The living present
Beyond Galactic Clay
The story does not end in the deep past. The same mineral family still touches living tissue — and this archive is the evidence.
If Cairns-Smith’s crystal genes and Ferris’s catalytic surfaces describe how clay may once have midwifed the transition from mineral to organic life, then the clinical observations of Line Brunet de Courssou reveal that the same mineral family has never fully relinquished its intimacy with living systems. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, working among communities in Côte d’Ivoire afflicted by Buruli ulcer — Mycobacterium ulcerans, a flesh-destroying infection that often resisted antibiotics and required radical surgery — she applied daily poultices of specific French green clays (illite-smectite rich, fine-grained, iron-bearing). The results, carefully photographed and later presented to the World Health Organization, were striking: rapid non-surgical debridement of necrotic tissue, progressive cleaning of the wounds, and eventual regeneration of soft, supple scar tissue with restoration of function. Cases that might otherwise have led to amputation healed under nothing more sophisticated than wet clay changed once a day.
What is most remarkable is not only that certain clays proved capable of suppressing a stubborn mycobacterial pathogen. It is that they did so while remaining astonishingly gentle to human tissue. Across decades of traditional use and modern observation, there is no consistent evidence that these clays harm intact skin, open wounds, or the body when ingested in moderate quantities. On the contrary: they are routinely applied directly to raw flesh, left in prolonged contact, and washed away without chemical burns, systemic toxicity, or delayed healing. The same surfaces that can create locally hostile conditions for certain microbes appear, in the presence of evolved human cells, to support rather than disrupt. Clay does not attack the host; it seems almost to recognize the difference.
This dual character — selective against particular pathogens, yet biocompatible with complex multicellular tissue — is one of the quietest and most profound properties of certain phyllosilicates. It is the living counterpart to the constructive chemistry Ferris demonstrated in the laboratory. Where montmorillonite can concentrate and polymerize the building blocks of RNA and peptides, related layered clays can still modulate the microbial world while leaving the architecture of human flesh unharmed. The mineral that may once have helped life begin continues, in the present, to interact with life in ways that are more often restorative than destructive.
Thus the galactic dimension expands. Clays form wherever water meets silicate rock — on Earth, on Mars, in the altered matrices of carbonaceous meteorites. The same physical and chemical features that once made them plausible cradles for informational polymers also make certain compositions compatible with the far more elaborate biology that later emerged. They are not merely historical scaffolds. They remain active participants, capable of both assembling the first molecular complexity and, ages later, of touching open human wounds without injury.
Galactic Clay is therefore not only a story about origins. It is a recognition that these layered crystals have remained, across evolutionary time, unusually friendly to the forms of life that eventually arose from them — or alongside them. In the clinic as in the laboratory, in the ancient past as in the living present, clay continues to speak a language that complex life can still hear.