Where Is the Next Frontier of Innovation?

Standing over the guts of his favorite sea beast -- Altex, a yellow, torpedo-shaped vessel in the lab for some revamping -- Jim Bellingham is offering a history lesson on a young science. "Ocean exploration is like driving a car from the East Coast to the West Coast at night in a fog. What do you think you'd really see?" he asks. "These devices will let us know the ocean far more intimately."

Talk about a slow company. For most of its history, ocean science and exploration has depended on dispatching big boats for months on end to gather data. Scientists would then study the data for years before even trying to answer any big questions. The research process became a little more interesting when people could be sent down in submersibles, and then unmanned probes plunged deeper. But even those faster-paced explorations provided only snapshots of conditions in the ocean. "We are limiting the sea by the way we observe it," says MBARI science chair Ed DeLong. "Scientists tend to be conservative because exploration is so intense and expensive."

DeLong, who could pass for one of the fishermen who unload their tuna boats across the street from MBARI's headquarters, is eager to break through those limitations. He studies micro-organisms that contain genes for rhodopsin, which act like little batteries. They are difficult creatures to grow in a lab, so being able to collect them from the ocean helps his research -- research that one day could allow for such "natural batteries" to be incorporated into biocomputing functions. "The great thing will be when we in the man-made world can use the inventions that nature has already made," DeLong says.

To help scientists like DeLong explore faster, Bellingham is working on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that not only explore the oceans remotely (no humans necessary) -- but that do so in smarter ways than ever before. He is creating modular AUVs that can be outfitted with varying scientific components, depending on the research mission. The goal is for sensors to be interchangeable, borrowing a chapter from the plug-and-play logic of personal computers.

The broader goal is to get scientists and engineers out on the ocean every day -- without the costs, both physical and financial, that are associated with manned ocean exploration.

That should let scientists take more risks, because they won't be tied to just one or two trips a year. And Bellingham hopes that in time, his vehicles will be a part of a vast, global ocean-observatory system. Imagine, he says, a school of "robotic fish" roaming the seas -- searching for new life-forms, sampling the ocean's water, and going where neither humans nor tethered underwater vehicles have gone before. On the ocean surface, around-the-clock monitoring technology loaded onto unmanned buoys will sample and sniff the waters. On the ocean floor, remote ocean labs tethered to land with fiber-optic cables will give scientists an opportunity to watch the ocean continuously and to retrieve information in real time.

What MBARI scientists will discover through this model of everyday exploration is anybody's guess, but there are hints of what's possible. Molecular biologist Chris Scholin spent several weeks in May off the Gulf of Maine predicting with great accuracy toxic-algae blooms like red tides that can kill fish, close beaches, and make humans sick. It has taken five years of work by Scholin and Gene Massion, an MBARI mechanical engineer, to develop an instrument to predict such blooms in the same way that the Centers for Disease Control forecasts flu breakouts.

Their relationship, now a friendship, was spawned when they were assigned to work together. Things didn't exactly start swimmingly. Scholin likes to tell the story of offering up what he calls a "third-grade sketch" of a device he needed. Massion took one look at it and laughed, Scholin says. Massion admits to laughing, but then he set to work digging through his toolbox of technology. He yanked out remote medical sensors, sturdy batteries, and genetic-testing processes -- made cost-effective and easy because of the human genome project. He put them together with the insight of Scholin's scientific mind. The result: a "filter jukebox." Like a musical jukebox, the device shuffles filters, runs genetic scans (much like medical DNA scans), and coughs up results without scientists needing to be near it.

The give-and-take between the two men typifies a new way of work at MBARI that could lead to the most innovative era of sea exploration to date. New challenges beckon, such as storing carbon dioxide in the deep sea. Scientists and engineers have realized that along with great technology, the new economy has given them something even more valuable: a better way of working. As George Malby, an MBARI electrical engineer, puts it, innovation ought to happen this way. "We have a natural respect for each other," he says. "We have no reason to judge each other. We just have questions we want to ask and answer."

Fara Warner (fwarner@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer based in San Francisco. Visit MBARI on the Web (www.mbari.org).