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May/June 2005 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Bioprospecting In-depth: Bioprospecting The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

We are sailing this April day along the west coast of Vancouver Island, near the village of Bamfield, where Barkley Sound meets the sea. In other places on our blue-water planet, the dive plan might be a simple lust for loot. A frogman might surface with an ancient Roman amphora in his grasp, or the Empress of Ireland’s silverware, or a handful of Spanish doubloons. But this time, as LeBlanc flippers and flops his way on deck, the bounty squishing within his sack may hold — we can only hope — the cure for cancer or arthritis or AIDS.

The enterprise that brings us here to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre is called "bioprospecting." It is a worldwide, intensely competitive and increasingly feverish search for naturalsource medicines, fuelled by a simple premise, which history will prove to have been either prophecy or myth: namely, that the cures for the worst of our plagues lie waiting to be discovered on the reefs and in the rain forests of a ravaged world.

Find them now, the bioprospectors cry, or lose them forever.

LeBlanc, who grew up in landlocked Guelph, Ont., and did not see the sea until he was eight years old, is a research assistant in the earth and ocean sciences department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). A marine biologist by training, he is part of UBC’s elite bioprospecting team, a mission that has taken him from Barkley Sound to Papua New Guinea and from the Caribbean to Newfoundland.

Today, LeBlanc and two UBC graduate students, Katherine Woods and Kelsey Desjardine, are scavenging the basement of the sound for marine invertebrates — the starfish and sponges and other squiggly little creatures that carpet the tide-swept bay. Although the odds are heavily against success, something in or on the bodies of these organisms may prove to be effective against some grievous human malady. So the divers strap on another silver tank and plunge overboard again.

One of the specimens they deliver when they return is a burnt orange species of hydroid, which looks like a fragile, frondlike plant, but is actually a carnivorous condominium of thousands of individual animals. Another is that saltwater slug Diaulula sandiegensis.

Diaulula is a nudibranch, which rhymes with tank, not ranch. It is a lovely little thing, pearly grey with leopard-like "eye" spots warning predators that the thumb-sized beast, which is probably both blind and senseless, is also toxic.

Common in these waters — and as far south as Baja California — its fate, alas, is to be pickled, diced and whipped into a thick shake of protoplasm in the UBC labs, then centrifuged until the molecular structures of its bodily constituents can be accurately mapped.

Woods hopes — though the evidence is far from conclusive — that one or more of Diaulula’s bodily chemicals may somehow mitigate type 2 diabetes, a disease that affects 16 million people in North America and recently killed one of her aunts. Certainly, the experiment is worth trying.

"The ultimate goal," she says, "is to find out whether there is any interesting chemistry in Diaulula that would be useful to medicine in general. These nudibranchs do very interesting things. The dream would be to see if they have some sort of anti-diabetic activity on their skin.

"A sea slug has no natural physical defences — no hard shell, no claws, no fangs. So it just sort of goes along, and if a fish decides to eat it, it can’t do much about it. But if it can produce something on its skin that will make the fish spit it out or will kill the fish, then it can survive. What we try to find out in the lab is what that ‘something’ is.

"People always ask me whether the nudibranch gets hurt. I tell them that it doesn’t really feel anything — it doesn’t have a brain area, so it doesn’t perceive pain the way we perceive pain. At least, I hope not!"

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