Transcription of Graham Shimmield for the show Deep Blue Sea, #117
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Lisa: If you spend time in Boothbay Harbor up in the midcoast of Maine, I hope that you will have also taken the time to go to the Bigelow Lab’s brand new facility right there on the coast and see what they’re doing. First, to see their architecture, it’s really a testament to what we’re doing with Maine and research and what we think is important in the state.
Today, to talk to us about the importance of biological and marine research and what they’re doing at the Bigelow Labs is the Executive Director, Dr. Graham Shimmield. Dr. Shimmield, I think people are going to notice right away that you don’t have the accent of a Mainer. You are from elsewhere.
Graham: That’s right. I’m from away.
Lisa: You’re from away.
Graham: I moved to Maine from Scotland in the United Kingdom. I spent most of my working life in Scotland although I was born and grew up in the West Indies, on the Island of Trinidad.
Lisa: How did you end up making that big leap across the pond?
Graham: I think that’s probably a testament to the powers of persuasion of the Bigelow Scientist and the board of trustees. There was an international search for new Executive Director. They tempted me over to come and have a look and a few months later, I agreed to make the move. Bigelow Laboratory is very well-known internationally in the scientific circles, probably less so to the people of Maine and general members of the public. It’s been a great honor to come and work for a laboratory that’s really had a great place in oceanographic science.
Lisa: The Bigelow Labs is very well-known internationally. I’m not sure that people really quite understand the scope of what you’re doing there. Talk to me about that.
Graham: The scope is global. That’s the first thing to say. Our scientist work in the oceans all around the world from the Polar Regions right to the tropics. Our primary focus is on the smallest things in the ocean, the microbes. We work on the viruses, the bacteria and the plankton, whether they’re the small microscopic plants that we call phytoplankton or the microscopic animals which we call zooplankton so pretty much everything that you can’t see with the naked eye that’s living in the ocean is what we study. Those smallest things have big influences. They influence the way in which that climate system operates.
They are at the base of the food chain so they supply food to the other animals that live in the ocean, and of course they’re a source of energy as well and maybe new products for pharmaceutical purposes. There’s many aspects to our research. We are global in nature, as I said.
Lisa: These little organisms can really reflect big shifts in the environment over time.
Graham: That’s right. We’re still trying to understand how quickly there are changes in this microbial communities that might represent changes in the ocean chemistry or changes in the what we call the trophic structure, the sort of food chain structure but certainly by studying them and understanding the chemistry and genetics, we hope to be able to predict changes in the ocean that may be coming faster than we currently would like.
Lisa: You also, I believe, have the ability to send your specimens really all over the world so other labs can do research on certain organisms.
Graham: That’s right. We are the US National Collection for marine phytoplankton but we also have some bacteria and viruses in the collection, The National Center for Marine Microbiota. This collection operates as a mail order service. We have over 3,000 strains and specimens in the collection. There’s a dedicated website. You can go on to the website and look for your favorite organism and order it with your credit card and then it’ll be shipped to you living either in packed in dry ice or in a liquid medium. Then, you can grow it. You can grow up larger quantities for scientific study or for fish feed. That’s another purpose or if you want to study biofuels. There are many purposes for this algae.
Lisa: I like that. We’ve talked about this before on the show before that in Maine, we use what we have. We think about well, okay, in the past, we’ve had a timber industry. We’ve had a ship-building industry. Of course, we have little organisms in the ocean. Maybe we just didn’t even really realize it. Now, we really are utilizing what we have and we’re making it available to people everywhere.
Graham: That’s right. I think as we recognize the pervasiveness of these microbes, whether they’re on land actually or in the ocean, but we’re understanding what a critical part they play. I think here in Maine, being closely connected to the sea, we’ve been pretty familiar with the seasons coming and going on land and in the ocean. Often, when the oceans are turning green or and cloudy in the summer, that’s the blooming of these microscopic plants in the ocean water. Then, of course, the ocean gets clearer in the winter time when they die. That’s an important part of the food cycle in the ocean.
Lisa: I know that the Bigelow Labs, the building is really pretty brand new and it’s so impressive, it’s right on the water. It looks down through evergreens on either side. There are places for researchers and the students to sit and ponder. There are labs. There’s a big meeting space. There’s different wings that have different foci of interest. Why is it that it was so important to create this new structure? Why do it in Boothbay?
Graham: I think there’s lots of aspects to that question. Firstly, the laboratory has been in Boothbay for coming up on 40 years. In fact, our 40th anniversary is next year. Originally at McKown Point, West Boothbay Harbor, where we occupied some relatively unused buildings that the state had. The founding scientist, Dr. Charles Yench, working with the then Commissioner for Department of Marine Resources, Spencer Apollonio, essentially we’re able to locate the laboratory as a non-profit research institute in those unused buildings.
Bigelow had that great opportunity to grow over 3 1/2 decades in those facilities but gradually, quite quickly, we were starting to outgrow those both in terms of people but more particularly, the buildings were not really fit for the scientific purpose that we needed them to be. Some years ago, about eight years ago, the board of trustees were able to secure some new properties and land at East Boothbay, which we’re referring to on the side of the Damariscotta River. We have a 64 acre site there, beautiful location with deep water frontage.
Then, 3 1/2 years ago, we were able to start winning funding from both state and federal sources, together with our own money and private financing to construct the new facilities. It’s a $33 million facility covering on the 64 acre side. What was important to us is that we built a building that was sustainable, that was in-tune with the environment and of course, as you’ve hinted, was able to do the kind of science we wanted to do. We’re delighted that it’s turned out to be a lead platinum building, that’s the energy efficiency and design criteria at the highest level. We think that it’s a building that does justice to the great science that we do.
Lisa: I actually met Dr. Yench when I was a student at Bowdoin and I believe is a Flow Cytometry Conference. This was a very long time ago. It was striking to me that actually I met his wife, I think at the time, Clarisse, Dr. Clarisse Yench. It was striking to me at the time that there was so much passion about something like Marine Biology and sort of focused right here in Maine. You attract the sort of interest. You attract the sort of researcher here. It’s not just a great facility, you actually have people coming from all over the world to do their research here.
Graham: We do. Those type of scientists that’s attracted to come to Bigelow Laboratory and to Maine is entrepreneurial, is passionate, is collegiate, wants to work with a group of colleagues and has really visionary ideas, scientific ideas. We are almost exclusively focused on research mission. We do do education and we do work with industry as well but we are primarily a research-focused organization. The kinds of person that come are extremely passionate, dedicated and enthusiastic and as you say they’re international as well.
Lisa: The teaching piece, I don’t think that I would underplay that because I know that my own son is a college student, spent the summer up at the Bigelow Labs and did his own research project and was really impressed with the caliber of individuals that he was surrounded by, not only his fellow student researchers but also the doctorate level of researchers. Why is this educational piece so important? Why is role modelling when it comes to marine biological research, why is that important?
Graham: It’s all about the next generation of scientists. I think for scientist to really transmit the knowledge that they acquire in the course of their research, they can do it in a number of ways. They write scientific papers. They go to scientific conferences and talk about their findings. One of the most lasting ways, of course, is to transmit that knowledge to the next generation of scientist to mentor them, as you said.
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Lisa: That communication piece that you’ve alluded to, I think is very important because when I was up at the Bigelow Labs and I was looking at the poster that I believe all students create for the end of the summer, I was having my son Campbell explain to me what it was he was doing. I had to have you explain it to me again. It has to do with bacteria. Why don’t you go ahead and describe it a little bit?
Graham: Okay. This particular project your son was working on was on bacteria, they’re some of the smallest microbes that we have in the ocean. These specific ones oxidize iron, the element iron, to derive energy. They’re some of the most primitive microbes on the planet in the sense that they were around actually before oxygen started to form in the atmosphere. They survived over billions of years. They are quite ubiquitous on the floor of the ocean. You may also find them on land, in wetland areas, in pools, but they’ve never been really studied in the focus that we have at Bigelow Laboratory in the laboratory of David Emerson.
He’s able to look at their biochemistry and their genetic make-up and really understand a very fundamental role they play in the cycling of the elements and energy in the oceans. He goes to some very interesting parts of the world including the new volcano that’s currently under the water just off Hawaii, which will be the new Island of Hawaii in probably in a few hundred thousand years.
Lisa: One of the things that I was trying to get my son to do with me was to explain, okay, as a physician, is there any relevance to the research you did this summer and the health of people? He was able to talk about this. He was able to talk about gut bacteria and how gut bacteria is related to this project and is related to the health of humans. We’ve had some interesting evolutions in this area.
Graham: That’s right. We all carry a large consortia of bacteria in our guts, over two pounds in weight is bacteria. They perform a lot of functions obviously associated with digestion and regulation of body chemistry in a way that we don’t totally and fully understand. We do know that diet affects the bacterial populations and that those commensural bacteria in some way are an indicator of the health status of the individual.
They’ve been traditionally quite hard to study. We know the common ones and we know the ones that make us ill but we don’t know about some of the other kind of species of these bacteria. We now have new techniques where we can isolate just individual cells, bacterial cells from the guts of humans and other animals and essentially decode their genetic information. Those genes tell us about the functions that they perform. We’re making some now rapid progress in having, if you like, the hard science that underpins some of the anecdotal knowledge that we have about the role of gut bacteria on human health.
Lisa: Gut bacteria is something for people who are listening, that becomes an issue when you, for example, take antibiotics and things get thrown off and the antibiotics might work on one thing over here but they cause problems over here with the body. There probably is more of a link to illness and wellness than people have been able to understand previously.
Graham: I’m sure that is right. That’s, as you say, an antibiotic is a rather blunt tool for curing ills. Of course, it can remove some of the positive bacteria that are playing a key role and those people who’ve taken an antibiotic course kind of know that there are some of the side effects. I think over the next few years, we’ll see a rapid jump forward in the microbiota of human digestive systems and in veterinary medicine as well where that plays a very important part of animal welfare as well.
Lisa: The reason that I even played this out a little bit in my conversation with you is just to really reinforce the idea that what you’re doing at the Bigelow Labs has a direct impact on human health. There’s the ecological impact on human health but there is also the individual, the health of an individual. This is something that I think labs are being called upon more and more to explain. They’re being called more and more to translate what they’re doing for your average consumer because we really need to have an idea as to what’s really happening in research.
Graham: You’re absolutely right about that. We call it technology transfer or sometimes translational research and that technology transfer is very important. It might be on the specifics of a bacteria and its function. It might be around the tools that we’ve developed to look at them. It might be because our scientist can collaborate with a medical researcher and jointly together look at new areas of research. Early on, in our conversation, you mentioned Flow Cytometry. That was another technique developed for human medicine, essentially for blood cell research. We apply it in the oceans to count plankton cells and vice versa. Some of the techniques that we have been developing have applications into biomedical research.
This whole area of technology transfer is really important to try and understand the way in which new scientific discoveries can feed out into other areas of research and human well-being.
Lisa: It’s also important because the funding for a science research has really changed. It used to be that there was more, say, US government funding available for some aspects of science. Now, there seems to be less of that. People who are doing research need to go out and look for foundations, private funders. These individuals are asking more, they’re asking more questions about the value of the research. They’re asking to understand what the research actually means.
Graham: That’s right. Certainly, government funding like many years, the government funding has to have priorities and identify what areas to spend money on wisely. We’re seeing a diversity of funding opportunities. You mentioned foundations which are now playing a major role in funding scientific research. I think the other aspect of research funding is to work collaboratively as well with other institutions to share our resources and pool our knowledge together. That’s something we’re very keen on at the laboratory, making that happen.
I think that scientists need to explain the work that they’re doing well. Funding shouldn’t just be about the end-result being in a scientific paper. They should really also explain why it matters, what should happen next and how it might be used in applied opportunities as well.
Lisa: That’s an important point. I don’t know that people really … if you’re not in the scientific world, you may not realize how different that is, the idea of collaboration. I think traditionally, there has been competition amongst researchers and to be able to ask not only individual researchers but also institutions to collaborate. That is a big deal.
Graham: It is because if you think about the then … the ideas are a very personal thing. In the sense, your reputation is tied to your ideas, your ideas are who you are. You clearly want to hold on to those to a certain degree and feel that you’re making a personal contribution and your reputation is growing. At the same time, there’s a recognition of really advancing knowledge is going to be about sharing those ideas and also putting together people with different skills to work on a problem.
Some of the problems we would like to solve are pretty massive. They really need several different types of scientists working together to resolve those. I think this is a recognition of changing times and the spirit of openness is certainly something that we like to promote at the Bigelow Laboratory.
Lisa: What are some of the most interesting and exciting things that you think people who are listening to our conversation might want to know about the Bigelow Labs?
Graham: Wow, so I think that … we’re studying the microorganisms that live beneath the sea floor, where there is probably as much biomass that’s the sort of the organic material in these organisms as there is in the whole surface of the planet and yet we hardly know anything about them. We’re probing into the genetic make-up of the microbes that live in the dark part of ocean that’s below the light, the penetration that the sunlight in there in that dark world, there are many microbes doing really important aspects of the biochemical cycle of the planet and we’re just beginning to discover those at this time.
Then, we’re looking at the climate change aspects, the fact that the sea ice and the arctic is melting quite rapidly in the summer periods now and as a consequence, the plankton in the surface waters can expand and grow and there they produce gases as well as the oxygen that the phytoplankton produce. They produce other trace gases and they affect climate and they have a feedback effect on the melting of sea ice. We’re also studying things here in the Gulf of Maine.
We are essentially using the ferries and also a robot submarine, a very small one, only about six feet long that can travel across the Gulf of Maine making measurements and sending those back to the laboratory by a satellite and we repeat that quite a few times each year. Over the years, we build up a picture of how the whole Gulf of Maine ecosystem and physics and chemistry is changing.
There’s a lot of really exciting aspects, those are just a few snippets and of course I’ve left some out. It’s an exciting time to be a marine microbiologist.
Lisa: What is the website for the Bigelow Labs?
Graham: Very simple, www.bigelow.org, dot org, yes.
Lisa: Dr. Shimmield, we are thrilled that you’ve come over from Scotland and are sharing your knowledge with us and thank you for taking good care of my son this summer as a college student down at the Bigelow Labs. I know he enjoyed his experience. We appreciate what you’re doing for education and for research with the biology and the marine aspects of Maine. Thanks for coming in today.
Graham: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 117, Deep Blue Sea. Our guests have included Alan Lishness and Dr. Graham Shimmield. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our eNewsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest and read my take on health and well-being on the bountiful blog. We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
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