The world's oceans, while critical to life on earth, are barely understood, and at present, no international body monitors ocean pollution. Yet throughout the global marine environment, signs of ecologic deterioration are apparent: beach closings, red tides, and shellfish health advisories due to sewage contamination; infectious diseases in coral reefs, tumors in sea turtles, eggshell thinning and reproductive problems among fish-eating birds; infertility, cancer, and virus-related mortalities among marine mammals.

The Marine Environmental Research Institute (MERI®) was established in 1990 to promote scientific research and education on the impacts of global pollution on marine life. MERI's research has focused primarily on the effects of persistent organochlorine pollutants such as PCBs and DDT in marine mammals because the oceans are a sink and reservoir for these chemicals, and there is evidence that environmental exposure has contributed to adverse effects in seals, dolphins, and other marine mammals worldwide.

For three decades, marine mammals inhabiting contaminated ecosystems have signaled a wide range of toxic responses to PCBs, DDT, and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals present in the environment. These include reproductive failure, skeletal abnormalities, cancer, endocrine disruption, and susceptibility to disease. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of unprecedented morbillivirus epizootics decimated seal and dolphin populations in polluted areas of Europe, raising public concern about a possible contributing role of immunosuppressive chemicals (e.g., PCBs) in these mass mortality events. Recent concern has focused on the immune and endocrine-disrupting potential of ambient exposure to the same estrogenic and dioxin-like compounds in humans.