Guest Essay: Serendipitous Science Like the Gila Monster Discovery That Led to GLP-1 Drugs Is Under Threat

A slow, heavy desert lizard called the Gila monster can go months between meals.

In the early 1990s, a physician-scientist named John Eng grew curious about how it keeps its blood sugar steady across those long fasts.

Working with modest funds at a Veterans Affairs hospital, he and a colleague studied the lizard's venom and isolated a molecule that behaved like a human gut hormone, except that it lasted for hours instead of minutes.

Science turned a serendipitous finding about lizard venom into one of the most important drugs of the century, but that type of research is getting harder to do.