Lizard Venom Regrows 'Irreplaceable' Cartilage

In the early 1990s, an endocrinologist named John Eng walked into his lab at a VA hospital in the Bronx with a vial of dried Gila monster venom. He'd ordered it from a mail-order catalog from a serpentarium in Utah [1]. His colleagues thought he was wasting his time. The idea that a poisonous desert lizard could teach us anything about human medicine seemed, to put it politely, unlikely. But Eng…