Alchemy was the ancient art that tried to transform base metals into gold and create a medicine to cure any illness. The ancient chemists failed, but half a billion years before them nature succeeded. Venom and poison are cocktails of death. The creatures that carry the deadly toxins are often the creatures of our nightmares. Yet venom is one of nature’s great masterpieces, and those organisms that combine individually innocuous chemicals into fatal mixtures are indeed nature’s deadly alchemists.
