Plenty of sea urchins, not many scientists

ALEX COOLMAN

CORONA DEL MAR -- The urchins are having lettuce for lunch today,

gnawing on scraps of wilted green iceberg in lieu of the kelp they

normally prefer.

Each urchin -- a spiny, purple creature about the size and shape of a

small bagel -- sits in its own plexiglass cell, silently munching with

the tiny teeth on its underside. The man in charge of their fate, Pat

Leahy, regards them fondly.

“They’ll eat anything,” Leahy notes. “Carrots, parsley, whatever. I

just went and got them some lettuce up at Albertson’s.”

Leahy knows the tastes of urchins. And he knows everything else about

them, too. As the director of Caltech’s KerckhoffMarine Laboratory, he

cares for thousands of the bristly creatures, and knows just about

everything that can happen to o7 Strongylocentrotus purpuratusf7 .

Leahy has spent the last 24 years working for the lab, which is

situated at the end of Dahlia Street on a tiny bit of beach in the

entrance to Newport Harbor. But it was only in January that he took over

direction of the institution, and he says he hopes he can make a few

changes in the way the lab is run.

The lab can use some help. Though it’s a gorgeous, airy facility with

a breathtaking view of the ocean and spacious research areas, its halls

are virtually empty. Workstations are stacked with dusty cardboard boxes.

Doors to offices that once housed active researchers are now locked shut.

There are plenty of urchins. There just aren’t too many people.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1970s, Leahy recalled, the lab was a

sort of hot spot for Caltech students. The four efficiency apartments at

the rear of the complex were always booked by scientists, and a small

army of grad students actually camped out in tents on the roof of the

building.

“We had people here. It was a really cool place,” Leahy said. “It’s

sort of a ghost town now.”

There are a couple things working against the Kerckhoff site: It’s a

long way from the main Caltech campus in Pasadena, and the school no

longer has a marine biology program.

Though there are three researchers -- Eric Davidson, Wheeler North and

Roy Britten -- who still actively use the facility, Britten and North are

emeritus faculty who don’t necessarily feel compelled to crank out large

volumes of new research.

The emphasis of the lab is interesting stuff, however. All those

urchins are raised and fed, tweaked and prodded as part of research on

the way genes affect developmental processes.

Urchins, said Professor Davidson, are good animals to use for this

kind of research because they are such avid reproducers.

“You can do a fantastic number of elegant experiments [with urchins],”

Davidson said. “These animals are very, very fecund. They contain

enormous numbers of eggs. It’s like a little regulatory machine.”

The work on urchin development, Davidson said, ultimately has

implications for understanding of the human genome.

“It’s the most important question in biosciences in certain respects,”

he said.

And with subject matter like that to draw researchers, Davidson said

he’s confident the Kerckhoff lab will eventually return to the bustling

condition of yesteryear.

“It’s an utterly unique institution,” Davidson said. “It will get

rejuvenated with new people pretty soon.”

Getting bodies -- not small, cold spiky bodies, but warm human ones --

into the lab sounds to Leahy like a welcome change.

“We want more activity,” he said, walking through the quiet halls.