Avis aux Bougiotes, Jijéliens, Dellysiens,....La médecine de la mer

Voir article complet : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/medicine.html

EcoCenter

Medicine from the Sea

From slime to sponges, scientists are plumbing the ocean's depths for new medications to treat cancer, pain and other ailments

• By Kevin Krajick
• Smithsonian.com, May 01, 2004

Fred Rainey was standing aboard the 100-foot-long spree about seven miles off the marshy Louisiana coast, rocking on four-foot swells. All around, oil-rig platforms rose like skyscrapers from the heaving waters of the Gulf of Mexico’s “oil patch,” a 64,000-square-mile stretch of shallow ocean where 4,000 steel platforms pump enough petroleum to account for one-third of the nation’s production. But Rainey was not prospecting for oil. Amicrobiologist at Louisiana State University, he was on the trail of an unlikely quarry: slime. In particular, he sought algae, sponges, sea urchins, soft corals and other squishy, mostly immobile organisms that have attached to the oil platforms’ undersides in tangled mats up to a foot and a half thick.


Scientists have extracted some 20,000 new biochemical substances from marine life over the past 30 years. But the hunt for drugs from the sea has only recently gone into hight gear (above, divers collect organisms from a Gulf of Mexico oil rig).