Thomas Goetz

One of the first antibiotics, streptomycin, was isolated out of soil.

tetracycline, rapamycin, and a dozen other medicines started in dirt.

Omura was a director at the Kita Sato Institute, and he had just begun a research project with Merck, the New Jersey-based pharma company.

Part of Omura's habit was to carry sample bags with him, so that when the mood struck him, he could shovel up a soil sample for testing later.

The sample from that golf course was just one of 40,000 cultures isolated in Omura's lab.

The promising ones were then sent overseas to New Jersey.

And exactly one turned out to have an anti-parasitic effect.

It killed worms.

For the next few years, the Merck team, led by William Campbell, they sweated the stuff, trying to create a stronger brew of this microbe.

They tested it against various pathogens, from bacteria to parasites.

And after countless experiments, they had ivermectin, a drug that worked reliably and consistently to kill parasites in livestock.

In 1981, ivermectin was approved for use in animals to kill various kinds of parasites, mites and ticks and roundworms and hookworms and heartworms.

Merck would make a lot of money this way.

But parasites were also a problem in humans, particularly in less developed countries.

So that same year in Senegal, Merck began testing ivermectin in people for the prevention and treatment of river blindness.

And those experiments worked too.

Ivermectin was approved for use in humans in 1987.

But who would pay for the drug?

It would be no small expense to manufacture and distribute the drug to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

So Merck did something remarkable.