35 



have one in the Atlantic, and we had to close one unfortunately 

 down in the gulf. The company is privately held and all my re- 

 search is funded by the Bagwell family of Georgia. I just happen 

 to live in Massachusetts. 



I would like to thank NOAA in appreciation for their support of 

 the Charleston Laboratories biomedical test material programs 

 which was one of the first efforts to purify these omega oils. 



There was a conference in 1985 that was sponsored by National 

 Institutes of Health, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the 

 NFI on the health effects offish oils. It was instrumental in begin- 

 ning to bring to fruition a lot of the research on the antitumor ef- 

 fects which we have tried to support, and I could give you some in- 

 formation. I did not have the data prepared for this testimony, but 

 I will submit information on the great progress in anticancer work 

 that is being done in Europe. 



The FDA GRAS status for marine fish oils is still held up, how- 

 ever there is a lot of new information on the ill effect of transfattv 

 acids such as you find in margarine, and we hope that this will 

 propel the FDA to hurry this status along. 



This is one gram of 95 percent pure EPA-DHA, and its current 

 cost is $100 a gram. If we had the money for support to start a 

 pilot plant, we could probably lower the costs significantly. 



There are a number of people who cannot testify here today who 

 have done amazing research in this area. Dr. Pam Hargis unfortu- 

 nately passed away at a young age, from Texas. She was the first 

 to put these omega oils into poultry. That is my overall corporate 

 goal. My overall goal is to try to incorporate the benefits of eating 

 fish into a diet of children who are far less fortunate than a num- 

 ber of us sitting in this room today; try to broaden the base in 

 which people can incorporate these oils into their nutritional sta- 

 tus, and also to further the research into the medical applications 

 of these very unique oils. 



To do that, the bottom line is we have to find fish, and there are 

 ways in which I think NOAA could help us, one of which is the 

 LIDAR program. Right now there is no office within NOAA which 

 coordinates the either laser based or space satellite based research 

 into fish biomass or plankton or any of these other subjects. There 

 are other countries that are leading in this area. 



It is kind of ironic that the Army Corps of Engineers has had to 

 go to a Canadian company to take technology which was essentially 

 developed in the United States within the Navy and the Depart- 

 ment of Defense and put it to supporting these efforts. 



Right now, the best fish finding laser in the world is owned by 

 the Army. I think there was a great cartoon in the National Fisher- 

 man, and I think it addresses a lot of your constituents, where 

 there was a picture of a boat and on one side a fisherman was lean- 

 ing over and he was seeing a great school of fish, and on the other 

 side there was a NOAA observer and he only saw one fish. And he 

 said, I think this is grounds for a closure right now. 



I think as a scientist, one of the things we want is to try to get 

 a good scientific basis for making any type of management decision. 

 And I think that having a fleet ourselves, the usefulness of fleets, 

 given what you can accomplish from space, what you can accom- 

 plish from platforms on which LIDAR's and other color scanners 



