Deadly Lake May Hold Cancer Cure [W/Video]

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Cures to cancer have zeroed in on genetics, stem cells, exotic plant extracts—even micro-robots. Now researchers have turned to one of the most unlikely places in the world to find a cure for the feared disease: an extremely toxic, placid pool of blood-colored water that looks every bit like the hellish lake described in Dante’s Inferno.

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The Pit

Dateline: Butte, Montana. Once an open-pit copper mine, the man-made lake called Berkeley Pit has evolved into a bizarre attraction for curious tourists.

Now The Pit as some locals refer to it, has also become a draw for microbiologists and medical researchers seeking a cure for diseases including cancer. Many would consider it the most unlikely place in the world to search for cures.

Yet the Berkeley Pit may lead to an eventual cure—at least for some types of cancers.

The deadly waters stretch out over one mile and its nearly a half mile wide. The water’s choked with toxic scum, heavy metals, porous slag, and waste copper.

At one point, the lake was so infused with copper miners ran heavy-duty hoses into it and sucked the metal out.

According to Oddity Central, about 400,000 pounds of copper were harvested from 13 million gallons of water.

Over time, nearly 1,000,000,000 tons of ore was extracted from the mine. While most of the metal was copper, silver and gold were also mined, albeit in significantly smaller quantities.

The Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana [Image: NASA]

As the mining operations progressed, Anaconda, the mining company, expanded and deepened the pit while buying all the surrounding land and moving out the homes and businesses located there.

Life found in deadly chemical soup

Eventually, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) purchased the land. Tests of the water confirmed the high level of toxicity. Besides copper, gold, silver, cadmium and zinc, deadly chemicals like arsenic and sulfuric acid permeated the water in The Pit.

Based on extensive environmental analysis, a superfund was established to clean up The Pit. The decision to start the clean-up was galvanized by the death of a flock of geese that briefly landed on the water and then died from massive poisoning soon after.

As the project to drain the deadly water proceeded, new lifeforms were discovered in the chemical soup of The Pit. Incredibly, life somehow found a way to survive in the midst of swirling poisons.

Husband and wife team, microbiologists that specialize as marine natural products chemists, Andrea A. Stierle, and Donald B. Stierle of the University of Montana-Missoula found new bacteria and fungi—species formerly unknown.

Extremophile strange microorganisms

Their discoveries set off shockwaves in the scientific community and led to the National Institutes of Health awarding the Stierles a large grant to study how the life adapted to The Pit and how it protected itself from all the cancer-causing chemicals.

Back in 2006, the Stierles predicted that medical breakthroughs could come from researching the life that had adapted there, and they were correct.

Failuremag.com writes The Pit “is proving to be a rich source of unusual extremophilic microorganisms, which have produced novel and compelling bioactive metabolites. In other words, the water is filled with a hardy assortment of fungi, algae, protozoans, and bacteria, many of which have shown great promise as producers of potential anti-cancer agents and anti-inflammatories.”

Topographical analysis of The Pit’s various elevations

The Stierles’ research holds huge promise for dealing with a range of diseases and chronic ailments. Their investigation into the abberant lifeforms are providing important new insights into how cells protect themselves and could lead to the development of new clinical treatments. “We can use these molecules as tools to study particular systems,” Donald Stierle told Failure magazine. “Now we can study the cellular processes that happen under normal cellular conditions and under disease cellular conditions. As we know more about that process, we have a better idea how to change it—how we can take a disease state and return it to a normal state.”

Video: The Berkeley Pit

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