KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Stowers Institute for Medical Research here in Kansas City has a new partnership that could pave the way for exciting new discoveries in the future.
Stowers has opened a satellite lab at the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. Scientists and researchers from the Stowers team in KC will be able to head to the MBL to conduct new experiments on the marine life there.
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The goal, as with everything Stowers researchers do, is to find keys in the animal kingdom that could unlock better human health down the road.
I spoke with Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado, who will spend three weeks at the MBL in June and July, about what this partnership means.
"Most of the life that lives in this planet lives in the water,” Sanchez Alvarado told me. “And so, if we have an opportunity to make inroads in understanding the secrets of life, and there's more life in the ocean than there is in land, we hope to uncover many, many more secrets by studying these organisms."
"We know that when we do this, science gets better. And when science gets better, everybody wins," he added.
I've reported from inside Stowers multiple times, and there is a great deal of research on marine life done inside those walls.
So, I asked Sanchez Alvarado about what the MBL’s location can provide. He explained the simple but very important difference in the studies that will be available in Massachusetts.
"The systems that we can raise here at the institute are systems that have undergone a process of domestication,” Sanchez Alvarado said. “The systems that are living out there in the ocean have refused to be domesticated. Why bring nature to the lab when we can actually bring the lab to nature?"
Dr. Sanchez Alvarado told me that there are already multiple scientists at Stowers who have made concrete plans for studies they intend to pursue at the MBL in the near future.
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