From The Scripps Institution of Oceanography
And
The University of California-San Diego
4.16.24
Story by:
Lauren Fimbres Wood
lmwood@ucsd.edu
Monica May
m3may@ucsd.edu
Media contact:
Lauren Fimbres Wood
lmwood@ucsd.edu
Center will focus on advancing science of marine contaminants, nutrients and seafood security in a changing climate.
Sea urchins from the Hamdoun Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health will be a multidisciplinary program to advance understanding of marine contaminants and nutrients. Credit: Erik Jepsen.
The University of California San Diego was awarded $7.35 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a multidisciplinary program to advance understanding of marine contaminants and nutrients in a changing climate, and to ensure that safe and healthy seafood is available and accessible to all people.
The funding, to be awarded over five years, will enable the re-establishment of the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health as one of four new nationwide centers focused on understanding how ocean-related exposures affect people’s health.
The center brings together experts from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the School of Biological Sciences, as well as NOAA’s California Sea Grant and the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Its multidisciplinary research team will explore the sources, fates and potential toxicity of human-made and natural chemicals in the ocean, and further study their environmental distribution and movement through the marine food web.
Center director Bradley Moore, right, and former student Kate Bauman streak Salinispora cultures. The Moore Lab focuses on chemically exploring and genetically exploiting marine natural products, primarily as drug leads and environmental toxins. Credit: Erik Jepsen
“The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health will bring together a range of scientific disciplines to advance of our understanding of seafood security to ensure we maintain our access to safe and healthy seafood,” said Bradley Moore, professor of marine chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, who will serve as center director. “Scientific discoveries are the first of many steps to ensuring seafood safety, and to help with the process, the center will also have a focus on community engagement to work with fishers, chefs, non-profits, and the public at large to bridge scientific discovery with the community.”
The team will look at health benefits from nutrients like selenium and omega-3 fatty acids, and examine toxic heavy metals like methylmercury and organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and how concentrations may be impacted in a changing climate. PCBs are industrial chemicals banned in the U.S. in 1979, and PBDEs are a class of fire retardant chemicals that can be both human made and occur naturally in the ocean.
“The ocean is absorbing more than 90% of excess heat caused by human activity, which is causing habitat migration and compression, low oxygen zones, and biodiversity loss,” said Margaret Leinen, vice chancellor for marine sciences at UC San Diego and director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s important to understand how these changes may impact seafood security, given that three billion people consume seafood globally each year. UC San Diego is uniquely positioned to bring together leaders across oceanography, biomedical and human health sciences, and community engagement experts to bridge the science to society.”
Anela Choy examines a lancetfish from the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection alongside the stomach contents of a lancetfish collected in collaboration with local fishers. Lancetfish are a deepwater fish whose voracious eating habits can give scientists insights into the marine food web. Credit: Jeff Hester
The center will focus on three primary research endeavors and include a large community engagement program:
Climate change impacts on the human intake of seafood micronutrients and contaminants
Led by Scripps Oceanography marine biogeochemist Amina Schartup and biological oceanographer Anela Choy, this project aims to understand how nutrients and contaminants like mercury and other chemicals are bioaccumulating in the marine food web. Schartup and Choy will also develop models to simulate the cycling of methylmercury and PCBs, and potential human exposure, under different climate change scenarios.
In 2019, Schartup led novel research that found warming oceans could lead to an increase in methylmercury in popular seafood, including cod, Atlantic bluefin tuna and swordfish. Her findings attributed the increases to corresponding changes to food web dynamics.
“Habitat change such as fish leaving or fish joining an ecosystem means a new food source has entered the ecosystem of a region,” said Schartup. “We’ll be looking at if those ocean changes are potentially going to impact contaminants or micronutrient levels in these animals.”
Amina Schartup is a marine biogeochemist who has led novel research that found warming oceans could lead to an increase in methylmercury in popular seafood. Credit: Kenan Chan.
Choy studies the intricacies of the marine food web — who is eating whom — and impacts of environmental change on open-sea ecosystems. She has also studied what happens when microplastics enter deep sea food webs. This project will examine organisms lower on the food web and from deeper waters such as open ocean fishes, squids and crustaceans in Southern California waters.
Choy’s previous work demonstrated that methylmercury sources vary with depth, which has implications for how the heavy metal enters and moves through the marine food web.
By analyzing fish specimens in the lab to measure levels of methylmercury in their tissue and identifying sources of that methylmercury, the researchers can feed this information into climate models to predict how it may affect contaminants and nutrients over time.
“The vast majority of contaminant work focuses on familiar species at the very top of the food web,” said Choy. “But, how those contaminants between organisms require more study. We want to understand the food web pathways that dictate methylmercury levels in animals that may end up on our dinner plates.”
The marine microbiome as a source for the synthesis, transformation, and distribution of seafood contaminants
The second research area will analyze the marine microbiome to see how PBDEs, including ones produced naturally by sea sponges, are made and how they circulate within fish bodies and the larger marine ecosystem. According to Moore, only one atom differentiates natural PBDEs from sea sponges and the human-made chemicals used in making fire retardants. This project aims to understand why organisms make these chemicals and how the PBDEs can degrade both the naturally occurring and human made toxins.
Some of the genetic analysis and sample processing for this effort will take place at the Illumina Labs on campus, which house equipment that allow scientists to screen thousands of cells a day, observe protein evolutions, analyze DNA isolation for microbiome studies, and more.
This research effort will be led by Moore and Eric Allen, a professor of marine biology and molecular biology with a joint appointment between Scripps and the School of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego.
Amro Hamdoun will serve as associate director of the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health. The Hamdoun Lab uses sea urchins as model organisms for studying gene activity during development. Credit: Erik Jepsen
Mechanisms of bioaccumulation and developmental toxicity of seafood pollutants
The third research program will be co-led by Scripps marine biologist Amro Hamdoun and Geoffrey Chang, professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego, who collaborate to examine how chemicals get into cells. They are zooming in at a molecular level to understand how marine pollutants are transported into organisms, how pollutants further accumulate in the organism and how these pollutants are taken up by the human body.
The Chang lab is pictured in the fermentation room where the transporter proteins from polluted and healthy fish, sea urchins and human cells will be produced in yeast. Their research could reveal how pollutants accumulate in these organisms. Credit: Erik Jepsen
“There are some pollutants and chemicals that end up in our bodies and some that don’t accumulate,” said Hamdoun, who will also serve as associate director of the center. “With this research, we hope to understand the biology in the ocean that underlies whether a chemical can accumulate in the body.”
Hamdoun’s lab works with sea urchins, which like fruit flies have been an organism used in biomedical research for more than a century to understand cell and developmental biology. This program will allow the lab to further examine how pollutants interact during early life stages of embryo development in sea urchins. As model organisms, urchins can aid in our understanding of the health impacts stemming from early-life chemical exposures in humans.
Chang, an expert on protein structure, will closely examine transporter proteins from both polluted and healthy fish, sea urchins and human cells to uncover the molecular machinery that pollutants leverage to gain access to these organisms. Understanding how organisms survive or adapt to pollutants at a cellular level could reveal new ways humans can protect ourselves from seafood contaminants.
Community Engagement
The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health will also engage with the public to build capacity for public health risk prevention while highlighting the health benefits of consuming fish.
Theresa Talley (second from left) meets with a commercial fisherman (left) as part of a commercial fishing workforce development program along with Sea Grant colleagues. Talley and Sarah Mesnick (not pictured) partner with seafood producers, other members of the food system, other scientists, agencies, non-profits and the public to build relationships, and co-develop the data, information, resources and tools needed to ensure that we conserve and sustainably prosper from our coastal and marine environments. Credit: Fred Greaves
Theresa Talley, a coastal specialist with California Sea Grant and Scripps, and Sarah Mesnick, an ecologist at NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center and an adjunct faculty member at Scripps, will serve as community engagement leads.
Community engagement activities will integrate the research from this center with other current science to provide resources for the public and other stakeholders. This effort helps to ensure that the benefits of seafood consumption outweigh any risks. Community engagement activities could include web-based resources, seafood education events with chefs at the demonstration kitchen at the Marine Conservation and Technology Facility at Scripps, and partnerships with fishing communities in the San Diego region. Through these collaborations, they aim to improve understanding of local seafood and co-create accurate and effective information resources.
“A lack of clear links between many contaminants and human health often leaves people confused and uncertain of what to look for or eat, and reacting to the latest news cycle,” said Mesnick. “Our goal is to build and foster lasting partnerships with communities to better understand needs and barriers to accessing and using information about seafood sustainability and safety.”
“This Center’s discoveries will improve our understanding of mechanisms for how contaminants and micronutrients move, accumulate, and affect marine organisms and ocean food webs,” added Talley, who recently published a paper examining the contamination risks and social vulnerability associated with recreational shellfish harvest in San Diego Bay. “While many additional steps will be needed to understand how these findings apply to seafood safety and human health, these discoveries will contribute to a larger conversation about the complexities of contaminant dynamics, including how risks may vary with species, interactions with other compounds like nutrients, and changing climatic conditions.”
This NIH and NSF grant marks the re-forming of the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health, which had been supported from 2013-2018. The center was originally launched to examine emerging contaminants found naturally in common seafoods, as well as man-made chemicals that accumulate in human breast milk. The revived center will expand human health research at Scripps, which is also home to its Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, which emphasizes marine drug discovery, the ocean microbiome, molecular epidemiology, marine cell biology and development, and the physiology of marine mammals.
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A department of The University of California-San Diego, The Scripps Institution of Oceanography is one of the oldest, largest, and most important centers for ocean, earth and atmospheric science research, education, and public service in the world.
Research at Scripps encompasses physical, chemical, biological, geological, and geophysical studies of the oceans, Earth, and planets. Scripps undergraduate and graduate programs provide transformative educational and research opportunities in ocean, earth, and atmospheric sciences, as well as degrees in climate science and policy and marine biodiversity and conservation.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography was founded in 1903 as the Marine Biological Association of San Diego, an independent biological research laboratory. It was proposed and incorporated by a committee of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, led by local activist and amateur malacologist Fred Baker, together with two colleagues. He recruited University of California Zoology professor William Emerson Ritter to head up the proposed marine biology institution, and obtained financial support from local philanthropists E. W. Scripps and his sister Ellen Browning Scripps. They fully funded the institution for its first decade. It began institutional life in the boathouse of the Hotel del Coronado located on San Diego Bay. It re-located in 1905 to the La Jolla area on the head above La Jolla Cove, and finally in 1907 to its present location.
In 1912 Scripps became incorporated into The University of California and was renamed the “Scripps Institution for Biological Research.” Since 1916, measurements have been taken daily at its pier. The name was changed to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in October 1925. During the 1960s, led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography director Roger Revelle, it formed the nucleus for the creation of The University of California-San Diego on a bluff overlooking Scripps Institution.
The Old Scripps Building, designed by Irving Gill, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1982. Architect Barton Myers designed the current Scripps Building for the Institution of Oceanography in 1998.
Research programs
The institution’s research programs encompass biological, physical, chemical, geological, and geophysical studies of the oceans and land. Scripps also studies the interaction of the oceans with both the atmospheric climate and environmental concerns on terra firma. Related to this research, Scripps offers undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The institution operates a fleet of four oceanographic research vessels.
The Integrated Research Themes encompassing the work done by Scripps researchers are Biodiversity and Conservation, California Environment, Earth and Planetary Chemistry, Earth Through Space and Time, Energy and the Environment, Environment and Human Health, Global Change, Global Environmental Monitoring, Hazards, Ice and Climate, Instruments and Innovation, Interfaces, Marine Life, Modeling Theory and Computing, Sound and Light and the Sea, and Waves and Circulation.
Organizational structure
Scripps Oceanography is divided into three research sections, each with its own subdivisions:
• Biology
o Center for Marine Biotechnology & Biomedicine (CMBB).
o Integrative Oceanography Division (IOD) Archived 2015-11-29 at the Wayback Machine.
o Marine Biology Research Division (MBRD).
• Earth
o Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP).
o Geosciences Research Division (GRD).
• Oceans & Atmosphere
o Climate, Atmospheric Science & Physical Oceanography (CASPO).
o Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) Archived 2013-10-04 at the Wayback Machine.
The University of California-San Diego is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The University of California-San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California, and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. The University of California-San Diego occupies 2,178 acres (881 ha) near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately 1,152 acres (466 ha). The University of California-San Diego is ranked among the best universities in the world by major college and university rankings.
The University of California-San Diego consists of twelve undergraduate, graduate and professional schools as well as seven undergraduate residential colleges. It received over 140,000 applications for undergraduate admissions in Fall 2021, making it the second most applied-to university in the United States. The University of California-San Diego San Diego Health, the region’s only academic health system, provides patient care, conducts medical research and educates future health care professionals at The University of California-San Diego Medical Center, Hillcrest, Jacobs Medical Center, Moores Cancer Center, Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, Shiley Eye Institute, Institute for Genomic Medicine, Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion and various express care and urgent care clinics throughout San Diego.
The University of California-San Diego operates 19 organized research units as well as eight School of Medicine research units, six research centers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and two multi-campus initiatives. The University of California-San Diego is also closely affiliated with several regional research centers, such as The Salk Institute, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, and The Scripps Research Institute. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
The University of California-San Diego is considered one of the country’s “Public Ivies”. The University of California-San Diego faculty, researchers, and alumni have won Nobel Prizes as well as Fields Medals, National Medals of Science, MacArthur Fellowships, and Pulitzer Prizes. Additionally, of the current faculty, a number have been elected to The National Academy of Engineering, The National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
History
When the Regents of the University of California originally authorized The University of California-San Diego campus in 1956, it was planned to be a graduate and research institution, providing instruction in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Local citizens supported the idea, voting the same year to transfer to the university 59 acres (24 ha) of mesa land on the coast near the preexisting Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Regents requested an additional gift of 550 acres (220 ha) of undeveloped mesa land northeast of Scripps, as well as 500 acres (200 ha) on the former site of Camp Matthews from the federal government, but Roger Revelle, then director of Scripps Institution and main advocate for establishing the new campus, jeopardized the site selection by exposing the La Jolla community’s exclusive real estate business practices, which were antagonistic to minority racial and religious groups. This outraged local conservatives, as well as Regent Edwin W. Pauley.
University of California President Clark Kerr satisfied San Diego city donors by changing the proposed name from University of California, La Jolla, to University of California-San Diego. The city voted in agreement to its part in 1958, and the University of California approved construction of the new campus in 1960. Because of the clash with Pauley, Revelle was not made chancellor. Herbert York, first director of The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was designated instead. York planned the main campus according to the “Oxbridge” model, relying on many of Revelle’s ideas.
According to Kerr, “San Diego always asked for the best,” though this created much friction throughout the University of California system, including with Kerr himself, because The University of California-San Diego often seemed to be “asking for too much and too fast.” Kerr attributed The University of California-San Diego’s “special personality” to Scripps, which for over five decades had been the most isolated University of California unit in every sense: geographically, financially, and institutionally. It was a great shock to the Scripps community to learn that Scripps was now expected to become the nucleus of a new University of California campus and would now be the object of far more attention from both the university administration in Berkeley and the state government in Sacramento.
The University of California-San Diego was the first general campus of the University of California to be designed “from the top down” in terms of research emphasis. Local leaders disagreed on whether the new school should be a technical research institute or a more broadly based school that included undergraduates as well. John Jay Hopkins of General Dynamics Corporation pledged one million dollars for the former while the City Council offered free land for the latter. The original authorization for The University of California-San Diego campus given by the University of California Regents in 1956 approved a “graduate program in science and technology” that included undergraduate programs, a compromise that won both the support of General Dynamics and the city voters’ approval.
Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a physicist from the University of Chicago, and Hans Suess, who had published the first paper on the greenhouse effect with Revelle in the previous year, were early recruits to the faculty in 1958. Maria Goeppert-Mayer, later the second female Nobel laureate in physics, was appointed professor of physics in 1960. The graduate division of the school opened in 1960 with 20 faculty in residence, with instruction offered in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, and earth science. Before the main campus completed construction, classes were held in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
By 1963, new facilities on the mesa had been finished for the School of Science and Engineering, and new buildings were under construction for Social Sciences and Humanities. Ten additional faculty in those disciplines were hired, and the whole site was designated the First College, later renamed after Roger Revelle, of the new campus. York resigned as chancellor that year and was replaced by John Semple Galbraith. The undergraduate program accepted its first class of 181 freshman at Revelle College in 1964. Second College was founded in 1964, on the land deeded by the federal government, and named after environmentalist John Muir two years later. The University of California-San Diego School of Medicine also accepted its first students in 1966.
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse joined the faculty in 1965. A champion of the New Left, he reportedly was the first protester to occupy the administration building in a demonstration organized by his student, political activist Angela Davis. The American Legion offered to buy out the remainder of Marcuse’s contract for $20,000; the Regents censured Chancellor William J. McGill for defending Marcuse on the basis of academic freedom, but further action was averted after local leaders expressed support for Marcuse. Further student unrest was felt at the university, as the United States increased its involvement in the Vietnam War during the mid-1960s, when a student raised a Viet Minh flag over the campus. Protests escalated as the war continued and were only exacerbated after the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. Over 200 students occupied Urey Hall, with one student setting himself on fire in protest of the war.
Early research activity and faculty quality, notably in the sciences, was integral to shaping the focus and culture of the university. Even before The University of California-San Diego had its own campus, faculty recruits had already made significant research breakthroughs, such as the Keeling Curve, a graph that plots rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and was the first significant evidence for global climate change; the Kohn–Sham equations, used to investigate particular atoms and molecules in quantum chemistry; and the Miller–Urey experiment, which gave birth to the field of prebiotic chemistry.
Engineering, particularly computer science, became an important part of the university’s academics as it matured. University researchers helped develop The University of California-San Diego Pascal, an early machine-independent programming language that later heavily influenced Java; the National Science Foundation Network, a precursor to the Internet; and the Network News Transfer Protocol during the late 1970s to 1980s. In economics, the methods for analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH), and with common trends (co-integration) were developed. The University of California-San Diego maintained its research intense character after its founding, racking up 25 Nobel Laureates affiliated within 50 years of history; a rate of five per decade.
Under Richard C. Atkinson’s leadership as chancellor from 1980 to 1995, The University of California-San Diego strengthened its ties with the city of San Diego by encouraging technology transfer with developing companies, transforming San Diego into a world leader in technology-based industries. He oversaw a rapid expansion of the School of Engineering, later renamed after Qualcomm founder Irwin M. Jacobs, with the construction of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and establishment of the computer science, electrical engineering, and bioengineering departments. Private donations increased from $15 million to nearly $50 million annually, faculty expanded by nearly 50%, and enrollment grew during his administration. By the end of his chancellorship, the quality of The University of California-San Diego graduate programs was ranked highly in the nation by The National Research Council.
The University of California-San Diego continued to undergo further expansion during the first decade of the new millennium with the establishment and construction of two new professional schools — the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Rady School of Management—and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a research institute run jointly with University of California-Irvine. The University of California-San Diego also reached two financial milestones during this time, becoming the first university in the western region to raise over $1 billion in its eight-year fundraising campaign in 2007 and also obtaining an additional $1 billion through research contracts and grants in a single fiscal year for the first time in 2010. Despite this, due to the California budget crisis, the university loaned $40 million against its own assets in 2009 to offset a significant reduction in state educational appropriations. The salary of Pradeep Khosla, who became chancellor in 2012, has been the subject of controversy amidst continued budget cuts and tuition increases.
On November 27, 2017, The University of California-San Diego announced it would leave its longtime athletic home of the California Collegiate Athletic Association, an NCAA Division II league, to begin a transition to Division I in 2020. At that time, it would join the Big West Conference, already home to four other UC campuses (Davis, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara). The transition period would run through the 2023–24 school year. The university prepared to transition to NCAA Division I competition on July 1, 2020.
Research
Applied Physics and Mathematics
The Nature Index lists The University of California-San Diego highly in the United States for research output by article count in 2019. The university operates several organized research units, including the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS), the Center for Drug Discovery Innovation, and the Institute for Neural Computation. The University of California-San Diego also maintains close ties to the nearby Scripps Research Institute and Salk Institute for Biological Studies. In 1977, The University of California-San Diego developed and released the University of California-San Diego Pascal programming language. The university was designated as one of the original national Alzheimer’s disease research centers in 1984 by the National Institute on Aging. In 2018, The University of California-San Diego received $10.5 million from The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration to establish the Center for Matters under Extreme Pressure (CMEC).
The University of California-San Diego founded The San Diego Supercomputer Center in 1985, which provides high performance computing for research in various scientific disciplines. In 2000, The University of California-San Diego partnered with The University of California-Irvine to create the Qualcomm Institute, which integrates research in photonics, nanotechnology, and wireless telecommunication to develop solutions to problems in energy, health, and the environment.
The University of California-San Diego also operates the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the largest centers of research in earth science in the world, which predates the university itself. Together, SDSC and SIO, along with funding partner universities California Institute of Technology, San Diego State University, and The University of California-Santa Barbara, manage the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network.
