Comparative physiology involves learning about how living organisms and their bodily parts function by comparing their similarities and differences. In this way, studying the physiological systems of different marine organisms – comparing their genes, enzymes, transporters, how their organs function, and how they behave, can uncover information that applies to humans, laying the groundwork for future advancements, even if understanding human health was not the original intention. The pursuit of basic or fundamental knowledge in this way is extremely important, because you don’t know what you don’t know…until you know it.
In addition to contributing to the fundamental pursuit of knowledge, marine organisms can sometimes make the best animal model to further the understanding of human health and disease processes because they are more like humans than a laboratory mouse or rat. Take stress physiology as an example. If you compare a typical white laboratory rat, a marine fish, and a human, the marine fish is more similar to the human because both use cortisol as their major stress hormone, unlike the white laboratory rat that uses corticosterone. Alternatively, sometimes understanding marine organisms can benefit human health because they are different – a marine animal may be more tolerant to a contaminant or a physiological state than a human or they may excrete a unique chemical to fight a disease or a pathogen.
Many winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, which is given to a scientist for making a paradigm-shifting discovery that has benefited humankind, have used marine animals to make their groundbreaking discoveries. For example, Ilya Mechnikov won the Nobel Prize for his work on phagocytosis, an important process in the immune response, using starfish larvae because they were transparent, and you could see the phagocytosis taking place. Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize for determining how a signal was conducted through nerve cells using squid because squid nerve cells were so much larger than mammalian nerve cells, allowing for measurements that could not have been done otherwise.
More recently, Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for his work on how cells change during learning and short-term memory formation using the sea hare, Aplysia californica. He used the Aplysia because of its very simple nervous system – only tens of thousands of cells compared to more than a trillion in ours. Aplysia also have very large, distinct nerve cells that are well-described, and very simple behaviors. The ability to identify nerve cells enabled Kandel to connect a particular nerve cell to a particular behavior, which is a very powerful approach.
One of the goals of the Glassell Family Center for Marine Biomedicine is to not only continue with the important fundamental science that we pursue on marine organisms, but, given our expertise in marine organisms, reveal which marine animal might hold the answers to our human health and disease questions.
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