Answer: Scorpion Venom

In our day to day lives there are all sorts of expensive liquids we buy: fine wines, printer ink, and the like all have a cost per gallon well above a plain old jug of water. Not many of us are out shopping for a gallon of scorpion venom and it’s a good thing too; scorpion venom is so labor intensive to gather and produced in such small quantities that a gallon jug of the stuff would set you back a staggering 39 million dollars.

Fortunately for the researchers who need scorpion venom for their labs, the quantities used aren’t warehouse-store bulk size and they can get what they need by purchasing tiny volumes for a few thousand dollars at a time.

If you’re curious where all that high-priced scorpion venom comes from, you’ll find the majority of it originates in Pakistan, where a bustling quasi-legal scorpion trade supplies thousands upon thousands of scorpions to medical research facilities and labs around the world where the scorpions are milked by professionals and their venom either used in-house or sold in tiny (but lucrative) amounts to other labs.