Volume 9, Number 1, Summer 2002
Cover: Graduate Student Tracy Mincer
Photograph by Marc Tule

Conservation at Sea [view online]
Conservación en el Mar
[ haz click aquí ]
Binational Coalition Builds a Model for Success
By Mario C. Aguilera
Join marine ecologist Enric Sala and colleagues from the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur on a three-month expedition along the Gulf of California. Surveying fish populations of reef systems in the gulf, Sala and his team encounter a far different marine environment than that described by John Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea of Cortéz. Results of this survey will help the team make recommendations for establishing a network of marine reserves, areas off limits to fishing that could help protect marine life.

Microbial Warriors
Are Bacteria Man’s Real Best Friend
By Robert Monroe
Scripps graduate student Tracy Mincer, with adviser William Fenical of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, discovers an ocean-dwelling genus of the bacteria that is the source of many of the world’s natural antibiotics. The find confounds conventional thinking that such microbes could not survive in the ocean and turns out to be only the first of several bacterial strain discoveries in the ocean that could revolutionize development of anti-cancer and antifungual drugs as well as antibiotics.

Oceanography in a Changing World
Scripps Institution of Oceanography 1986 to 1996
By Joe Hlebica
This feature is the eighth in a continuing series celebrating the100-year history of Scripps. In this article, events taking place at the institution while Edward A. Frieman served as Scripps’s eighth director are covered. Environmental concerns and global climate change were among the most important issued to be addressed by Frieman. In the early 1990s, marine pharmacology and biotechnology programs evolved from marine biology and chemistry disciplines at Scripps, resulting in the creation of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine.