I. Introduction
BRUCE ROBISON: It's my pleasure and your good fortune to be bringing
George Somero up here to speak to you now about the adaptations of animals
that live in the deep sea. George's title covers it all in the sense of
adaptation to the deep sea, life in the cold, dark, high pressure world.
George originated in Minnesota. Fortunately for us, when he decided to leave
he turned west instead of east and came to Stanford University where he
did his Ph.D. research. After that he moved to the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography where he spent many years as a researcher investigating the
adaptations of deep sea animals and of animals that inhabit a variety of
harsh environments. In many respects George is preeminent in that field
of determining the ways, the mechanisms, by which animals are allowed to
enter and indeed to thrive in habitats that to us appear to be virtually
uninhabitable.
After doing more at Scripps than many people could accomplish in three careers,
George moved to Oregon State for a few years, got his taste of fog, and,
lucky for us, he was able to complete the circle and come back to Stanford
and to assume the David and Lucile Packard Professor's Chair in Marine Science
at the Hopkins Marine Station where he is now in residence. George has no
peer in his understanding of these processes. We're all very fortunate to
be able to learn from him today about the very special ways that animals
adapt to these habitats. George...
GEORGE SOMERO: Thank you very much, Bruce. What I would like to do is offer
you some footnotes on the first two talks and explain how all these beautiful
animals go about their business and succeed in living in the deep sea. We've
been fortunate over the years to have had many good collaborators and we're
certainly enjoying the fact that we're now near the people at MBARI who
have, as you've seen, state of the art technology for observing and collecting
organisms. What I would like to do is share with you some of the insights
that we've gained from looking at deep sea organisms. To a certain extent,
as mentioned earlier, I'm going to try to cover a bit of the territory that
my good friend Jim Childress was unable to cover here today because he basically
is underwater like a deep sea organism, down in Santa Barbara with a flooded
airport.
Bruce stole a little bit of my thunder by quoting from an article by Dr. Cindy
Van Dover who is both a Ph.D. in oceanography and a former pilot on the
Alvin. Cindy wrote an article that came out in Discover magazine
a few years ago with this quote, "Even today we know more about the
moon's behind than the ocean's bottom." This quote emphasizes two of
the points that Bruce made in his talk, namely, that the deep sea is the
major fraction of the biosphere, probably 80% of the biosphere by volume,
and it is populated by extraordinarily interesting organisms about which
we know relatively little.
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