[Alex Murphy]

Actually, I think you're required to french-kiss the lizard within a half-hour of each meal for it to be effective. If you don't stop eating out of revulsion (hence the weight-loss) your blood sugar will drop as it bites your lip and it's venom starts to flow into your bloodstream.

Seriously, how do researchers come up with this stuff? Was someone in the uber-secret Arizona lab staring, bored out of his/her skull, staring out of the window one day - spots a roaming gila monster, and decides "hey, I've got nothing better to do. I'll grab that lizard, let it drool into my mouth, and use my government grant money to pay for research into what it does to me?" Waddya wanna bet he was expecting to find another free psychotropic drug source, i.e. toad-licking?

[Jaxter]

"Actually, I think you're required to french-kiss the lizard..."

I think you mean freedom-kiss.

Anyway, I think Dave Barry would agree that Lizard Spit would be a great name for a rock band.

[dmcnash]

Seriously, how do researchers come up with this stuff? ... use my government grant money to pay for research into what it does to me?"

You are almost there! There is some research dude that has a passion for Gila Monsters. There is a pile of grant money at NIH or the Diabeties Foundation for research into diabeties. The research dude just combines the two in his grant application and voila, a funded research project.

I would bet you could find research on Gila Monster saliva and AIDS and heart disease too, by the same dude.