ABSTRACT
Many references may be found to novel pharmaceutical compounds pro duced by a wide array of so-called "marine" bacteria. Yet, there is negli gible information about the fruits of this research reaching the market place as commercial products. This is curious, but may reflect that
• Any final commercial name is very distinct from that used in the initial research publications. With this scenario, it would be virtu ally impossible to trace the development of a product from its initial recovery from marine bacteria to availability to the consumer,
• Research publications discuss only the failures, whereby the com pound has failed at some crucial testing stage in product develop ment, such as involving toxicity to humans. An extension to this possibility might be that data on commercial products are not pub lished in the referred scientific literature. Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to determine the precise origin of the finished product.
