Passport to Texas

Extracting venom at the John C. Perez Serpentarium at Texas A&M- Kingsville, TX

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This is Passport to Texas

The National Natural Toxins Research Center in Kingsville, part of the Texas A & M system, houses 450 venomous snakes from around the world in its Serpentarium, from which they collect venom for research.

This center really is sort of a hidden gem in the A & M System, and in the state. It’s doing great work; it’s something that Texans should be proud of.

Reeve Hamilton works for the A & M System. Researchers at the lab do their own research, such as work on a universal anti-venom; they also share venom with fellow researchers worldwide.

Other researchers elsewhere will get in touch with them and say we really need this for our research, can you get it to us? And they’ll freeze it and ship it off. They’re doing their own research, but they’re also enabling the research of others.

Pharmaceuticals to treat heart attacks, strokes, and to prevent the metastasizing of tumors have come from venom research. Reeve Hamilton hopes that by understanding how venomous snakes help humans…

You know, you come across a snake, maybe you might change your appreciation of the animals a little bit.

Read about the Natural Toxins Research Center in the April issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2016 at 12:00 am and is filed under venomous snakes, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.