Surf washes onto a rocky coast in the fading light of day. With each pulse of a rising tide, waves reach farther up the shore, pouring fresh seawater into small tidepools scattered among the rocks. Tidepools are miniature worlds, natural stone basins vibrant with life. Some have bottoms carpeted with fluorescent algae that glow pink and orange, red and purple. There, white barnacles crowd around channels where the nutrient flows are rich, like buildings huddled on a downtown street. Near those channels there are also mussels, anemones, sand dollars, and a halo of other life forms that wait for food to come to them. The rising sea is just that, a rich bath of microscopic plants and small ocean creatures like shrimp, crabs, and baby fish. And when that waterborne feast pours in each day, tidepool inhabitants respond. The bony miniature towers housing barnacles lift their tops as fine tendrils reach into the flow, echoing strands of seaweed that wave and drift in the current overhead. Anemones open their flowerlike mouths. Crabs scurry and hungry fish dart and gulp. Meanwhile, a marauding sea star wraps its arms around a mussel, prying open the shell for dinner.

Organisms in a tidepool live there because it’s a source of water and food. But in a deeper sense what they want are the atoms that make up both the water and the foods that seawater brings. Some of those atoms are used for energy. Others are building blocks that then pass up through the food chain, where DNA information shapes them into progressively larger and more complex forms.

A tidepool’s vibrant biology is made the old-fashioned way: it grows there. As we identify life’s most basic parts and processes, though, a new biology is emerging. Can we build our own molecules? Make our own chromosomes? Fabricate bone, muscle, and other tissues? In fact, each of the above and more are coming from a research lab near you. This presents something radically new in the course of human affairs, with implications beyond the familiar environmental or health concerns. We draw a sense of stability from the physical world. The metals, woods, and other materials we use to make things are staid and familiar. The same plants and animals reproduce each spring. Our children look more or less as we do. And there’s little confusion about where biology leaves off and human design begins.

All that is changing. And any discussion of that change employs terms that fall below the radar of daily life. Most of us recognize words like “atom” and “molecule.” Along with others like “gene,” “chromosome,” and “cell” they tend to get tossed in a mental bin labeled “too small to see.” But our nonchalance toward small things is set to change as well. The microscopic realm is a universe unto itself, and as that subliminal world begins to flex and shift around us, the time has come to understand how it works.

Tags: Ecology, food chain, microbiology, nanotechnology, nutrients, ocean, tidepool

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Posted on April 25th, 2006 @ 6:00 am