LA JOLLA — You might never hear of Bill Fenical again. In the years ahead, though, you could owe him some of your good health. Perhaps your life.
Fenical probably won't join the ranks of those Communications Age nobles who transform convenience gadgetry and technological gewgaws into inconceivable wealth. Yet this chemist is hot on the trail of discoveries far more tantalizing.
William -- "call me Bill" -- Fenical, PhD, is out to cure cancer. Maybe prevent cancer.
Bill Fenical is a pioneer in an effort to beat other diseases that are rapidly -- alarmingly -- developing resistance to everything in the world's antibiotic medicine chest.
He is out to crack other maladies for which there are no cures at all.
And if Fenical, 64, doesn't achieve these things during his remaining years as a chief research scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he has blazed a trail that hundreds of others are rushing to follow. He's trained many of them himself. In this age when science is more corroborative and incremental than ever, Fenical is a pathfinder in the promising hunt for 21st century medicines from that vast, mysterious birthplace of life itself: the oceans.
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It's a simple proposition: A medicine is merely a compound that repels or kills or somehow interferes with the organisms and processes of disease. In short, it is chemistry. Medicines from aspirin to penicillin are natural chemicals harnessed for the benefit of countless millions of humans.
The problem is that the terrestrial world has been scoured so thoroughly that science is running out of places to look and breakthroughs to count on. No significant new antibiotic, for instance, has been discovered in a generation. Bacteria, meanwhile, have been busy developing immunity to known antibiotics.
What makes Fenical's work promising is that there is so much chemistry at work in the undersea about which science knows so little.
"It's like opening a chest of new and exciting ideas," he says at his oceanfront laboratory overlooking the Scripps Pier. "This is, without question, going to lead to significant discoveries of drugs."
The oceans are not only the largest features of the planet; they are also the most bio-diverse. If you recall your high school biology, "genus" is the taxonomic group under which species of organisms are categorized.
