It's a jungle out there.

In the past decade, scientists conducting routine analyses of animal and food samples began to discover unknown HOCs [halogenated organic compounds] in their samples. Detective work led to their identities, but where these compounds were coming from has been a mystery. While some of these "unknown" compounds can be loosely traced to a possible industrial or natural source, the majority of these compounds have no known industrial or natural sources.

Study authors Emma Teuten and Christopher Reddy found their pre-industrial HOC samples in a most unlikely place: whale oil from the Charles W. Morgan, one of the last whaling ships operating during the 19th and early 20th century. Built in 1841 in New Bedford, Mass., the ship traveled the world looking for whales, often on voyages of three years or more. The ship is now preserved and on public display at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Conn. The researchers received the whale oil sample from the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Teuten and Reddy studied one sample of antique whale oil and found 11 HOCs. The results provide further evidence that naturally produced HOCs were accumulating in marine mammals long before the human-produced varieties.

"What is most interesting to us is that our colleagues still find these 'natural' compounds in recent samples from marine mammals, human breast milk, and commercially available fish in Canada," said study co-author Christopher Reddy, an associate scientist in the WHOI Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department. With co-author Emma Teuten, now at the University of Plymouth, England but previously at WHOI, Reddy studied one of the previously unknown HOCs and determined that it was from a natural source, not industrial pollution. The approach was time consuming, taking more than six months of lab work to complete, and required more than ten pounds of whale blubber.

"Our main goal now is to identify who is making them, why, and how toxic they are," said Teuten. "We suspect that many of these compounds were and are made by bacteria, plants, animals as chemical defense mechanisms."

These chemicals, assumed to be natural weapons, "have chemical and physical properties similar to toxic PCBs and the pesticide DDT". This seems to happen frequently. We discover that natural systems have done things for ever that we have only recently learned to do, and only became aware of the natural systems after we had developed primitive versions of them. Then we study them and learn the fine points.

For example:

What is needed are active agents that act on completely different sites in the physiological sequence of pathogens than current medicaments.

Platensimycin, recently isolated from the mushroom Streptomyces platensis, is such an agent. A Californian team of researchers is now the first to synthesize this natural product completely in the laboratory--a crucial step on the way to a new class of antibiotics.

Platensimycin inhibits an important step of bacterial fatty acid biosynthesis and in this way paralyzes a broad spectrum of Gram-positive bacterial strains. Thus, this natural product in able to kill dangerous germs that have developed resistance not only to established antibiotics but also to standby products. Examples of these include various resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecium.

To isolate a complex natural product in sufficient quantity and purity for further experiments is usually a difficult and time-consuming, if not impossible, task. Chemists thus follow a different path: They reproduce the natural product in the laboratory from the ground up. This approach is known as total synthesis. To devise such a total synthesis is an enormous scientific challenge. A way must be found to assemble a complicated synthetic molecule faultlessly from simple, available components--and in sufficiently high yield in each reaction step. The total synthesis of platensimycin has now been accomplished by a team headed by the renowned natural products chemist K. C. Nicolaou (The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, and University of California, San Diego). Platensimycin consists of an unusual aromatic ring coupled through an amide group to a compact cage structure. The team built these two components--each a veritable challenge for synthetic chemists--separately and then joined them in the final step of the synthesis. "The described chemistry," says Nicolaou, "sets the stage for the synthesis of designed analogues for structure–activity relationship studies in the search for new antibacterial agents."

It's stories like this that underpin some of my disdain for doom mongers. They walk about with their heads on backwards, aware only of the past and nervous about what they'll stumble on given their deformed anatomy. They can't see where they are going and can't imagine what it might be like to look ahead as well as behind. It isn't that the future holds no threats, it's that we can avoid some of them and mitigate many others, and there are legions of bright folks working on the problems now. We can't know what they are getting up to, but we can expect continued announcements.