Stanford Today
Edition: July/August, 1996
Section: Science and Medicine News: George Somero Profile
WWW: The Ocean as Laboratory

By Janet Basu

Beneath the steel-blue waters of Monterey Bay, the sea floor drops off suddenly into rugged canyonlands as deep and awesome as the Grand Canyon. Strange sea creatures live in the frigid blackness, thriving in clouds of sulfur that would be toxic to most forms of life.

This is George Somero territory, life at its extremes.

Somero joined Hopkins Marine Station last October as Stanford's first David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science.

His friend Dennis Powers, director of Hopkins, says he's been trying for eight years to recruit Somero, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and former chair of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The prestigious Packard chair may be one thing that at last convinced him to come, as well as the chance to design his own laboratory in the new DeNault Family Research Building, which was dedicated in May.

The chance to return to Monterey Bay was also a major factor in that decision. Like the canyon's depths, the familiar tidepools on the bay's shores contain some of the harshest conditions that living things endure.

At 55, with mild blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, Somero looks less like an adventurer than the humanities professor he almost became ­ the philosopher of science who read The Death of Physics on his most recent plane trip.

But as a graduate student based at Hopkins in the 1960s, Somero spent 13 frozen months camped out at the U.S. naval base in Antarctica studying fish with icewater in their veins ­ and the course for his career was set.

For more than 30 years since, he has explored terrain where scientists thought animal and plant survival would be impossible ­ from frozen icepacks to scorching deserts to the bottoms of the seas.

In the process, he has become renowned as the father of the field of biochemical adaptation, determining which biochemical processes are essential for life to adapt to harsh and changing conditions.

When bizarre life forms were found next to deep-sea volcanic vents near the Galapagos Islands, for example, it was Somero's research team that figured out how they manage to live. The creatures turned out to be a new form of life never imagined by scientists, a symbiosis between animals and the bacteria they harbor in their cells, both drawing energy and sustenance from the sulfur that seeps out of volcanic magma.

"We are getting a sense of how evolution at the molecular level provides organisms with the ability to live in these different environments," Somero says.

Some of his discoveries may have medical uses one day. Perhaps more important, his work helps to explain why relatively small changes ­ a few degrees of global warming, for example ­ can displace some species from their natural habitats.

One answer lies in the cells of all living things, where small changes in the structures that do the cell's work make all the difference in an animal's ability to adapt.

"When you look at ecosystems and ask, why are some organisms here and not others, that question has several answers," he said. Somero's work has shown that the enzymes that do the cell's work are limited to certain ranges of temperature, salinity, oxygen levels or hyperbaric pressure.

"I think it's clear that the distribution patterns of organisms are strongly influenced, for example, by the temperature range in which their enzymes can work," Somero says. "We're trying to put some physiological and biochemical information into this whole picture of global change."

In addition to the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows joining this search, Somero welcomed three undergraduates into his lab for intensive spring quarter research projects. He says the opportunity to work with undergraduates is one of Stanford's most attractive benefits, and he already has initiated a philosophy of science seminar open to students of all levels.

The students are gaining a remarkable teacher, says Gretchen Hofmann, a National Science Foundation Marine Biotechnology Postdoctoral Fellow, who is finishing up her research in Somero's lab before joining the faculty at the University of New Mexico.

"George doesn't just teach techniques ­ he trains scientists," Hofmann says. While students in some labs learn only to do one repetitive experiment that advances the professor's research, Somero gives his students responsibility for individual projects. "That's an irreplaceable gift to a young scientist," Hofmann says.

Although to a weekend vacationer, Monterey Bay seems one of the most pleasant spots on earth, Somero says that he and his students only have to walk out the lab door to find life undergoing stressful changes.

The Hopkins Marine Life Sanctuary just offshore includes one of the most demanding environments of all: the zone between high and low tides, where conditions change from wet to dry, cold to hot, twice every day.

And for proximity to life at its extremes, there is nothing like working on the edge of Monterey Canyon. Somero collaborates with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute next door, using their remote-operated submarine to study deep-water white clams, sulfur-eating cousins of the creatures in the Galapagos Rift. The clams live at cold-water seeps from 2,000 to 13,000 feet below the surface.

"We want to move these animals around, bring shallow-living clams to deep water and deep ones to shallow, to see if they are able to acclimate at different pressures. No one's been able to do that before," Somero says. "You have to have a deep rift right outside your lab, and the technology to reach it."

Most of the real work of Somero's expeditions, however, takes place in the lab, thanks to two 10-foot-tall, minus-94-degree freezers packed with hundreds of carefully marked frost-coated boxes.

"We call these Noah's Ark," he says. "They have deep sea fish and hydrothermal animals and desert lizards and intertidal snails and all kinds of things."

Many of his tests on tissue samples from the Ark creatures focus on enzymes and membranes that most biochemists view in purified form, in a test tube or a cloned cell line. Somero's approach is different ­ he looks at how the enzymes work in the crowded protein soup of a cell, and how the cells work in an animal with a very specific environment.

"We're part of a small group of biochemists and now biophysicists, trying to examine proteins under conditions that are very different than in a test tube," he says.

It's a philosophy that he shares with many of his colleagues at Hopkins; in a sense it underlies his return there. "Everything feels right," he says. "This is where I'm supposed to be." ST