U.S. Senate Democratic candidate and Maine State House Speaker Sara Gideon toured Bigelow Laboratory facilities Aug. 7 after announcing an eight-part climate plan earlier in the day. Gideon said her visit to the East Boothbay-based independent nonprofit underpins the research and development needed to understand climate change and help create environmentally friendly jobs.

Bigelow Lab President and CEO Deborah Bronk led Gideon on the tour and explained the inner workings of Bigelow and several of the projects researchers continue to work on through the pandemic safely. She explained, federal funds account for about 80% of project funding and the operations budget, and 20% comes from almost completely Maine-based philanthropy.

“Anything that passes through that water sheds cells. The basic research side of it is how long does that DNA look like DNA for different species and then the big part of it is how do we get that data into a usable format so that a lobsterman can get up, have his coffee, log online and he knows where the right whales were yesterday … This is a game changer and Maine is kind of at the forefront of it.”

Bronk said one of the most notable projects is University of Maine-based – the tracking of DNA through water samples up and down the coast. The program is funded for $20 million through National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration funds matched by Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). EPSCoR was created to benefit states like Maine which lack the research capacity more urban areas benefit from, said Bronk.

Bronk said other programs are not as lucky with federal funding. What she described as one of the most interesting and ground-breaking Bigelow Lab projects is an ongoing study in methane-producing ocean microbes, organisms which function much like methane production in a cow’s digestive system. The plan is to create a feed supplement which would cut methane production in cows and yield healthier beef, milk production and manure.

Bigelow researchers were denied two $10 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grants which could have streamlined the project, said Bronk. But a philanthropist has put $7 million toward the project and $2 million toward patent protection.

Said Bronk, “What we'd like is to be able to raise funds that enhance the institute in terms of the kind of work we can do … What the federal government is really good at is funding basic research or funding applied research that can provide information on solving a problem. What we're not good at as a country is then making that jump of how do you translate what you know works into a product.”

At tour’s end, Gideon said months of quarantine and social distancing have offered much reflection on the relationship between climate change and pandemics. As ocean temperatures rise and the environment changes, the type of research Bigelow does is becoming more important and will be important to how we shape our economy, said Gideon.

“I think it is incredibly important that we continue these partnerships. As we learned today, there is that perspective of making sure that we are doing research to really understand what is happening in the ocean … and the relationship of that to the rest of our lives, the physical world around us and all we can learn from that … Some of the conversations we were having in the labs are about what that might look like.”