Shared Solutions

Scorpions are not stopped by the U.S.-Mexican border. Neither are the many U.S. and Mexican academics who collaborate to study those venomous creatures and many other issues that the two countries share.

Tens of thousands of individuals are stung by scorpions on both sides of the border each year. If they are lucky, they are saved from severe illness or possible death by injection of an effective antivenom in time.

In 1999, University of Arizona Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology Leslie Boyer, then pregnant with her daughter, was invited by the National Geographic Society to tag along on a National Geographic expedition with a film crew in Mexico, hot on the trail of a Mexican antivenom that was saving lives in Mexico, yet was unknown in the United States.

The expedition wrapped up in Cuernavaca, in the laboratory of scientists at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM). There Boyer witnessed an apparent miracle: as a mouse lay rigid, dying from scorpion venom, Boyer watched with amazement as one of the scientists injected the mouse with antivenom. Miraculously, within minutes, it was well on the way to full recovery.

Later, Boyer began speaking with one of the scientists, Alejandro Alagón Cano, a professor at the Biotechnology Institute of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Bioprocesses at UNAM. They began to realize that by combining their respective skills, they could yield results neither could on his or her own.

Alagón, who had won the 2005 Mexican National Prize for Arts and