Daniel flipped open the well-worn pages of the book and found the glossy pictures at its center. One of the pictures was of a golden jaguar faceup in the earth. Daniel held the picture up and compared it to the one on the computer screen.

  They were identical.

  Daniel didn’t need to reread the book to remember that after finding the golden jaguar, Martin Lefbrevor had walked another mile and stumbled on a large jungle pyramid. Lefbrevor then walked two more days, at which point he encountered a vicious tribe: the Nsé-Eja.

  During the ethnobotanist’s seventeen days in captivity, the Nsé-Eja shaman spoke bits and pieces of Portuguese to him. While Martin was held captive, the shaman often visited him. Martin learned the tribe was extraordinarily, almost mythically, healthy and had no known incidence of cancer. Then, somehow, Martin escaped.

  Scientists had been looking for this theoretical tribe since Martin’s book had been published in 1984. Martin refused to divulge where the tribe was located, only that it was in the Amazon jungle. Most people assumed the tribe was in the jungles of Brazil, where there had been a few other apparent Nsé-Eja encounters.

  No one had ever thought to look in Bolivia.

  ≈

  It took Daniel three days of travel to get to the capital of the Pando Department, Cobija, then another two days to arrive at the jungle town of Las Piedras. It was May 8 when Daniel found a café with internet access and sent his father his weekly update. He told him he was headed into an isolated area of the northern Bolivian jungle and that his father might not hear from him for a month. He didn’t tell his father about the images and coordinates Jordan Mae had sent him; he didn’t want to get his father’s hopes up. Nor did he want his father to know that his only child was venturing into an area where he could possibly encounter a ruthless and vicious tribe.

  Two days later, he found himself in another small jungle town, Campo Verde. For a small fee, the owner of a shop in town agreed to store the majority of Daniel’s research equipment until he returned.

  It would take two days by boat and four days on foot before Daniel found his way to the jaguar statue in the middle of the jungle. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he pulled it from the ground and held it. It must have weighed upward of ten pounds. If it were solid gold, which Daniel presumed it was, it would be worth over a quarter of a million dollars for the gold alone. He fastened the jaguar to the top of his pack and set out to find the jungle pyramid.

  Following the compass headings Lefbrevor had written in the text—“1.6 kilometers at sixty-two degrees”—it took Daniel three hours to find the pyramid. According to the book, the tribe was two days’ travel from there, roughly twenty-five miles away.

  But in which direction?

  Daniel decided to head north toward Brazil, then work his way back around. He’d purchased a rifle in Cobija, but hoped to avoid the tribe altogether. With a two-day radius of twenty-five miles, it was a search grid of nearly two thousand square miles. The odds of actually stumbling on the tribe was as microscopic as the organisms Daniel was searching for.

  His plan was to take as many soil samples in the area as possible. Though he had some rudimentary lab equipment stored with the shop owner in Campo Verde, it wouldn’t be until Daniel was back in the States that he could begin the detailed research necessary to see if the microorganisms in the samples had therapeutic properties to treat either cancer or autoimmune disease.

  It happened two days later. After a lengthy rain, Daniel was trudging down the side of a small hill, when he slipped and fell backward, smashing the left side of his torso into the exposed root of a large tree.

  Daniel rolled on the ground, certain he’d broken two ribs. A few hours later, he attempted to walk, but he couldn’t go far. It was too painful to breathe.

  Three days later, it was evident to Daniel that he’d injured more than just his ribs. Something internal was damaged. He was coughing up blood.

  It rained torrentially the next two days. Daniel tried to move to higher ground, but he couldn’t get far. He was swept away by a flash flood but somehow managed not to drown, pulling himself to safety. But his pack was gone, and with it his medicine, samples, food and water, GPS receiver, the golden jaguar—everything.

  By May 23 Daniel was certain he wouldn’t last another day. Lying down, he told his mom up above that he would see her soon.

  ≈

  When he opened his eyes, he was in a wooden hut. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the growth of his beard indicated it had been at least a week.

  Standing over him was a slender native with white hair and a few golden feathers sticking out.

  At first, Daniel assumed he’d been captured by the Nsé-Eja, but he soon learned otherwise, and that they had rescued him from certain death.

  Over the next few days, Daniel lived among the villagers and healed. They brought him food and tea.

  The villagers were friendly, and though most of them spoke only their native language, a few also spoke Spanish. They’d learned it from a Christian missionary long ago, so Daniel was able to communicate with them.

  To say the village’s history was momentous would be an understatement.

  Another few days passed, and Daniel finally felt he was healed enough to travel. He was elated when the villagers returned later that day with his pack. He was even more surprised that most of his possessions—his medicine, his samples, his GPS, even his passport—were accounted for. The only thing missing was the golden jaguar.

  Daniel found his prescription of Mireva, and only then did he realize he’d gone nearly ten days without taking the pills. Yet, aside from a bit of soreness in his ribs, his joints felt terrific. And not only that. For the first time in over three years, the red, scaly skin on his arms, legs, and scalp had completely healed.

  ≈

  After four days trekking back through the jungle and two days on the river, Daniel stumbled into the small village of Campo Verde on June 11. He recovered his research equipment from the small shop and drew a vial of his blood.

  One of the pieces of equipment Daniel had brought was a portable ELISA kit. An ELISA, or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, could be used to perform different immunological tests. Daniel could use the kit to run an ANA test to determine the prevalence of autoantibodies, the proteins that cause most autoimmune diseases.

  He added a droplet of his blood to the solution in one of the small vials. He then pulled out a separate dropper and added two drops of an antigen—a foreign substance that induces an immune response—then capped the vial.

  He shook it gently and waited.

  If his blood tested positive for autoantibodies, the pink solution would turn blue. The shade—from aqua to a midnight purple—would indicate the ANA concentration of the sample. The darker the color, the higher the concentration of autoantibodies in the sample.

  Daniel waited and waited, but the vial remained unchanged.

  Negative.

  Daniel couldn’t believe it.

  He raced back to the shop where his equipment had been stored and asked if the owner had an internet connection. Surprisingly enough, he did. For a small fee, the store owner allowed Daniel to log onto his computer.

  It had been thirty-three days since Daniel had last checked in with his father, and he was sure his dad was beginning to worry. He considered calling him, but his father would want to talk for hours, and Daniel was in a rush to get back to the village.

  Daniel sent a quick email recounting everything that had happened, emphasizing that he was perfectly okay. Then in all caps he wrote that he was 90 percent sure he’d been cured of his psoriatic arthritis, and that he might be close to finding a cure for all autoimmune diseases.

  He wrote that he was heading back to the village as soon as possible to start doing research and narrow down what had cured him. He probably wouldn’t be in touch for another three months.

  Daniel added that he loved him.

  ≈

  Back at the village six days later, Daniel asked one of the Spanish-speaking Indians to translate his request to the shaman. Daniel wanted to take blood samples from some of the villagers—all of them, if possible.

  The shaman, who was also the village elder, refused. They would only willingly give their blood as an offering to their gods.

  Over the next month, Daniel slowly wore the shaman down. He spent several hours with him and a Machinere Indian acting as translator, telling the shaman his people could hold the cure to a terrible group of diseases ravaging the entire world.

  The shaman knew about disease only too well. Finally, he relented.

  Many of the villagers were happy to give a few droplets of their blood. Others were frightened and refused. Of the 216 villagers, 176 gave blood.

  The results were, in a word, remarkable.

  Out of all the samples, seven had high concentrations, the vials turning a dark purple. Two had low concentrations, the vial turning a soft blue. For a total of nine positive tests, just over 5 percent of the sample size.

  This was moderately less than the 8 percent of the world population who had some sort of autoimmune disease. But more staggering was that roughly 15 percent of healthy people—people without autoimmune disease—will still have a positive ANA test. That’s because humans have antibodies in their blood for all kinds of reasons—from bacterial or fungal infections, to viruses, to simple genetic makeup—and these regular antibodies read as false positives.

  That only 5 percent of the ANA tests had come out positive meant that there was something unique to these villagers that was suppressing the immune response of even the healthiest individuals. Daniel believed the unknown factor was microbial, but it would take months, possibly years, and hordes of specialized equipment to determine what the single or multiple organisms were.

  It was near the middle of July.

  Maybe it was time for him to head back home.

  ≈

  Daniel decided to stay, at least another week.

  On July 20, two days before he was set to leave, he and several villagers were sitting around at night drinking tea, as was the custom. The tea wasn’t anything exotic, in fact, the sole ingredient was popular in teas all over the world.

  Ginger root.

  Daniel took a small sip of the peppery and slightly sweet tea, then glanced up. He noticed three natives surrounding him who weren’t drinking tea.

  It took Daniel a moment to make the correlation.

  Two of the three villagers not drinking tea were among the nine who had positive ANA tests. One was a Machinere Indian, and Daniel asked in Spanish why he wasn’t drinking the tea. He said he didn’t like the taste, and he never drank it. This was the same for the other villager as well.

  Daniel quickly jumped up and ran through the village, tracking down the other seven with positive ANA tests. It turned out that all nine villagers with positive ANA tests rarely, if ever, drank the ginger tea.

  Daniel was onto something.

  Early on, he’d discounted the tea as a vector because the water was boiled in a copper kettle for long periods over a fire, and 99 percent of microorganisms exposed to water above 149 degrees for five minutes will die.

  But there were species of bacteria that had extreme tolerances to heat. In fact, some were present in several probiotic teas your average person could buy at the grocery store. Most used a strain of bacteria called Bacillus coagulans. It had a high tolerance to heat as well as to high pH levels. It could survive both boiling water and stomach acid.

  In hindsight, he should have known. When Daniel talked with the shaman about any herbal remedies he may have given him when he was unconscious, the shaman mentioned the tea. They’d let it cool, then poured it down his throat.

  The tea was thought to have magic healing properties.

  But it might not be magic.

  It might be scientific.

  ≈

  Daniel convinced four of the nine villagers who had positive ANA tests to drink the tea for two weeks, then he tested their blood a second time for autoantibodies.

  All four tested negative.

  The tea was the vector.

  ≈

  There are over 1,300 different species of ginger and the root of the herbaceous perennial flower had long been known to have therapeutic and anti-inflammatory properties. Daniel couldn’t rule out that it was the ginger itself that was suppressing the villager’s autoimmune response. Still, he believed it was something microbial. Something living in the surrounding soil and growing on the ginger root.

  Under the compact microscope that Daniel had with him, he viewed a droplet of tea on a slide. There was a solitary bacteria that had survived the boiling heat.

  In a Petri dish, Daniel was able to culture the bacteria.

  He then convinced four of the remaining five villagers with positive ANA tests to ingest small amounts of the bacteria for two weeks.

  He retested their blood. All four had negative ANA tests. The test for the control, the one villager who didn’t ingest the bacteria, remained positive.

  It wasn’t the ginger.

  It was the bacteria.

  Daniel had proven his theory. He had isolated and identified a helper bacteria that suppressed the body’s autoimmune response.

  He had discovered the first “autobiotic.”

  53

  tribal village

  august 23, 3:23 p.m.

  days since abduction: 18

  Gina was standing on the narrow path next to Thomas, the two other men he’d come with, and Martin. They were across from Patrick, Bill, and Daniel. The four soldiers were seated on a fallen log just steps into the thick foliage. For the past ten minutes, all of them had listened silently as Daniel recounted his story.

  Though Gina had studied autoimmune diseases in med school and had seen several cases during her residency, it wasn’t until she worked as a primary care physician at a clinic in Seattle that she’d observed an exponential rise in the prevalence of these diseases. In her six-month tenure, she had encountered upward of a hundred patients who complained of fatigue, muscle aches, digestive issues, joint pain, recurring fever, swollen glands, and other mysterious symptoms.

  After performing a physical exam, Gina would recommend doing a full blood test panel and almost always she would include an ANA test. The laboratory ANA test was more complicated than Daniel’s portable ELISA kit, but for the most part, it worked along the same lines. If the ANA test came back positive, Gina would refer the patient to a rheumatologist—a doctor specializing in autoimmune conditions—who would perform further testing.

  Two years earlier, before the World Health Organization stopped funding Gina’s work with the Tibióno, a rheumatologist had spent three days there with her.

  The doctor, Hal Wentwoll, had administered ANA tests to thirty of the villagers.

  Only one came back positive.

  Similar to what Daniel said, Wentwoll theorized that the low incidence was due to a combination of factors, but mainly because the villagers had grown up in and around dirt, splashed in the many rivers, lived in close proximity to both domesticated and wild animals, were rarely treated with antibiotics, and received limited vaccines, if any. In their daily lives, the villagers had been inundated with microbes since birth. Their immune systems had never been coddled; they knew the difference between a foreign invader and a domestic citizen.

  According to Wentwoll, in the last several years, researchers had discovered that good intestinal bacteria regulated the innate immune system and confirmed that the presence of good bacteria could help inhibit the immune response. Scientists theorized that probiotics could potentially be used to treat or possibly even cure a wide range of systemic conditions.

  They just had to find the right bacteria.

  If what Daniel said was true, that he’d discovered a bacteria that suppressed the human immune response, then his discovery wasn’t just groundbreaking—it was revolutionary.

  Gina turned and glanced at Thomas. She knew he must be thinking about his sister. Gina had met Lacy during the same tumultuous period in South Africa that she’d met Thomas. She’d felt an instant kinship with Lacy, who remained stoic and even sarcastic in the face of death.

  Two months later, Gina had accompanied Thomas to Lacy’s wedding in France, and it was only then that Gina learned Lacy had multiple sclerosis.

  Though no one but Thomas was aware, Lacy had been suffering a flare-up during her nuptials. She hadn’t been able to take her medication for the three days she’d been held hostage on a cruise ship, and Lacy was in the midst of a months-long relapse.

  MS is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. The body attacks the myelin sheath (sleeves of fatty tissue that protect your nerve cells), causing disruption of the flow of information between the brain and the body. The symptoms of MS vary from person to person; for some it will be numbness in one of their extremities, for others it’s their coordination that suffers, for others it’s memory problems. For Lacy Prescott, most often it was her vision. When Thomas was walking Lacy down the aisle, she was seeing double.

  Back in Seattle, after Lacy’s wedding, Gina could see how much Lacy’s MS affected Thomas. When Lacy was in the midst of a flare, Thomas wasn’t the same, his mind preoccupied with his sister six thousand miles away. He described her disease as a constant splinter in his heel, and in a rare moment of vulnerability, Thomas confessed that the day Lacy was diagnosed with MS—her junior year of college—had been harder for him than the day he’d lost both his parents.

 

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