Boat Bottoms, Barnacles and Modern Medicine:

Dan Rittschof Hopes the Drug Store Will Offer a Safe Substance to Keep Barnacles Off Boats p.2

It was the search for an alternative that brought Rittschof to Duke University in the early 1980s. He’s the guy with the beard and the baseball cap who spends as much time paddling around the estuaries of Carteret County as he does in the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C., where he is based. As both a scientist and a professor, Rittschof’s work centers on the biochemistry of marine animal behavior. Helpful, hardworking and friendly, he has a reputation as an innovative and enthusiastic researcher. One colleague described him as “scientifically creative.” Over the years, Rittschof has helped create better food for farm-raised fish. And he’s identified the chemical signals that guide blue crabs, draw predators to oysters and help hermit crabs find shells. The classes he teaches include The Biochemistry of Marine Animals and Ecology of Chemical Signals.

Rittschof came to the Duke Marine Lab in 1982 to join a team that was searching for natural compounds to replace TBT. Led by retired researcher John Costlow—with the support of the U.S. Office of Naval Research—they were looking at the antifouling properties of whip coral. They weren’t having much luck, Rittschof said.

“They had been going for three years and didn’t have any results” he said. “What I brought to them was the ability to integrate chemistry and biology. I could make the science work.”

And he did, to a point. Well versed in barnacle breeding, his lab spawned billions of larvae over the years by developing a specialized water treatment process. He helped Costlow and his team identify the active ingredient in the coral’s ability to resist fouling—a disk shaped molecule known as the pukalide. Too complex and expensive to produce, the pukalide structure hinted at other chemicals that might prove useful. That led them to the sea pansy and a class of chemicals called “renillafoulins,” which the scientists patented in 1986. But again, those chemicals were complex. And, the team found it difficult to meld their compounds with existing paints and coatings.

“Making a coating is a lot more than mixing a chemical with paint, ” Rittschof said. “There is chemistry and there is biology and there is polymer coating science and the engineering that goes with that.”

While the compounds worked, they didn’t work as well as tin, which at the time, was still the industry standard, Rittschof said. So, industry interest—needed to move their work out of the lab and on to boats—was lukewarm. And then there was the Environmental Protection Agency review. It can take years and cost millions to put a new compound through the tests and reviews needed to make sure it too won’t contaminate the environment, said Rittschof.

“There are lots of environmental issues,” he said. “The organic compounds have the potential to be worse than copper because you don’t know how they work yet,” he said. “They can be environmental estrogens or they can be carcinogens.”

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