Deep sea: the last frontier This year, the International Day for
Biological Diversity is being celebrated under the theme 'Marine
Biodiversity'. The world's ocean is amazingly rich in life and
perhaps nowhere more so than in the deep sea. Here, over
millions of years, species have developed unique properties to
enable them to cope with extreme living conditions, such as high
pressure levels. It is the very uniqueness of these properties
which offer exciting potential for the development of new drugs
to treat all sorts of human ailments. Products based on marine
organisms have already found their way onto the market and are
now being prescribed to sufferers of asthma, tuberculosis,
cancer, Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis and male sexual
impotence, among others. Other industries, such as those for oil
or paper, are also bioprospecting the deep sea with promising
results. Today, there are no legal restrictions on exploring the
deep sea for the purposes of research or financial gain when it
comes to its livi