As I See It,
Bill Sargent, The Daily News of Newburyport, July 13, 2018, Edition

“It is May 15^th. The new moon hangs in the late-night sky. There are no sounds save for the quiet lapping of waves against the shore. The beach awaits the high tide, the highest of the month. There is an expectant sense of creation in the warm night air for it was in shallow waters like these where life first evolved.”

“Offshore, a male horseshoe crab has just re-enacted a ritual that has survived for more than 400 million years, long before there were birds, fish, and dinosaurs on our planet. When the first horseshoe crabs crawled ashore to lay their eggs, the only thing on land were mosses, ferns and a few dragonflies with 3-foot wingspans.”

“But the male crab is in trouble, his exertions during spawning flipped him over and now he was trying to arch his back so he could use his tail to right himself. But he is top heavy from an encrustation of barnacles, mussels and even a European oyster attached to his shell.”

“He is using valuable energy to flip himself over. If he doesn’t, at sunrise seagulls will find the crab and tear out his fragile book gills. This will allow gram-negative bacteria to surge into his blood system. Gram-negative bacteria are as fatal as they sound and are ubiquitous in shallow waters like those in Plum Island Sound.”

“However, the crabs have a primitive but elegant defense against gram-negative bacteria. Unlike humans that have more than 26 different types of cells making up their immune system, horseshoe crabs only have a single type of amoebocyte cell. The cells simply migrate to a wound and coagulate to keep the infection out of the crab’s blood system.”

“Humans are also susceptible to gram-negative bacteria that can cause often fatal diseases like spinal meningitis, gonorrhea, and toxic shock syndrome. In the 1970s, Dr. Frederik Bang at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole discovered that the blue copper-based blood of horseshoe crabs could be used to make Limulus amoebocyte lysate or LAL to test for the endotoxins released by these gram-negative bacteria.”

“Whenever anything comes in contact with the human blood system — whether it’s a syringe, vaccine or artificial knee — it has to be tested for gram-negative bacteria and the way that is done is with the LAL test.”

“So, today a quart of this processed horseshoe crab blood is worth over $30,000, and several large pharmaceutical companies produce LAL and sell it worldwide.”

“All this lysate is being made from a single species of wild animal, and as you would expect, the population of that animal is declining up and down the East Coast, breaking a link in the chain of life that includes several species of endangered shorebirds, such as red knots, that time their migrations to Tierra del Fuego and back to the Arctic so they will be on Delaware Bay in May to consume up to 40 tons of horseshoe crab eggs. This will allow them to lay their own eggs as soon as they arrive on their Arctic nesting grounds.”

“Theoretically, the decline in horseshoe crabs should not have happened because crabs are supposed to be bled for LAL and then released back into the wild with no mortality. But under industrial conditions, things inevitably go wrong and the crabs often die from transportation or being overbled, which sometimes kills up to 50 percent of the crabs.”

“But things might be starting to change for the crabs. In 1997, Dr. Jeak Ling Ding at the National University in Singapore filed a patent to use recombinant technology to produce a synthetic substitute for LAL.”

“However, the FDA refused to regulate the substitute because it wasn’t a blood product and wasn’t used to diagnose or treat a disease, so regulators claimed it was out of their jurisdiction.”

“It wasn’t until 2012 that the FDA came around and announced that pharmaceutical companies could use the substitute LAL, but they added a kicker. The companies had to prove that the artificial LAL worked better for each drug they produced, so there was little incentive for them to do so since LAL continued to work just fine and the companies were already familiar with how to use it.”

“It was not until 2017 that Lee Bolton, a researcher at Eli Lilly who also happened to be a birder, convinced the company to use the substitute LAL to test the water they used to make pharmaceuticals in a new plant they were opening in China.”

“Then, on May 10, 2018, he held a press conference at the New Jersey Audubon Center to announce that Eli Lilly planned to start using the synthetic substitute to test the water used in all of its plants in the United States. This would reduce Eli Lilly’s use of LAL by 90 percent.”

“If other companies follow suit, it could save the lives of half a million crabs and they would return to only being used as bait for conchs and eels, which is a much easier problem to solve because it turns out that fishermen are much more amenable to change than pharmaceutical companies. Who would have guessed it?”