#401 ‒ How curiosity transforms medicine: extraordinary discoveries that changed modern healthcare

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe.
Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. Today we're going to take a look at some critical pieces of history in modern medical science. Now, we normally focus on this podcast, on the findings and applications of medical research. But in this episode, we're going to instead look at that process, with an emphasis on how apparently and at times seemingly irrelevant basic research can be the stepping stone upon which medical revolutions are built. Now, we could have presented this as a series of findings, but I think the argument works best if you actually see it play out, to see who these scientists were, what they were genuinely trying to do, and what it looked like in the moment before anyone understood what they stumbled into. So rather than argue the thesis, I want to show it to you, story by story. By the time we're done, you should hopefully understand where several of the most consequential drug classes of the last 50 years actually came from. And hopefully more than that, you'll have a different framework for thinking about where medical progress actually comes from and how that informs how we, as a society, should value the basic science research that fuels medical innovation. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy this special episode of The Drive.
In the summer of 1961, a young Japanese biochemist named Osamu Shimomaru and his wife, Akemi, and his mentor, Frank Johnson, loaded into a station wagon in Princeton, New Jersey and drove 3,000 miles to the northwest corner of Washington State. Their destination was a place called Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. They went there for jellyfish, specifically Acoria victoria, a small, mostly transparent jellyfish that drifts in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. Its umbrella is rimmed with tiny organs that emit a faint green light.
Shimomaru was building a career studying the chemistry of bioluminescence. They scooped them up one at a time with shallow dip nets, brought them ashore, and cut the luminous rings off the umbrellas with scissors, by hand, one jellyfish at a time.
The goal that first summer was 50,000. They came back the next summer. And the next, for 19 consecutive years, Shimomaru and his family and a rotating cast of students returned to Friday Harbor.
By the time they finally stopped in 1988, they had cut the bells off approximately 850,000 jellyfish, drawn from a population of about one million pulled from the Bay. Nineteen summers, a million jellyfish.
If you had walked up to Shimomaru on a dock in 1965 and asked him what he was doing, he would have told you, honestly, that he was trying to understand how a jellyfish produces light. That was the whole project. He wasn't trying to cure a disease, he wasn't designing a drug, and he wasn't setting out to revolutionize the very process of scientific discovery. He was a man with scissors cutting rings off jellyfish because he wanted to know how the animal glowed. Here's what he found. When he ground up the jellyfish rings and purified the proteins, the first thing he isolated was a protein that emitted blue light, not green, and only emitted that light in the presence of calcium ions. He called it aquarin. That by itself was a beautiful piece of biochemistry. Nobody had ever seen a calcium-triggered light-producing protein before.
But while he was purifying aquarin, he kept noticing in the background a trace contaminant, a second protein that didn't glow on its own. But when you shone the right wavelength of blue light on it, it fluoresced bright green. He purified it, and he named it plainly Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP.
The jellyfish, it turned out, was running a two-protein optical system. Aquarin generated blue light from a calcium signal. That blue light then excited GFP, sitting right next to it, which absorbed the blue light and re-emitted the energy as green. And that's the glow you see in the water. An elegant piece of jellyfish biology.