dirt / By Amy Stewart

Something Wicked

Pondering years spent on the dark side of the plant kingdom. New book!

(April 23, 2009)  A couple of years ago I took a research trip to Logan, Utah to visit the USDA’s Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory. From the photographs on their website, I was expecting a sort of horticultural X-Files experience: something very high-tech and state-of-the-art, but also mysterious, subversive and possibly dangerous.

And in fact, that’s exactly what I got. Guys in white lab coats, glass beakers, machines that go beep and startling medical experiments. Although the laboratory’s primary objective is to study poisonous plants that pose a threat to herds of cattle and goats so that they can help ranchers, over the years they have seen some unbelievable projects come out of their research into poisons.

GALLERY >

The guy who was showing me around asked, a little carefully, if I had any objections to conducting medical experiments on animals. How do you answer a question like that? I shrugged and smiled and said that I was sure that they were doing valuable research. And it turns out I was right: the researchers had discovered that when pregnant goats graze on particular wild plants (tree tobacco, Nicotiana glauca, and a few others) during a specific point in their pregnancy, the goat kids are born with cleft palate. They were able to help ranchers figure out how to keep pregnant goats away from the plant during that particular stage of pregnancy, but more importantly, they realized that now they had a way to actually cause cleft palate to happen during a pregnancy so that research could be done on possible treatments.

At first they would impregnate the goats — well, they wouldn’t, but another goat would — then they’d feed them a powdered version of the poisonous plant during that critical window of their pregnancy, and put the goats on a plane to the East Coast so that surgeons could operate on them and attempt to correct the cleft palate. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that it was easier to fly surgeons to Utah then it was to fly pregnant goats anywhere, so they set up an operating room where surgeons could perfect their technique.

Now they know how to operate on cleft palate in the womb so that the goat kid is born perfectly healthy and with no scars from the surgery. Fetuses, as it turns out, are able to do something called ‘scarless healing’ in the womb, so they’re born perfectly healthy after this treatment.

But cases of cleft palate aren’t necessarily caught in the womb, so they also developed an appliance that could be surgically installed in the roof of the mouth of goat kids born with cleft palate, so that rather than do multiple surgeries it’s a simple matter of tightening this little appliance at regular intervals to encourage the cleft palate to heal.

So far, the work has all been done in goats, but you can see the enormous potential for children.

There’s one more. Another wild plant, skunk cabbage, causes sheep to be born with grotesque facial deformities, including a single ‘cyclops’ eye in the middle of the forehead. One of the researchers asked me if I’d like to see a cyclops lamb. I said yes, of course, and without warning he reached into a cabinet and pulled out a jar that contained (I almost can’t write this, it’s so weird) a severed lamb’s head floating in formaldehyde. Sure enough, the lamb had just one single eye in the middle of its forehead, and that eye was open and looking at me. I haven’t slept since.

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