Wednesday 2 August 2017

Modern-Day Dragon Blood Might Help Cure Diseases

Looks like a dragon. Image courtesy of Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

It might not be easy to miss dragons. They’re in legends, the Chinese horoscope as well as in the names of animals such as draco Volans or the flying dracon and the biggest remaining monster of them all, the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis).

This big dragon can grow to be three metres (10 feet) long. New Scientist calls it ”a true relic of a bygone era” and describes a perhaps surprising trait in the creature’s blood: it can probably be used to cure diseases in humans:

Some of the first clues to the power of dragon blood came from a curious observation. Komodos generally eat carrion, which may be tainted with disease, but they rarely succumb to illness. Investigations showed that this is because the lizards’ blood is loaded with antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs – an all-purpose immune defence.

The hope is that those AMPs could be used as antibiotics to beat the growing number of resistant bacteria threatening hundreds of thousands of human lives around the world.”

Well, dragons were always somewhat mysterious.

Another relic is the tuatara. Evolutionists have to believe that it hasn’t evolved for over “200 million years”.

Source:

Popescu, Adam. 2017. On the trail of dragons with blood that can save people’s lives. New Scientist (2 August).