By PHILIP ENGLISH
An Auckland-born television producer has upstaged the world's scientific community by doggedly pursuing a hunch that crocodile blood contains an infection-beating agent that might one day be a powerful antibiotic.
Top BBC science producer Jill Fullerton-Smith was filming a documentary on salt water crocodiles in Australia and wondered why
terrible wounds on the reptiles never became infected when the water they inhabited was so dirty.
The former Cambridge High School pupil, known to old friends by her maiden name, Jill Faricy, supervised the extraction of blood from wild crocodiles for her film.
"We couldn't tranquillise these monsters. One bit right through our boat. We won't say who it was, but somebody knocked the lights out in the middle of the night while we had this 4m crocodile on the loose," she recalled from London.
The New Jersey Medical School isolated the agent in the blood samples to find it killed strains of virulent bacteria resistant to standard antibiotics. The substance, named crocodillin, may one day be used in drugs to combat superbug infections in humans.
Jill Fullerton-Smith passed the University Entrance examination but never went to university. Instead she travelled the world, ending up seeking a job in television in Britain in the early 1980s and being trained as a director.
After running an independent production company, she went back to directing three years ago and decided to specialise in science programmes, including the acclaimed BBC Horizon series.
"You have to specialise whoever you are, whether you are a journalist or documentary maker, because you build on your contacts and your reputation ... And the biggest growth area in documentaries is science documentaries because they cross all cultural boundaries."
The award-winning documentary maker, producer of The Fat Files - which has screened on TV One - is now working on the BBC1 programme Living Proof, a new flagship science series. Instead of a static, intellectual approach the style of the series is high energy ... and crocodiles win high ratings.
Because other film-makers had pretty much covered every story to be told about sharks and crocodiles, Jill Fullerton-Smith had to find something new.
After searching fruitlessly, she visited Australia and met a British crocodile expert, Dr Adam Britton, who mentioned how crocodiles inflicted terrible injuries on each other in battles over territory yet their wounds healed without infection.
"I really just put it on my list of thoughts ... It literally came back about a month after I got back. I woke up one morning and thought, that's a really good question.
"Why do they heal? There must be something there that makes their immune response better than ours."
With biologist researcher Chloe Leland, Jill Fullerton-Smith phoned reptile experts around the world and found nobody was working on the question. "At that point we started to give up ... And then, I don't know, I just kept fidgeting at it. I got out the cuttings again and that is when I saw this cutting about a man who found an antibiotic in the skin of a frog, and I thought I'll give it a go."
Her persistence paid off. Blood samples were collected from crocodiles for the film. The BBC science department then funded a molecular chemist, Dr Gill Diamond, at the New Jersey Medical School to isolate the agent, a peptide or natural chemical that can destroy bacteria by penetrating their membranes.
"It does kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is very, very powerful. We are trying to find out who owns this peptide, which is why I am having meetings with lawyers at this moment."
She laughed when asked whether she or the BBC would be taking a cut if the discovery proved to be worth millions.
"The BBC is a bit confused because they have never done anything like this before ... Nobody really knows. Obviously, the question is why wasn't the research done in Australia. They've got the crocodiles."
The film of the hunt for the crocodiles and the antibiotic peptide has yet to be screened.
Dr Diamond, who helped isolate a similar agent from fish skin several years ago, said it was hard to say if the crocodile blood discovery would lead to a new drug.
"This one probably works very well for the crocodile. It might not work very well for a human but that remains to be seen."
By PHILIP ENGLISH
An Auckland-born television producer has upstaged the world's scientific community by doggedly pursuing a hunch that crocodile blood contains an infection-beating agent that might one day be a powerful antibiotic.
Top BBC science producer Jill Fullerton-Smith was filming a documentary on salt water crocodiles in Australia and wondered why
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