MOLECULAR biologist Christopher Kemp had never heard of ambergris until one day, when he was living in New Zealand, a huge mound of what looked like “dirty week-old snow” washed ashore near Wellington. Crowds of people fell into a frenzy, hacking away at it with anything they had to hand.
The excitement, Kemp soon learned, was because the substance was believed to be a massive boulder of ambergris. This elusive compound, partly made from undigested squid beaks, originates in the guts of just 1 per cent of sperm whales. Ambergris has been used for centuries in perfumes, health remedies and…
