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Toxic remains of mining operation kill geese, cancer cells
You really can't beat this opening sentence, so I'm not even going to try:
BUTTE, Mont. — Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab.
If that doesn't sound like a cheery story to you, you're in for a surprise. From that scab-colored corrosive water, researchers are pulling organisms that might be the key to the next generation of cancer drugs.
The pit is the remains of what was once the world's biggest copper mine, now filled with acidic water and- well, again, author Christopher Maag says it better than I could:
For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world’s largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.Today it is one of the harshest environments in the country. When residents speak of the pit, they often recall the day in 1995 when hundreds of geese landed on the water and promptly died.
He's not kidding; this thing is an environmental nightmare.
But two scientists with a history of discovering sources of cancer-fighting drugs think they may have struck gold again. Of the 80 chemical compounds that exist in this pit and nowhere else, two have already demonstrated under lab conditions an ability to kill breast and ovarian cancer cells.
It will be years before the drugs-from-sludge meet the market, and that's only if they pan out. Still, as environmental health stories go, this is a fascinating one. I hope they manage to get something of value out of the murky water. Maybe that will begin to mitigate the environmental damage done by the open pit mine.