The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health is a a new center
funded jointly by the National Institute of Health
and also by the National Science Foundation. The impact
of the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health is many fold
and we see impact as far as increasing public awareness
for marine contaminants and how they may
impact human life and balls many investigators
here locally in San Diego primarily at the University of California San Diego.
Many of these investigators will begin to look at sort of
how marine chemicals better in the
environment, how they accumulate are produced
and get to the the food chain, so this requires many
investigators in the UC system who are chemist,
biologist, public health, and also medical doctors
begin to sort of look at this problem for many different points of view
to begin to understand the
consequences of abuse chemicals in environment and how they impact
us. So my main focus at the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health is to
try to understand
the range of compounds that we
find in different organisms in the marine environment,
primarily at the top of the food chain so fish that foraged right at the top
like tuna and swordfish.
also we look at marine mammals because marine mammals
accumulate these compounds over their entire lifetime
so it's a lot easier to actually detect them so that's the first place we look.
So we're looking at both the range of compounds that we find in these
organisms and then trying to partition them
into compounds that we know are made by humans
and compounds that we think are natural but have
potentially have similary
toxic impact as the natural compound.
Our hypothesis is that the natural compounds are being made by
organisms at very low in the food chain so
single cell organisms that either live in coastal environments or in the open
ocean
and as organisms consume these they
sort of pass the compound along they're not very easily
metabolized and used up by the organism so it kind of gets stored
and when one organism gets eaten by the the organism in the next level up the food
chain
it gets passed on essentially and so that's why organisms right at the top
tend to concentrate these compounds and so because we
actually consume, we don't consume dolphins, but we consume tuna and swordfish that
sit at the top
also feed at the same sort of trophic level as the Dolphins
there's the possibility that humans will consume
these fish and then accumulate those compounds as well in breast milk in
particular
is of concern because like the blubber in the Dolphins these compounds will
concentrate
in breast milk because they have that kind of chemistry
and so that's one direct way where you can eat seafood so one of the things
what SDSU
our partner at SDSU will do is actually survey all these women
who are pregnant and get a sense of what their
food consumption is like and then we'll pair that with the
breast milk samples that we analyze for these particular compounds. So UC San Diego is a
fantastic place to study this problem. We are the only university
in the United States that has a major oceanographic institution
adjacent to a school of pharmacy as was to
a school of medicine. And myself being a professor
both at Scripps as well as the Pharmacy school can help bridge that connections
between discoveries
that are here that are more oceanographic and basic science
with more application and human health in the Sc.hool of Pharmacy.