This is shocking news, but not too surprising: I know a few of the people in this facility, and when I talked to them last they were deeply concerned about this possibility. The University of Hawaii is planning to shut down the Kewalo Marine Laboratory. They’re doing it so they can funnel more money into the expansion of a cancer research center, which is certainly valuable, but not at the expense of closing half of their marine facilities. This is especially shocking because heck, when students here in the cold and land-locked midwest talk to me about going into marine biology, many of them ask about Hawaii — it’s only natural that they’d imagine a tropical island would be a haven for that kind of research, and it is. It’s just that the state doesn’t support it. This is an ironic fact:

The Kewalo scientists said that Florida, also an ocean state, has 22 marine labs. “Even Georgia would have more marine labs (four) than Hawaii” if the Kewalo facility goes, said Michael Hadfield, biosciences research center faculty member and former director.

So I should tell my students that Georgia would be a better place to study marine biology? That’s nice for the South, not so nice for Hawaii.

And it’s not as if Kewalo has been unproductive — they’ve turned out some amazing work. Mark Martindale is there, as the director. The man is a Very Big Name in the field of evo-devo — go back through my evo-devo posts, and he keeps popping up everywhere. He’s working on early pattern formation in the metazoans, and his papers are indispensable in understanding early evolutionary events.

An old friend of mine, Elaine Seaver, is also there and doing fabulous work on a promising new system, the polychaete worm Capitella. If you want to know about body plan evolution, we need the kind of comparative approach she’s taking.

Write. Contact:

Gary Ostrander

Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education
Hawaiʻi Hall 211
2500 Campus Road
Honolulu, HI 96822
808-956-7837

Let them know what an incredibly short-sighted decision this is, and what a failure of vision in the making. Not only does it harm the university immediately, damaging their reputation and costing them a useful facility, but think of the message it’s sending, that productive and esteemed faculty at the University of Hawaii can have their work so cavalierly dismissed and their laboratories demolished.

The Nobel in Chemistry this year goes to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien for the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein, GFP. That’s well deserved — GFP is a wonderful tool, a simple protein that fluoresces. There are lots of fluorescent compounds out there, and most of them require some kind of artificial injection or application to get them into cells — they basically allow you to determine that “a needle was stuck in here“, and also to allow us to visualize the morphology of individual cells, which is all very useful, and there’s quite an industry built around making new probes of this sort. GFP is different. It allows one to use the molecular biology of the cell to generate your green glowing compound. If you want to know when and where a particular gene of interest is expressed, for instance, you just make a construct that couples the regulatory elements of that gene to a GFP gene, and presto, where ever the gene you’re following is turned on, so is GFP, and the cell lights up like a little Christmas tree decoration. That’s powerful stuff: it gives us a tool to follow patterns of gene expression visually, in real time, in living cells.

Wave those arms in praise of MSKGEELFTG VVPVLVELDG DVNGQKFSVS GEGEGDATYG KLTLNFICTT GKLPVPWPTL VTTFSYGVQC FSRYPDHMKQ HDFFKSAMPE GYVQERTIFY KDDGNYKTRA EVKFEGDTLV NRIELKGIDF KEDGNILGHK MEYNYNSHNV YIMGDKPKNG IKVNFKIRHN IKDGSVQLAD HYQQNTPIGD GPVLLPDNHY LSTQSALSKD PNEKRDHMIL LEFVTAARIT HGMDELYK!

    1 atgagtaaag gagaagaact tttcactgga gtggtcccag ttcttgttga attagatggc 
   61 gatgttaatg ggcaaaaatt ctctgtcagt ggagagggtg aaggtgatgc aacatacgga 
  121 aaacttaccc ttaattttat ttgcactact gggaagctac ctgttccatg gccaacactt 
  181 gtcactactt tctcttatgg tgttcaatgc ttctcaagat acccagatca tatgaaacag 
  241 catgactttt tcaagagtgc catgcccgaa ggttatgtac aggaaagaac tatattttac 
  301 aaagatgacg ggaactacaa gacacgtgct gaagtcaagt ttgaaggtga tacccttgtt 
  361 aatagaatcg agttaaaagg tattgatttt aaagaagatg gaaacattct tggacacaaa 
  421 atggaataca actataactc acataatgta tacatcatgg gagacaaacc aaagaatggc 
  481 atcaaagtta acttcaaaat tagacacaac attaaagatg gaagcgttca attagcagac 
  541 cattatcaac aaaatactcc aattggcgat ggccctgtcc ttttaccaga caaccattac 
  601 ctgtccacac aatctgccct ttccaaagat cccaacgaaa agagagatca catgatcctt 
  661 cttgagtttg taacagctgc taggattaca catggcatgg atgaactata caaa