A thick slab of whale blubber weighing as much as a toddler sat on a steel bench in Chris Reddy’s chemistry lab. Surrounding it was an assortment of carving knives, beakers, and a kitchen blender from Walmart.
It was 2003, and Emma Teuten, a then-postdoctoral researcher working in Reddy’s lab, had acquired 10 kilograms of the foul-smelling flesh from the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center after the tragic beaching and death of a True’s beaked whale. Teuten and Reddy were on a mission to look deep within the whale’s tissues to find traces of naturally-produced compounds similar to industrial chemicals made in factories. They may not have realized it at the time, but finding these compounds would help begin to answer a critical question: could naturally-produced “pollutants” pose similar health risks to marine life—and ultimately humans—as manufactured toxic chemicals?
“We had known for years that toxic industrial PCBs were persistent in marine animals,” says Reddy. “But we also began to understand that some similar compounds were produced naturally by certain organisms in the ocean like sea sponges, worms, and other critters. They were also present in marine mammals and even in human breast milk."
Reddy says isolating a single milligram of the compound from 10,000,000 milligrams of whale blubber was “epic work.” But after countless hours of chopping the blubber into small cubes, blending it into what looked like pink smoothies, and burning its fat down with acid, Teuten extracted the samples they needed.
Read more at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Photo: Marine organisms such as the barrel sponges shown here can produce natural compounds that are similar to toxic chemicals manufacturing in factories. (Photo courtesy of Tim Shank, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)