AIDS. Faced with the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, Mason’s team is focused on sourcing new antibiotics from the sludge. So far, they believe they are close to isolating four new strains of antibiotics from compounds produced by the microbes living in the Gowanus Canal.