Innovation at Sea

Today on Idea Evolution we’re talking about Medicine.

Now, I know what you could be thinking. This series is all about the ocean, what has medicine got to do with the ocean? Well, I’m going to answer that question with a question of my own….

Do you know what marine bio-prospecting is?

It’s a pretty big mouthful to say I have to admit. And you’re going to hear it used a lot in this episode.

Bioprospecting is a process where scientists search for interesting genes, molecules, and organisms in nature that could be useful in fighting human diseases. Basically, searching the ocean for medicine.

Marine bioprospecting is the term used for bioprospecting that is done in the ocean.

Searching nature, or bio-prospecting, is by no means a new idea.

People have a long history of using natural resources and turning them into medicines. Records exist from 5,000 years ago showing that the ancient Sumatrans used specific herbs to treat illnesses.

The Australia Aboriginal people have had a very close relationship with finding medicine from the nature around them. They’ve been using Tea Tree oil, wichity grubs and so many more, finding treatments for ailments such as pain, inflammation and burns.

Other ancient civilisations such as China, Greece, Egypt and Rome also had well documented medical uses for their natural resources and indigenous cultures have long held special knowledge of the powerful effect of certain plant and animal parts when treating injuries and illnesses.

It’s not really surprising that there’s so much history of land bioprospecting for medicine.. I mean, as humans, our natural location on this planet is on the land. For a millennia the oceans have mostly remained a mystery.

But with the advancements in scuba equipment and submarines, humans have slowly peeled back the mysterious hidden by the ocean.

Now, the oceans cover over 71% of the planet’s surface and it is estimated that about 80% of all plant and animal life on earth is found under the surface of our oceans. And scientists estimate that we have only identified 9% of all ocean species.

So it makes a lot of sense that, as our ability to explore the oceans increases, people actively work to find new sources that could help to create new medical treatments.

I wonder…

What amazing medicine could be discovered in the ocean? Could a cure for cancer be lurking in its depths?

Although access to land-based plants and animals to make medicine was easier than water-based ones, there’s evidence from China in 2,953 B.C. there was a tax on the profits that came from fish-derived medicine.

In 400 BC Hippocrates recommended the use of sea sponges to dress soldiers’ wounds and the personal doctor of Emperor Claudius, recommended the zaps from electric fish to cure headaches.

But with every good there is a bad.

Around 30AD Agrippina the Younger was the first unofficial Empress of Rome. She is believed to have successfully paved the way for her son, Nero, to take the throne by poisoning relatives with a poison extracted from a shell-less mollusk known as the sea hare. And native warriors in Maui, an island of Hawaii, would dip their spears in a deadly coral located in tidal-pools. A single nick from their blade and their enemies would die.

So all up, we know that marine bioprospecting has been around for a very, very long time.

Let’s take a time machine forward a few thousand years. Pretty much to the end of World war 2 in the mid 20th Century. Access to reliable scuba diving equipment meant that scientists were able to start exploring the oceans in their search for new medical treatments. Several discoveries were made in the decade that followed which still have an impact now.

In 1945, a young organic chemist named Werner Bergmann collected a sponge in the waters off of Florida. This particular type of sponge had never been studied by scientists before. Through experimentation, Dr. Bergmann discovered that these sponges possessed a new compound unknown to science.. He discovered particular features of one sea sponge that helped scientists to create two completely new medicines. One was used to treat a virus called herpes and the other was able to be used to treat two different types of cancer. That’s a pretty incredible thing to have discovered from a sponge don’t you think?

Sponges are of particular interest to medical researchers. In fact, every year, around 5,300 different natural products and new compounds are isolated from marine sponges alone. The compounds help to create all sorts of medicines, including antiviral, antimalarial, antitumor and many more other anti’s.

Another pioneer of marine bioprospecting was Paul Scheuer “the father of marine natural products.” He was an organic chemist and a refugee from Nazi Germany. He hadn’t been allowed to attend university in Germany because of his religion, but he managed to make his way to America where he obtained his university degree in chemistry. He began work at the University of Hawaii in 1950. And he wondered…. How was it possible that marine creatures with no obvious defense mechanisms such as teeth, claws, flippers could affect escape from predators. And they didn’t just survive, they thrived.

Dr Scheuer and others wondered… maybe the creatures had invisible chemical defenses? Maybe, just maybe, those chemicals could prove be useful to people? So they began investigation by grinding up samples and dissolving the materials, then testing the resulting extracts to see whether they could do things like kill bacteria or attack cancer cells. The researchers had some success with their discoveries, and medicines have evolved.

Another great example of something that has evolved over time started in the 1950s. Marine Biological Lab scientist Frederick Bang discovered that the horseshoe crab could protect itself from swarms of marine bacteria because its blood clotted in response. 20 years later scientists realized that this response could be really useful when testing vaccines for unwanted bacteria. This test is still used 40 years later when testing vaccines.

You may have noticed that we’ve mentioned all the great potential that marine bioprospecting can bring into the world of medicine.

You might think that with such promising results, lots of scientists would have focused their attention on making discoveries in the sea from then on, but that hasn’t really happened.

I wonder… why. Why haven’t scientists discovered more from our oceans after all these years.

There were lots of reasons for this.

One was that scuba diving gear was not easily obtainable for deep ocean exploration until the last few decades. This is such a new field of research.

It also takes a number of years of tests and trials before a medicine can be accepted into circulation.

The lab equipment that was used to carefully examine samples of plants and animals from the land were not very well suited to inspecting samples from the ocean. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the machines used in labs became more finely tuned and could return consistent and meaningful results with many marine samples. Even then, scientists often needed large amounts of sample material that could be hard to collect or which would mean placing certain species of plants and animals at further risk, if they were already under threat.

Dr Kirsten Benkendorff of Southern Cross University has made a career out of marine bioprospecting. She told Idea Evolution that, in the past 10 years there have been significant improvements in lab technology which have allowed scientists like herself to study marine samples in much smaller quantities which has made sample collection and analysis easier and therefore more attractive to pharmaceutical companies that fund bioprospecting research.

This is exciting because the world’s oceans contain somewhere between 500,000 and 10 million marine species and a majority of those haven’t ever been analysed.

As with any human interaction with nature, we need to be very careful about what and how much we take from our oceans. In the 1990s when marine bioprospecting became an exciting and viable possibility, large samples were required for analysis and some delicate ecosystems and plant and animal populations were placed at risk.

In 1982 the United Nations made the Law of the Sea to help manage the activities in oceans and seas to make sure that they are carried out sustainably. There is a whole part of this convention that is entirely devoted to the subject of marine scientific research because it is so important both to human life but also to the future of the ocean.

But after 9 years, the United Nations and scientists felt that the member countries weren’t managing marine research in a sustainable way so in 1991, they developed a guide to help with better implementation. The guide is constantly reviewed and updated to ensure that by finding new ways to help humans with medicines and other discoveries we don’t accidentally damage parts of the ocean beyond repair.

Now might be a good time for you to press pause and have a think about what rules you would put in place to make sure that scientific discoveries don’t seriously damage the ocean.

What did you come up with?

Some of the things we thought about were:

• Don’t take samples from plants or animals that are endangered.
• Take the smallest possible samples needed to conduct effective studies.

• Don’t take all of your samples from one colony or area.
• Collaborate with other scientists so that samples can be used for multiple purposes.

One final issue… we’re going to circle back to the Australian Aboriginals and other indigenous peoples. It’s recently received a lot of attention for not the right reasons … scientists have often spoken with and gathered the knowledge of traditional land owners when conducting their research. Sometimes the research conducted by scientists has relied heavily on the information from those indigenous people and then the discoveries have been patented so that companies can profit from the development of different products. Often the indigenous people are not paid for the information that they have provided and there is also a question about whether companies should really be able to place patents on knowledge that has been held within the indigenous communities for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. Another question is whether the companies who take the patents have any right at all to prevent the traditional owners from using their own knowledge, which is what a patent effectively does.

What do you think? Should companies be allowed to use traditional knowledge to make money without giving anything back to those who passed that knowledge on? Should they be allowed to stop the traditional owners from using their own knowledge that is sometimes centuries old?

As the scientists and CEOs of the future we know that you will find the right balances and look for ethical ways to resolve the conflicts that come from exploring nature to improve the lives of others.