The Hunt for Wonder Drugs at the North Pole
Gathered around a white plastic table, four scientists surgically explored a quaking pile of mud, freshly scraped from the bottom of the ocean and spiked with twitching tentacles and antennae. In the persistent dusk of an Arctic October, illuminated only by the navigation lights of their ship, the scientists’ orange rubber jumpsuits looked like a collection of traffic cones, bright and reflective against the murky sky. With long tweezers, the researchers organized the mess before them into tidy piles of sponges, starfish, and squirts, delicately picking each out of the morass as if extracting a prized shrimp from a takeout carton of lo mein. I hopped back and forth behind them, trying to stay warm in the biting ocean air and out of range of any sludge flung from the work area. Even in the Arctic, mud is still mud—copious, dirty, and potentially filled with life.
To the 24 scientists on board the Helmer Hanssen, a 209-foot, navy-blue-hulled fishing-boat-turned-research-vessel, the scene was deeply familiar. Most of the members of the team are based in Norway, at the University of Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world—where they are part of a lab called Marbio; the Helmer Hanssen is their home during annual, and sometimes biannual, trips in search of undiscovered organisms. The group is looking for compounds that have novel effects on other living substances, hoping that some of their finds will lead to new, lifesaving treatments for cancer and drug-resistant infections in humans. Their type of mission—traveling deep into rain forests, or to the top of the world, to look for rare, microscopic life—is called bioprospecting. The Helmer Hanssen had just embarked on its 14th bioprospecting trip in half as many years (the 13th was skipped superstitiously), and this time, I had been invited along on the voyage.
Two days earlier, our expedition had departed from Longyearbyen, a utilitarian settlement on the island of Spitsbergen in the archipelago of Svalbard. Halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole, Svalbard is an Arctic outpost frequented mostly by fossil-fuel experts, adventure tourists, and scientists.
For the first few days, we sailed among Svalbard’s fjords and islands, moving gradually north. Eventually, we would lose sight of land, becoming entirely surrounded by ocean and, later, by ice. Every day, and every mile, would bring us closer to what everyone, “the dark time,” the season when the highest reaches of the Arctic Circle receive no sunlight. Our goal was 82 degrees latitude—the farthest north the team had ever traveled.
