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“Just rub some dirt on it.”
W. T. A. F.
I was 6, maybe 7 years old. I had just returned home, estimating the necessary time of arrival – dinnertime – by the sun in the sky, as all great adventurers do. I had spent the day exploring outside our house in a nearby wood. Not a park mind you, but an actual wood with a creek, a swamp, and brambles to accompany the deeply forested areas. Back in the day, unless you lived in the city, nobody sought frontier adventure in a park. That would be like sending Indiana Jones to search for artifacts in a museum; boring. And we went outside not by choice, but by maternal decree. Apparently, coaching my mother towards enlightenment by repeating the phrase, “but why?” after every sentence she uttered led only to annoyance, not nirvana.
Thus in the late afternoon, I emerged from the borderlands, hopping over the split rail fence and back into suburbia. There I found my mother, reclining in her chaise lounge throne with a huge white sun hat for a crown, Pepsi Light over ice complete with a slice of extra lemon by her side. In retrospect, I believe there was more than a carbonated beverage in that summer refresher. It was there that I presented myself. I stood there; disheveled, partly sunburnt, with legs and socks and sneakers caked in stinking, still damp swamp mud where I had sunk to my knees crossing that forbidden wasteland like Frodo and Sam sneaking into Mordor.
Only my ninja-like reflexes and keen wit had saved me from certain death sinking into that marsh. I crawled on my belly through the muck and brambles to return home—in time for dinner, thank you very much—by my account, lucky to be alive. I had the battle scars from my encounter with the Grim Reaper. I looked like I had been on the wrong end of a knife fight with Tinkerbell and her horde of wee, but angry fairy friends. As I presented myself to my mother, I explained my confidence that unless there was an immediate remedy, I was pretty sure I would hemorrhage to death from all those scratches. Such an immediate need for first-aid would also excuse me from any repercussions of potential punishment as a result of ruining my sneakers, my clothes, and smelling like three-day-old polecat roadkill.
At my plea for clemency, she moved her oversized sunglasses down to the bridge of her nose. Somehow, reclining on a lounge chair she still seemed to be able to be peering judgmentally down at me. She took a long, cool sip of her drink whilst her eyes surveyed the situation that was me.
“Go into the garage, take off all of your clothes before you go into the laundry room, and wash the hell up. Then get dressed for dinner. You stink and you’ve ruined your sneakers.”
“But what about all these cuts? I’m bleeding.”
She pointed to the raised garden beds where some vegetables were growing.
“Just rub some dirt on it.”
W. T. A. F.
I had, by my reckoning, nearly died making sure I got home by dinnertime after being sent out into the wilderness so my mom could sip icy cold cola, and who knows what else, undisturbed in the backyard. And my reward, the extent of her concern, was to tell me to go rub some dirt on myself. Cruel and useless advice, I thought, as I purposely took my time meandering towards the garden.
Fast-forward several decades. It’s 4 AM on a Friday morning. I, along with the intrepid crew of the cardiac catheterization laboratory, have just finished treating a patient who arrived in the emergency room less than 90 minutes ago with a life-threatening heart attack. To assure both a great short-term and a great long-term outcome for this patient, we’ve implanted a drug-eluting stent into the walls of the affected coronary artery.
Drug-eluting stents, or DES for short, are the sliced bread of interventional cardiology. They are among the most important tools in our toolbox to treat acute heart attacks and prevent the recurrence of those pesky blockages. Some would argue that they are the single most important innovation since the creation of angioplasty itself. And one of the biggest advances in the technology of stents, was the addition of the drug-eluting polymer.
But where did this revolutionary drug come from? What is this silver bullet? The drugs we use today when we perform coronary angioplasty and stenting to treat heart attacks and coronary artery blockages are analogs and derivatives of sirolimus. Sirolimus is the generic term for rapamycin. Rapamycin is a compound produced by the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus. But this is not just any run-of-the-mill bacteria. This bacteria was discovered in the 1970s from soil samples unique to Rapa Nui, or as it is commonly called, Easter Island. It is magic muck.
As I left the hospital that morning, I reflected back on the unassailable wisdom of mothers. In a very real sense, using the latest technology and science, I had treated a heart attack by rubbing dirt on the inside of a coronary artery; albeit very special dirt. Yet once again, it’d taken me decades to learn that my mother was right all along.
And that got me to thinking, always a dangerous enterprise, about the interactions of soil and the food we grow? Does that make a difference?
Continued in Part II
