The shark is the toxic wood chipper of the sea.
It must move to breathe, so it keeps swimming forward. It has a short and wide esophagus, which allows it to eat huge chunks of food without chewing. And of course, it has thousands of razor-sharp teeth designed for shredding living flesh.
Two shark attacks took place within hours of one another in North Carolina yesterday. Both victims were teenagers, and though their wounds were “life threatening,” both victims were airlifted to the hospital and kept in safety.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a shark can do to a human, but it’s one of the most brutal wounds the body can sustain.
Years ago, I knew a surfer who was bitten by a shark off the coast of South Carolina. When in recovery, he sent me a picture of his wounds. I’ll never forget them. His side had a massive chunk removed, and a huge row of stitches closed the segments that were left behind. He was regularly in the news that summer.
Shark bite incidents always make news because they’re actually rare, but their morbidity and mortality are extremely high.
Reconstructive surgery after a bite is also an intensive and difficult process.
But let’s take a step back to think about that… Sharks are not a natural predator of humans. We don’t have any natural defenses against their bites. No wonder they mess us up so badly.
That’s why a Georgetown study in 2011 observed dolphins to figure out how they can survive after the most heinous shark attacks that would surely kill a human.
One Weird Trick…
Dolphins are considered some of the most intelligent creatures on Earth, but their ability to escape death from shark bites has very little to do with their intelligence.
You see, sharks leave behind more than terrible wounds with their teeth. They leave behind a nasty concoction of bacteria that could easily kill a human within days of contact. Dolphins can swim off with a giant wound festering with bacteria and yet survive with no antibiotics.
Georgetown University Medical Center professor of surgery and immunology Michael Zasloff observed wild dolphins off the coast of Australia. Dolphins that had sustained serious attacks from sharks would have no visible wounds left in 30 days, with no scars or deformation.
Zasloff theorizes that a wounded dolphin can produce a hormone that actually stimulates the production of stem cells. These stem cells can become whatever cell matter was lost and regenerate it.
As far as the dolphin’s ability to fend off infection, it’s believed that dolphins store antibodies in their blubber and can stop bleeding by diving to great depths and shutting off blood flow to the affected area, coagulating surface wounds.
If this area of animal biology can be understood, humans can mimic that treatment in the unlikely event of a shark attack.
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Our Own Tricks
Okay, so we don’t have the ability to regenerate our body parts through the creation of stem cells.
But we’ve got precision medicine and stem cell tech.
In fact, one stem cell development is finally being revived after more than a decade in limbo.
Stanford developmental biology professor Irving Weissman created a lifesaving method of growing and delivering blood-forming stem cells in the late ’80s and sold the process to Swiss biotech Sandoz Pharma.
Sandoz then merged with Ciba-Geigy and became Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS). This made Weissman incredibly wealthy but essentially turned his stem cell technology into just another patent in a Big Pharma portfolio.
In 2000, Novartis halted any further development of the “personalized medicine” cancer treatment that Weissman had developed.
He sold out the promise of his developments for fast money. He then convinced Novartis to license the technology to a new company he’d formed (Cellerant), but research was cancelled due to lack of investor interest.
Years later, Stanford once again has access to the technology, and it’s pursuing its development in a non-profit setting.
As science makes advances in pharmacogenomics, we are able to detect how we will react to treatments long before treatments are ever needed. This means when some unlikely event happens — even an event as unlikely as a shark attack — we will be ready to fix it with a personalized solution.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
