summarize this "In the fall of 2016, I met three friends at George Bush
Intercontinental Airport in Houston to embark on a somewhat unusual
vacation. We flew eleven hours overnight to Santiago, Chile, where we drank
coffee and ate breakfast before boarding another plane to fly six more hours
to the west, across 2,500 miles of open ocean, to Easter Island, the world’s
most isolated body of land that is inhabited by humans. We were all men in
our forties, but this was not your typical guys’ weekend.
Most people know about Easter Island because of the thousand or so
mysterious giant stone heads, called moai, dotting its shoreline, but there’s a
lot more to it. The island was named by European explorers who landed there
on Easter Sunday in 1722, but the natives call it Rapa Nui. It is an extreme,
isolated, spectacular place. The triangle-shaped island of roughly sixty-three
square miles is what’s left of a trio of ancient volcanoes that surged up more
than two miles from the seabed millions of years ago. One end of the island is
ringed by very high cliffs that plunge down into the gorgeous blue ocean. The
nearest human settlement is more than one thousand miles away.
We were not there as tourists. We were on a pilgrimage to the source of
one of the most intriguing molecules in all of medicine, one that most people
have never even heard of. The story of how this molecule was discovered, and
how it revolutionized the study of longevity, is one of the most incredible
sagas in biology. This molecule, which came to be known as rapamycin, had
also transformed transplant medicine, giving millions of patients a second
chance at life. But that was not why we had traveled ten thousand miles to
this remote spot. We had come because rapamycin had been demonstrated to
do something that no other drug had ever done before: extend maximum
lifespan in a mammal.
This discovery came about at least in part thanks to the work of one
member of our group, David Sabatini, who was then a professor of biology at
MIT’s Whitehead Institute. David had helped discover the key cellular
pathway that rapamycin acts upon. Also on the trip was another biologist
named Navdeep Chandel (Nav to his friends), a friend of David’s who studies
metabolism and mitochondria, the little organelles that produce power (and
do much more) in our cells, at Northwestern University. Completing our
foursome was my close friend Tim Ferriss. Tim is an entrepreneur and
author, not a scientist, but he has a knack for asking the right questions and
bringing a fresh perspective to something. Plus, I knew that he would be
willing to swim in the ocean with me every day, reducing my chances of
being eaten by a shark by approximately 50 percent.
One purpose of our trip was to scout out the location for a scientific
conference that would be entirely devoted to research about this amazing
substance. But mostly, we wanted to make a pilgrimage to the place where
this extraordinary molecule had come from and to pay homage to its almost
accidental discovery.
—
After we dropped off our luggage at our thirty-room tourist hotel, our first
stop was Rano Kau, the one-thousand-foot-tall extinct volcano that dominates
the southwest corner of the island. Our destination was the center of the
crater, where there is a large swampy lake, nearly a mile across, that had a
certain mystique among the locals. According to a local legend that we had
heard, when people were feeling sick or unwell, they would make their way
down into the crater, perhaps spending a night in the belly of the volcano,
which was believed to have special healing powers.
This is where the story of rapamycin begins. In late 1964, a Canadian
scientific and medical expedition arrived on Easter Island, having sailed all
the way from Halifax aboard a naval vessel. They spent several weeks
conducting research and dispensing much-needed medical care to the local
inhabitants, and they brought home numerous specimens of the island’s
unusual flora and fauna, including soil samples from the area of the crater.
The scientists might have heard the same legend about its healing properties
that we did.
A few years later, a jar of Easter Island dirt ended up on the lab bench of
a biochemist in Montreal named Suren Sehgal, who worked for a Canadian
pharmaceutical company then called Ayerst. Sehgal found that this soil
sample was saturated with a strange and potent antifungal agent that was
seemingly produced by a soil bacterium called Streptomyces hygroscopicus.
Curious, Sehgal isolated the bacterium and grew it in culture, then began
testing this mysterious compound in his lab. He named it rapamycin, after
Rapa Nui, the native name for Easter Island (mycin is the suffix typically
applied to antimicrobial agents). But then Ayerst abruptly closed its Montreal
lab, and Sehgal’s bosses ordered him to destroy all the compounds he was
researching.
Sehgal disobeyed the order. One day, he smuggled a jar of rapamycin
home from work. His son Ajai, who was originally supposed to be the fifth
member of our pilgrimage, remembers opening the family freezer to get ice
cream when he was a kid and seeing a well-wrapped container in there
marked DO NOT EAT. The jar survived the family’s move to Princeton,
New Jersey, where Sehgal was ultimately transferred, and when the
pharmaceutical giant Wyeth acquired Ayerst in 1987, his new bosses asked
Sehgal if he had any interesting projects he’d like to pursue. He pulled the jar
of rapamycin out of the freezer and went back to work.
"