A pool of aquatic researchers convened recently at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) in Salisbury Cove, Maine, to figure out how to change that. These investigators shared research findings, successes, failures and insights, and participated in workshops to devise strategies on how to raise their collective profile and put the water world on the research map.
"We've been dealing with a very human-mouse centered culture of science," says MDIBL director John N. Forrest Jr., professor of internal medicine at Yale University. "Yet the sea is a place of enormous diversity, and it holds the potential for discovery of all kinds of things--and this is the beginning of our pitch."
During approximately 150 years of cell biology history, only a handful of marine cell lines have been established, and the government has earnestly funded only one transgenic species of fish. It's ironic, considering that long-time director of the National ...
