Wild Biotech co-founder Neta Raab

Two Church lab vets, a se­cre­tive in­sti­tute and an Is­raeli bil­lion­aire hunt for drugs in the guts of wild an­i­mals

Over the last four years, Ne­ta Raab and Ido Bachelet have re­ceived hun­dreds of padded card­board box­es con­tain­ing frozen poop from wild an­i­mals on five dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents.

The pack­ages came reg­u­lar­ly to their lab out­side Tel Aviv, sent from a squad of zo­ol­o­gists and spe­cial­ized Is­raeli army vet­er­ans who tracked enough an­i­mals to fill a Rud­yard Kipling nov­el, rush­ing to col­lect vul­ture and rhi­no and frog sam­ples with­in an hour of ex­tru­sion. Raab and Bachelet care­ful­ly opened the box­es, re­mov­ing the sam­ples from plas­tic-wrapped tubes and then us­ing spe­cial­ized mag­net­ic beads to fish out the bac­te­r­i­al DNA in­side for se­quenc­ing.

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