Case in point

My conservation biology group is discussing the value of biodiversity, including the "option value" of organisms that might have little or no current economic value but could yield significant return in the future - provided we allow them to hang around long enough.

I give you sirolimus, known in medical circles as rapamycin. Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant that has been used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients - it's proven particularly useful in kidney transplants. That's rapamycin at left.

Recently, researchers have been looking at the effect of rapamycin on increasing lifespan in a number of organisms, including yeasts, the nematode C. elegans, and mice. Now, a new study appearing in PLoS One suggests that rapamycin can slow down or block the progression of Alzheimer's disease in a mouse model. The work is summarized here at Science Daily.

Pretty significant stuff, but how does it relate to biodiversity? Well, rapamycin was first isolated from the soil bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus, first collected in a soil sample from the island of Rapa Nui, known to you as Easter Island. The question is, how many potentially life-saving organisms have gone under the axe or plow before we got to them? And what would they have been worth?