Lizard spit comes full circle

Jeff Servoss photo, Courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Gila monster

- Jeff Servoss, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service

As soon as my insurance provider authorizes it, I'll be shooting up twice a day with spit from a poisonous, desert-dwelling Arizona lizard species that resembles a 2-foot-long chunk of lava.

"No, officer, it's not heroin. It's lizard spit. Seriously."

Last week, my doctor decided to put me on Byetta (pronounced "by-A-tah") to help me better control my Type 2 diabetes. Pills and exercise alone aren't working adequately.

Derived from Gila ("HEE-lah") monster saliva, Byetta is a new diabetes treatment drug from Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and California biotech Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc.

It was OK'd in late 2005 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

According to educational booklets in my Byetta starter kit, the drug tells the pancreas to make the right amount of insulin after you eat, which prevents high blood sugars.

In Type 2 diabetics, this natural function of the pancreas doesn't work. It's either got to be jump-started, as with Byetta, or circumvented by insulin injections.

But unlike insulin, Byetta has an eyebrow-raising side-effect that's most advantageous for diabetics: weight loss.

In most people, it reduces one's appetite by telling the brain that the stomach is full, which, it is. The drug slows down how quickly food and glucose leave your stomach.

After prescribing Byetta, my doctor sent me to a Central Maine Medical Center diabetes dietitian at Rumford Hospital to learn about the drug and how to inject it.

That's where I learned that Byetta is a synthetic version of exenatide, a protein found in the saliva of Gila monsters, which are the largest lizards native to the nation.

Gila monsters, which I think are cute in an ugly sort of way, are lethargic, heavy-bodied lizards covered with bead-like scales of mottled black and yellow, pink or red.

They are also one of only two venomous lizards in the world. The other is a cousin: the Mexican beaded lizard.

Gila monsters are the ultimate "couch potato," spending 99 percent of their lives underground in burrows or under rocks, according to the San Diego Zoo Web site.

In 1963, when I was a mere 5 years old and living in the Sonoran Desert — the protected reptile's ever-decreasing home range due to urban sprawl — the zoo (my favorite due to its lizards) became the first in the world to hatch Gila monsters.

Often described as the pit bull of the lizard world, these lizards will muckle onto you with lockjaw tenacity and even flip themselves over while holding on. That's if you approach them while ignoring the loud hiss emanating from their wide-open maw, laden with brittle tiny teeth through which their venom flows as they chew on you.

"Watch out for Gila monsters!" my parents would always emphatically warn me and my siblings before we ventured into the Arizona desert, eager to learn about the environment in which we lived in Superior and Apache Junction.

What's funny about getting to inject oneself with Gila monster lizard spit at the age of 51, is that when I was a kid, some of my brothers and I would try to find and catch these critters and rattlesnakes to sell for cash.

I can't recall if we ever found any Gila monsters, but we found plenty of rattlers.

So, it's really weird to come full circle at midlife — 3,000-plus miles away in Maine — from a poisonous lizard species I sought to catch as a child.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com