What is the Secret History of Bioluminescence?

The Secret History of Bioluminescence

In the late 1990s, marine biologist Stephen Haddock visited fellow scientist Osamu Shimomura at his laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Both researchers were fascinated by bioluminescence : light produced by chemical reactions in living organisms, most notably fireflies, but also found in fungi and various marine organisms.

Haddock recalls that at one point during their meeting, Shimomura dumped what looked like large sesame seeds from a jar into her hand, sprinkled them with a little water, and ground them into a paste in her fist. Then he turned off the light. Her palm glowed with an enchanting blue light, as if a fairy lived inside.

Sesame seeds are actually the dried bodies of tiny crustaceans called oysters. Shimomura explained that during World War II, the Japanese military captured large numbers of these creatures from the ocean. The cool blue light emitted by sea fireflies was bright enough for soldiers to read maps and letters, but too dim to reveal their position to nearby enemies. “It’s a simple, easy-to-use light source,” says Shimomura, 87. “You just add water.

It’s very convenient, and you don’t need batteries.” By the time the Haddock reached Shimomura, the dried plankton was decades old but still retained its ability to glow.

Haddock was so fascinated by the story that he asked Shimomura to bring a small portion of the shell to his lab at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. He kept it in a container no bigger than a spice jar and rarely opened it. “I’ve only tried five or six times,” he says. But with luck and desire, he might be able to pull his little lamp off the shelf and conjure a heavenly glow.

What is it about bioluminescence that fascinates us so much?

Finally, there is plenty of light. Every morning, a giant bowl of light rises from trees and rooftops, above the birds and mountains, pouring out a golden glow. Sunlight spills over continents and oceans, falls on treetops, gathers in valleys and deserts; it creeps silently into farms and cities; it creeps into our bedrooms, seeps into our skin, penetrates our eyes, and lights up the theater of our minds.

Yet we don’t seem to get enough light, or feel close enough to it. Throughout history, many cultures have told stories of people and creatures surrounded by halos or radiating an irrepressible glow: gods, angels, fairies, saints, and elves. Being filled with light means being divine or supernatural, precisely because it is impossible for us.

Since we can’t summon light from within, we found other ways to generate and control it, and keep it close in the absence of the sun: we tamed fire and channeled electricity; we learned how to throw color bombs into the night and cover the roofs of our houses with bright rainbow droplets; we created powerful beacons that can be summoned at the touch of a button and erected shining poles along the streets.

Today, some people are willing to implant LED lights under their skin to illuminate tattoos or just for the sake of novelty. But it’s all just pretend. Despite our technological sophistication, we’ve never been able to reach the level of crustaceans and fireflies. We can’t match his intuitive grasp of enlightenment.

Light has been woven into our biology in ways we never knew possible. “The ability of organisms to produce light, and especially to harvest large quantities of it, seems to us like a superpower,” Haddock says.

It’s a power we can’t resist harnessing. For millennia, people have devised innovative applications for bioluminescence, but many remain unknown today. Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that the mucus of a certain type of luminescent jellyfish (probably the noctilucent jellyfish) could be smeared on a walking stick to make it act as a lantern.

In the late 17th century, physician Georg Eberhard Rumphius described indigenous peoples in Indonesia using bioluminescent fungi as torches in forests. Before the 19th century, coal miners would fill jars with fireflies and dried fish skins filled with bioluminescent bacteria to use as lanterns; safety lamps had not yet been invented, and carrying open flames into caves could set off explosive gases.

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It took a long time for people to discover the uses of shells and other small, shiny sea creatures because, for most of human history, no one knew they existed. Early explorers were puzzled by streaks and patches of light around boats and oars, as well as by radiant waves and sparkling areas of water sometimes called "milky seas." Initial attempts to explain these phenomena often skewed closer to poetry than science.

For many, light was like fire, even when it was in water. The ancient Chinese text Heinishichuqi, which details seafaring adventures from the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., mentions that “when water moves, fire is produced, and when fire is produced, fire is produced.” Similarly, the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes likened the visible light in turbulent waters to flint sparks.

In 1688, on a sea voyage to Siam, the Jesuit missionary and mathematician Guy Tachard wrote that the sun “drenches the sea water, and fills it with an infinite quantity of hot and luminous energy during the day.”

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin speculated that some “extremely minute animal” in the water might emit visible light. Around the same time, naturalists like Goodhue de Revelle used early microscopes to confirm Franklin’s suspicions: the ocean’s flashes and glows were produced by living organisms, what we now call plankton tiny “sea insects.” By the early 20th century, bioluminescent plankton was no longer known.

They are closely monitored by some of the world's most powerful military forces and are literally caught in the crossfire of human warfare.

When ships and other vehicles pass through large populations of bioluminescent plankton, ripples and clouds of green and blue light often form on their sides and in their wakes. These unwanted spotlights have proven to be a problem for navies, especially when stealth is needed. In 1918, during World War I, a British ship sank a German submarine off the coast of Spain after spotting its glowing halo.

During World War II and the Cold War, the Navy was studying how to use bioluminescence to track submarines and torpedoes. The U.S. Navy is continuing this research today, trying to develop an underwater robot that can measure bioluminescence as a way to detect enemies and prevent accidental detection.

In 1954, marine bioluminescence saved a soldier's life. At the time, future Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell was a fighter pilot. He was on a training mission in stormy weather off the coast of Japan when his cockpit instrument panel suddenly malfunctioned. All lights and dials went dark. He could no longer rely on technology to guide him to the aircraft carrier .

As he peered into the darkness, he noticed a gleaming green line on the surface of the sea, which he realized was the ship's bioluminescent trail. He used this ray of life as a guiding light and was able to land safely.

The next year, Shimomura began his journey into bioluminescence, a journey that would revolutionize the field of biology. In 1955, Shimomura joined the lab of Yoshimasa Hirata at Nagoya University, tasked with extracting the organic compound luciferin from shellfish and determining its precise molecular structure. Scientists now know that in many bioluminescent organisms, an enzyme called luciferase catalyzes a chemical reaction between luciferin and oxygen to produce light.

But at the time, Shimomura said, "We didn't fully understand how this happened.

It was a mystery." After ten months of lab work, Shimomura became the first person to crystallize luciferin, a key step in studying its structure. In the 1960s, Shimomura continued his research at Princeton University, where he also began studying the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria.

Shimomura and his colleagues collected large samples of A. victoria, examining them like squeezing them to extract small amounts of pure, glowing "juice." They found a protein called aequorin in this glowing fluid that glows blue when it interacts with calcium, even in the absence of oxygen. Another protein in jellyfish, green fluorescent protein (GFP), sometimes absorbs blue light.

By 1978, after collecting nearly a million jellyfish, Shimomura was finally able to elucidate the structure of aequorin and the nature of A. victoria's unique light-emitting reaction. Aequorin and green fluorescent protein, as well as the gene that encodes the latter, have become indispensable tools in biology and medicine. Scientists can now identify and observe previously invisible complex interactions between genes and proteins in living cells.

In 2008, Shimomura shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, for their work on green fluorescent protein.

Recently, bioluminescence has evolved from a laboratory tool to a commercial toy. The San Francisco Glowing Plant Project, funded by Kickstarter, offers DIY kits that customers can use to genetically engineer glowing Arabidopsis plants at home genetically. BioPop, based in Carlsbad, California, has unveiled a glowing version of its beloved kid-friendly mascot, the Sea Monkey (not actually a water monkey, but a brine shrimp).

They call it the Dino Pet: a small, vaguely Apatosaurus-shaped aquarium filled with bioluminescent plankton called dinoflagellates. During the day, the plankton photosynthesizes; at night, if you turn off the lights and shake the tank, the blue diatoms glow turquoise, like the “sparks” that Chinese sailors saw in rough waters long ago. But the glow lasts only three times a night, and if you’re too rough, it can harm or kill the plankton.

It’s easy to feel sorry for the little swimming star trapped in his plastic bubble. Every night, the giant’s hand wraps around him, turning them into a whirlpool for a moment of selfish pleasure. Then the monster takes over your entire world, as easily as closing the lid on a music box. They’re only alive because of this masterful trick.

But perhaps we’re the most pathetic members of this relationship: the gods bewitched by mosquitoes. Bioluminescence in a bottle gives us the impression of a rare, otherworldly phenomenon, but the reality is quite different. Bioluminescence is so common on Earth, especially in the ocean, that scientists estimate that the thousands of bioluminescent species they have documented so far represent only a small fraction of the total.

The vast majority of creatures that live in the deep sea, where the sun doesn’t reach, probably produce their light (sometimes with the help of microbes). They use this innate intelligence primarily to communicate: to warn and intimidate, to hide and hunt, to attract and lure. This bright, vibrant language is one of the oldest and most widespread on Earth, and it’s a language that’s very foreign to us.

Despite our fantasies and myths, the truth is that there’s nothing supernatural about the light of life; it’s already part of nature. We’ve been deprived of this special gift.

So perhaps, instead of being grateful, we’ve used the unparalleled gifts of these magnificent creatures for our purposes. We’ve borrowed its light, and it’s revealed biological knowledge we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. But that’s all we can do: borrow. We can’t be like them, so we seek them out and pull them toward us, just as we’re mesmerized when we think the sun has penetrated the sea.

To this day, we still hold them in our hands, in jars, on our nightstands, and always try to satisfy our Promethean hunger.