‘If you’re lucky enough to live by the sea, you’re lucky enough’, so declares the cute decorative plaque with which you can smugly appoint your walls. There is more than just an element of truth in this statement.

 The Greeks and the Romans appreciated the therapeutic effects of sea water and started a long tradition of frequenting sea-side spas, a practice that peaked in popularity during Victorian times but that is still recognised for its benefits to both physical and psychological health today.

 In 1811 Bernard Courtois (1777-1838) a Napoleonic soldier set fire to a pile of seaweed, hoping to discover a new ingredient for making gun powder and instead created iodine, the antiseptic qualities of which have been used universally for the treatment of wounds ever since.

 Even more ironically, now, in our environmentally blighted times of ocean acidification and global warming, researchers are turning increasingly to the oceans as a huge and unexplored larder of potential treatments and cures. It is called bioprospecting and has already yielded extraordinary results.

 Coral ecosystems have provided important sources of new medicines that are currently being developed. Medicines that can be used for the induction and easing of labour, the treatment of cancer, arthritis, asthma, ulcers, bacterial infections, heart disease, viruses and in the production of nutritional supplements, enzymes and cosmetics.

 Studies revealing the curative elements in nature are not new, in fact half of medicines used today have their origins in natural products, derived mostly from plants, animals and micro-organisms. Remedies that come from nature are in fact the oldest medicines known to man and in many instances we are relearning lost knowledge. One has only to look at old wives’ tales to find examples of this, how many amongst you were told to eat your carrots and goaded with the promise that they would help you to see in the dark? The beneficial effects of beta-carotene as vitamin A on eye function is now widely recognised, incidentally it also helps to fight glaucoma, cataracts and night blindness.

 If we consider that half of medicines are made from natural sources found above the water we can begin to understand the gargantuan potential for finding cures beneath its surface. The oceans cover nearly 75 per cent of the earth’s surface, but that is only the start.  The average depth is four 4 kilometres, the maximum depth is 11 kilometres. Some 97 per cent of the living space on Earth is the sea and 95 per cent of the ocean has never been seen by human eyes. The as yet unexplored capacity for the oceans to treat human maladies is incredible.

 At CCMI we work to provide a centre for research for scientists from all over the world. Scientists visiting our Little Cayman Research Station have collected data for use in research that furthers the understanding of fluorescent proteins in corals, how these proteins have evolved and how they function. The proteins have already been used successfully in medical science as a tool leading to breakthroughs in AIDS and cancer research and their use to illuminate neurological processes could lead to further ground breaking treatments.

 There are many reasons why we should seek to conserve our precious marine resources and almost always the reasons turn out to be essentially selfish, for the health and protection of our own species.