By Natalie Bochenski
Bryan Grieg Fry's latest discovery is how to more efficiently milk the venom from box jellyfish.
It's an intimidating prospect for most, but just another perk of the job for Brisbane's own Venom Doctor.
Bryan Fry says animal venom could help unlock the next wonder drug.
An associate professor at the University of Queensland's School of Biological Sciences where he runs the ominous-sounding Venomics Laboratory, Dr Fry is an expert in all things creepy-crawly.
He's survived potentially deadly encounters with 26 snakes, three stingrays and a particularly nasty scorpion in the Amazon jungle. He's also racked up 24 broken bones, broken his back twice, received more than 400 stitches and starred in more than 40 nature documentaries.
UQ scientist Bryan Fry.
It's all great fodder for Venom Doc, his memoir published on August 25.
"If it's got venom, I'll play with it. This is all I've ever wanted to do," he said.
"I'm driven by this child-like sense of wonderment ... for whatever reason my brain is just drawn to these sorts of creatures."
He believes an early encounter with spinal meningitis, which left him deaf in his right ear, sparked his interest in deadly animals.
Bryan Fry says animal venom could help unlock the next wonder drug.Credit: Suppleid
"From the first memory, my world's been basically toxic," he said.
"It's something that's fascinated me, and I was four when I announced I was going to study venomous snakes when I grew up."
After growing up as wild as his parents would allow in the United States, Dr Fry arrived at UQ in 1996 to do his PhD in the toxic natriuretic peptides of the inland taipan.
A decade of university placements and research trips around the world followed, with Dr Fry studying a multitude of komodo dragons and Antartic octopi alongside centipedes, lizards, insects and snakes of all sizes.
He rates the four and a half metre king cobras of the subcontinent as his favourite.
"They're a very calm animal, they won't attack a person, only defend themselves," he said.
"They're very long lived animals, so they're very intelligent ... it's not like looking at a brown snake, which is as dumb as a f---ing rock, king cobras are a very smart animal."
Dr Fry said people needed to be educated about the critical value of reptiles and other venomous creatures as a bio-resource.
He said an example of "conservation through commercialisation" was the development of Captophil, a modified snake toxin used as blood pressure medication.
"This was developed in 1976, it remains a $10 billion a year market and it's been one of the top 20 drugs of all time," he said.
"If these kinds of animals go extinct, we've lost our chance to exploit them ... destroying a forest is no different to popping a nuke on top of an oil field."
Most recently, Dr Fry and his UQ team have developed a new technique to extract box jellyfish venom.
"Jellyfish have the oldest venomous lineage, they're nearly 700 million years old, yet in the average year more papers are published on snakes than have ever been published on jellyfish," he said.
"This is not from lack of interest, but lack of reproducible venom."
Snakes can be easily milked by forcing them to bite into a cup, but a jellyfish's venom is contained in millions of stinging cells located along its tentacles rather than one gland.
Dr Fry said it was a matter of turning accepted wisdom around to harness the venom for good.
"First aid always says never use ethanol on a jellyfish sting because it causes the tentacles to fire off, but I was thinking why can't we use that to milk them?, he said.
"It was just that easy all along, and now this is going to revolutionise the study of jellyfish venom because we can get clean venom from any species instantly."
Dr Fry hopes his memoir will shock and entertain, and encourage the next generation of "mad scientists".
"It's like David Attenborough on acid," he said.
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