A Living Medicine Chest

Beyond protecting coasts and feeding millions, reefs hold value that is only now being discovered. Research on reef organisms has produced compounds used in cancer treatment and antiviral drugs, and reefs are thought to hold thousands more undiscovered compounds with medical potential.

Much of this never reaches the market. Promising molecules can vanish before they are ever studied if the reefs that produce them keep degrading — a loss with no price tag and no replacement.