I love that they were able to patent a naturally-occurring organism. We need more systems in place like that so that the entirety of nature can be locked up behind patent license fees and legal protections to keep the rest of humanity from benefiting.
"The pit and its water present a serious environmental problem because the water, with dissolved oxygen, allows pyrite and sulfide minerals in the ore and wall rocks to decay, releasing acid. When the pit water level eventually reaches the natural water table, estimated to occur by around 2020, the pit water will reverse flow back into surrounding groundwater, polluting into Silver Bow Creek which is the headwaters of Clark Fork River.[1] The acidic water in the pit carries a heavy load of dissolved heavy metals. In fact, the water contains so much dissolved metal (up to 187 ppm Cu) that some material is mined directly from the water."
This is a propaganda article by BP. It says that the mine were the ones that first brought thee water to the scientists for study. And then, even tough the scientists have not discovered anything useful the article is full of talk of "potential" compounds for the treatment of a bunch of diseases, but it's all speculation. Also there were several notes through the article of concern about the costs to BP which made me more suspicious because a normal reporter wouldn't write that.
The piece says that the water samples were provided by the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, not BP. Why would a "normal reporter" not include factual information about the costs to the responsible party?
Do you have any proof of your claim, or is this speculation?
If there are so many beneficial organisms coming out of this one contaminated environment, we should create small toxic environments in laboratories and see what grows there. A bathtub or swimming pool filled with heavy metals, acid, and yeast could apparently yield a lot of organisms for study.
An artificial environment would be ideal, but it's currently impossible. The issue is: how do we recreate the environment with the right organisms? How do we know that they're all growing like they would in their natural environment?
I remember in an environmental micro lab, one of our exercises was to grow a newly 'cultivable' bacterium. For a while, it had been considered uncultivable, and all research was done in the field. There had been a breakthrough at the time, though, that let us actually culture this one species in the lab. We used the technique outlined here:
It took us about a week to set up the proper environment and rig a filtration system to approximate the right conditions. A quarter of the class couldn't even get the bacteria to show up after all of that work. (And that was with detailed instructions!) Bottom line: figuring out growth conditions for novel species is hard, especially with the relatively mysterious archaebacteria. Until this decade, the primary way of growing them was to see what showed up on a petri dish with a generic broth.
The reason this pit (and others) is crucial is that it holds tons of unidentified bacteria, bacteria that probably wouldn't survive transportation to a controlled environment. We only know they're there because of the bits of DNA we've recovered from dead organisms. Without knowing what we were trying to recreate, our class wouldn't have been able to carry out our controlled experiment. The same probably holds true for the organisms in this pit.
That's fascinating. My mom lives in Butte, and I've been out that way several times. It's a bit jaw-dropping to stand at the edge of that thing. At least something good has come out of that monstrosity.
