Melanin: The Philosophical Stone of Molecular Biology and its Implications on Dissolved Oxygen Levels in Water and Fertility of Agricultural Soil

Two fundamental problems now are: the growing contamination of water throughout the world, and the progressive loss of fertility of agricultural soil. The lack of revenue is a significant impediment to financing water. Water pollution is a key part of the climate change. Unless the water sector addresses efficiently the challenges inhibiting creditworthiness, new sources of revenue aren´t likely to flow to the water sector. There are two ways to pay for water infrastructure: tariffs and taxes. Worldwide, there is the cycle of “building” water infrastructure, and then “neglecting” it by not maintaining or repairing these assets because the resources aren’t available. Specifically, when local governments, water utilities, and other providers can significantly expands their collection systems efficiently, improves significantly water quality, reducing the non-revenue water, and decrease energy costs, then they can become viable, efficient, safe, and bankable service providers. Current methods to improve water quality date back to the French Revolution, and to date they are carried out on a larger scale, with more sophistication, greater energy expenditure, more CO2 emissions, greater production of toxic sludge, and yet, the quality of the water is not better, on the contrary it is declining as the contamination of the water continues to be incessantly, increasingly, cumulative and more and more complex. Despite the centuries that have passed, one factor has gone relatively disregarded: the levels of dissolved oxygen in the water and in soil. The better the quality of the water, the higher the levels of dissolved oxygen, and vice versa. Which also applies to agricultural soil, because the more oxygen is present, the more fertile the soil and vice versa. Addressing the low levels of dissolved oxygen in the water, until now it seems that it is considered as something secondary, as if it were something accessory, something like a parameter that would even improve spontaneously as soon as the levels of contamination of the precious liquid improve. But this has not happened so far with any method and in any part of the world. In addition to a lack of interest in developing processes to raise dissolved oxygen levels in the water and soil, there is the problem that the few available to date are too expensive. But the discovery of the unsuspected capacity of the human body to extract oxygen from water, dissociating it like plants; it means a light at the end of the tunnel.