“A healthy ocean means a healthy human population,” says Theresa Talley, who leads community engagement for the revived Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health in La Jolla.

The center will be a hub for research of marine contaminants and nutrients to help ensure that safe and healthy seafood is available and widely accessible.

The center, at UC San Diego, is being re-established following $7.35 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. The funding, to be awarded over five years, will make the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health one of four new centers nationwide focused on understanding how ocean-related issues affect people’s health, according to UCSD.

The original center, from 2013 to 2018, was launched to examine emerging contaminants found naturally in common seafoods.

The revival will expand human health research at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which also is home to the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, which emphasizes marine drug discovery, the ocean microbiome, molecular epidemiology, marine cell biology and development and the physiology of marine mammals.

The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health brings together experts from Scripps Oceanography, UCSD’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and School of Biological Sciences, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s California Sea Grant and Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

The center’s multidisciplinary research team will explore the sources, fates and potential toxicity of human-made and natural chemicals in the ocean.

“The goal of the center is to … increase our understanding of how contaminants move through ecosystems and how and why,” Talley said. “The team of researchers at the center span from pharmaceutical scientists, ecologists, geneticists, microbiologists — they run the gamut.

“Seafood has so many health benefits for humans, but sometimes there are risks. … This research will give us a better understanding of potential risks so we can identify strategies to mitigate them.”

Members of the Chang Lab are pictured in the fermentation room where proteins from polluted and healthy fish, sea urchins and human cells will be produced in yeast. Their research could reveal how pollutants accumulate in those organisms.

(Erik Jepsen)

The team will explore three main fields: the marine microbiome as a source for the synthesis, transformation and distribution of seafood contaminants; climate change impacts on the human intake of seafood micronutrients and contaminants; and community engagement.

The latter is the most important to Talley.

“Sometimes academic research stays academic and doesn’t get put to use, so I’m excited, because as information is generated, it goes out to the community to be used,” she said. “We’re also hearing from the public to see what their information needs are, and we can interface with research teams and get it to those that need it. We also specialize in public education. It’s a nice pairing. We want to put science to work.”

That can mean working with fishing professionals, chefs, nonprofits and the public at large to help them adapt their practices based on the researchers’ findings. Talley noted that some compounds that accumulate in fish break down when cooked, so even how one prepares seafood can make a difference.

“The ocean is absorbing more than 90 percent of excess heat caused by human activity, which is causing habitat migration and compression, low oxygen zones and biodiversity loss,” said Margaret Leinen, vice chancellor for marine sciences at UCSD and director of Scripps Oceanography. “It’s important to understand how these changes may impact seafood security, given that 3 billion people consume seafood globally each year.

“UC San Diego is uniquely positioned to bring together leaders across oceanography, biomedical and human health sciences and community engagement experts to bridge the science to society.”

Talley added that “the ocean provides so many functions that benefit humans: provision of food, absorbing heat in the midst of climate change, production of oxygen through plankton photosynthesis, job creation, not to mention recreation. But if the ocean isn’t functioning well, we humans can’t rely on it. All those services give us better living. … We in turn are better able to take care of the ocean when we know how.”