Journal of Marine Science: Research & Development
Open Access

Abstract

Viewed from the outer space, our biosphere appears like an extremely thin and colorful veneer at the surface of the "Blue Marble" (planet earth). This is where all past and present life forms have evolved, lived and died. If the origin of life still escapes our understanding, biodiversity is a circumstantial miracle as it thrives at this highly unstable air/sea/ land interface. Furthermore, biodiversity seems to recreate under adaptive life forms after massive collapses due to major tectonic movements and meteorite collisions... until man came with unsurpassed destructive potential. Time has now come to call scientists at the rescue like GP doctors at the bedside of an ailing environment, or as investigators to help mediate impacting human activities using state-of-the art technologies.

Biography

Stephane LA BARRE is a Senior Research Scientist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He obtained his MSc Degree from Auckland University, New Zealand, and his PhD at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia, before entering CNRS in 1984. He spent two years (1990-1991) as research scholar at University of California San Diego working on synthetic peptides with late Murray Goodman, and on marine natural products with late John Faulkner. His multi-disciplinary career includes marine chemical ecology, natural products chemistry of terrestrial and marine organisms and polymer chemistry. He is currently the administrative coordinator of the research cluster BioChiMar (Marine Biodiversity and Chemodiversity), and he is promoting research on new analytical tools to evaluate and predict environmental changes on coral reefs diversity, both biological and chemical. He is now editing a textbook on marine natural products, targeted to an academic readership.