Simpson Case Boosts Microbe Conservation

A unique heat-loving microbe found in a 158-degree Yellowstone National Park hot spring 28 years ago has become an important player in the O.J. Simpson murder case, to the delight of conservationists who have suddenly been handed a provocative symbol for their cause.

The microbe, dubbed Thermus aquaticus, is a key ingredient in a DNA fingerprinting technique crucial to the prosecution’s case against Simpson.

Now, with the Simpson case drawing global attention to the potential of DNA technology, environmentalists and others are attempting to capitalize on the publicity and raise public consciousness about the conservation issues surrounding the crucial microbes. They argue that Thermus aquaticus and its many uses make a compelling argument for taking better care of the habitats of a variety of microorganisms being found in springs and caverns around the country, as well as in the ocean.

National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy proposed in a recent interview that commercial microbe hunters--”bio-prospectors,” as they are called--pay a royalty to the park service. He noted that miners, loggers and ranchers who make a living from federal lands are being pressed to contribute more to the conservation of those lands.

Last week, as teams of researchers probed Yellowstone and other national parks for the next golden microbe, Kennedy pointed out that Yellowstone never received a penny from the millions of dollars that industry has reaped from the commercial applications of Thermus aquaticus.

Beyond revolutionizing police work, laboratory refinements of the microbe are helping in the diagnoses of the human immunodeficiency virus, Alzheimer’s disease and sickle cell anemia.

Scientists representing 39 schools, firms and research organizations currently have permits to prospect for microbes in Yellowstone’s thermal waters. None of them pay for the privilege.

“We don’t have the funds to properly study the impact it is having,” Kennedy said.

And he asked: Is the specter of the biotech industry “guzzling up pondsful of microbes” all that different from timber companies harvesting the national forests? “Doesn’t the public, which pays for the upkeep of these places, have a right to expect some sort of contribution from those who are enriching themselves?”

Few discoveries in nature have prompted conservationists to argue so strongly for promoting biodiversity, whether it involves subsidizing the national parks or paying private property owners to protect the habitats of rare plants and animals.

Beyond its value to criminology and medicine, Thermus aquaticus and similar microorganisms are showing promise as sweetening agents for the soft drink industry, as high-powered stain removers in detergents and as catalysts in the manufacture of clean-burning fuels.

Scientists studying the origins of the planet also are intrigued by the microbes, known as thermophiles. Their research has led beyond Yellowstone to deep-sea vents where kindred organisms are growing at temperatures above the boiling point of water. Because they thrive in a climate that may have prevailed when the earth was in its fiery infancy, these microorganisms could offer important clues to the nature of the earliest life forms.

“To date, Thermus aquaticus is the most spectacular example we have of the benefits of biodiversity,” said Thomas Lovejoy, assistant secretary for external affairs at the Smithsonian Institution and a science adviser to the White House. “The thing to remember is that it (Thermus aquaticus) was accessible to science because its habitat had been protected for nearly a century,” said Lovejoy.

But continued protection is not guaranteed.

With 3 million people visiting Yellowstone each year, the costs of taking care of fragile resources can be enormous, said John Varley, the park’s chief scientist. The park’s annual $18-million budget, he says, is not always enough to keep the campgrounds open or the trails cleared, let alone baby-sit the 36,000 geysers, steam vents, hot springs and mud pots where the biological treasures dwell.

Gaps in vigilance, sometimes because of staff shortages, have led to significant damage, some of it irreparable, Varley said. “People pitch things into a geyser. That plugs up the throat. It can dry up. Or there can be a change in temperature that wipes out a whole colony of microbial creatures.”

Legislation to enhance protection of Old Faithful and related phenomena has been languishing in Congress for three years. The legislation would prohibit any well-drilling on land adjacent to Yellowstone that might alter geothermal processes in the park. Opponents argue that the ban would interfere with private property rights.

Meanwhile, a growing number of federal agencies and U.S. firms that engage in international biological prospecting are entering into agreements with foreign governments, promising a share in the profits if discoveries in those countries lead to products.

The National Cancer Institute, for example, has reached such agreements with the governments of Cameroon and Sarawak, where cancer institute researchers have isolated compounds from indigenous plants and vines that show promise in controlling HIV.

Ironically, the firm that has profited most from the microbe found in Yellowstone is a foreign company. The big Swiss pharmaceutical firm, Hoffmann-La Roche, acquired the patent on the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, one of the processes at the heart of the Simpson investigation, which allows police to identify criminal suspects from tiny fragments of blood or tissue.

The enzyme critical to the process was derived from Thermus aquaticus.

Government officials, including Park Service Director Kennedy and the Smithsonian’s Lovejoy, believe that the same kind of agreements that govern international prospecting ought to be negotiated in the United States. Lovejoy would have them extend beyond the park so that private landowners could share in the profits of scientific discoveries made on their property.

In Lovejoy’s view, such a system of rewards is the most sensible way to encourage preservation.

“Suppose the only hot spring left with Thermus aquaticus in it was on your property,” Lovejoy said. “It makes sense for society to offer you some incentive to protect it.”

But Steve Brewer, director of bio-products for the Monsanto-Searle Co., a major pharmaceutical and chemical company, contends that the government already has its hand deep in the industry’s pocket.

“Taxes on our profits are high enough as it is,” Brewer said, adding that the park service director’s concerns about damage to resources are overblown.

“We go in there and take a teaspoonful of water. It’s ludicrous to compare us to a mining company that tears up God knows how many acres of soil and rock.”

According to the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association, companies already pay royalties to the federal government.

“When the government discovers a new drug, it turns to the industry to market (it),” said Steve Bircham, a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. “If the company makes money from it, the government asks for something back.”

Some government experts say it would be difficult to craft a U.S. law on mandatory royalties that did not discourage scientific research. This might be especially true in national parks, where scientists already must contend with limitations on what they can take out of the parks, where they can work (out of sight of tourists) and how they must travel to remote areas (on foot or horseback).

One of the nation’s most prestigious biological prospecting organizations, the nonprofit Missouri Botanical Garden, which does research under contract with chemical companies, tries to avoid national parks because of the red tape.

“We have found we often can’t get the access we need to the places in the parks where we want to go,” said James S. Miller, a curator at the garden.

Sympathetic to those concerns, Varley, the park’s veteran senior scientist, has mixed feelings about imposing a royalty system.

“I sort of straddle the fence on that issue,” he said. “On the one hand, the parks don’t have adequate budgets for resource protection. On the other hand, when I see something like Thermus aquaticus, which has turned out to be of such enormous benefit to humankind, I hesitate to raise a financial barrier to future research. The costs of bringing one drug to market, for example, are already so high.”

Those matters were of little consequence to Thomas Brock in the fall of 1966 as the Indiana University microbiologist sampled the hot waters of Yellowstone’s Lower Geyser Basin in the woods about eight miles north of Old Faithful.

Brock was doing basic research, studying how the environment affected certain microorganisms. Taking care not to burn himself and keeping an eye out for grizzly bears, Brock found something that wasn’t supposed to exist: bacteria that thrived at temperatures above 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brock, who has never profited from his discovery, admits he did not know what he had. “I had no reason to believe it would lead to something practical,” he said.

Naming his find Thermus aquaticus, he placed it in the public domain by donating it to the American Type Culture Collection, a sort of bank of microorganisms.

More than a decade later, a scientist working with the microbe in a Cetus Corp. laboratory in Northern California isolated an enzyme that could survive repeated cycles of heating and cooling and thus was the ideal organism to drive the DNA copying process known as PCR.

In 1991, Hoffmann-La Roche paid Cetus $300 million for the patents on the enzyme and on the PCR process. Last year, Kary Mullis, the Cetus scientist who perfected the PCR process, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

For the National Park Service, becoming the proud progenitor of such a wondrous invention was a new experience and one reason government officials are scrambling to come up with a policy to protect its interests in the future.

“It’s one of those issues we really hadn’t thought about and it kind of got away from us,” said Dennis Fenn, the park service’s acting director for natural resources.

With prospecting going on in at least three national parks, officials had better think fast.

Working at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky five years ago, Lawrence Mallory, a University of Massachusetts biochemist, found another microbe in a subterranean environment supposedly incapable of supporting life.

“What we detected at about 150 to 170 feet below ground,” Mallory said, “were diverse and active microbial communities surviving on very, very low nutrient levels.”

Some of the microbes produced a chemical that caught the eye of researchers at the University of Vermont’s Regional Cancer Center.

Preliminary testing has shown Mallory’s bacteria effective in killing leukemia cells harvested from laboratory mice.

While the researchers at the cancer center try to determine if Mallory’s microbes are useful in treating cancer in humans, Mallory continues to look for hardy organisms deep underground. He has moved his work to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico where, he said, he is continuing to find life forms where life is not supposed to exist.