THE DISCOVERY OF SQUALENE

Sharks which live at the depth of 300 - 1000 meter below the sea level are supposed to be exist since 400 million years ago, far before human created. Categorized as rare vertebrate, shark has black-gray color and has not more than 1,5 meter at length, with weight of 50 kg. It is supposed there are 15 kinds of sharks living in the depth as written on the table below:

Tabel: Kinds of Sharks and their Squalene level


Quoted from Cosmetic Products Raw Materials Standard, ED II , Annotated , Yakuji Nipposha.

The peculiarity of dogfish is that it lives at hard environment. The fish is stay at the depth of 300 - 1000 below the sea level, untouchable by sunlight, rare of oxygen, and live under high water pressure. However, it can survive there and never come up to the higher depth.

How can this kind of shark survive at that difficult environment?
According to fishermen and traditional medicine experts from China, Japan and Korea, the key to the shark survival is in its liver. Since the ancient time, the shark's liver especially dogfish, has been in one of medicine list in Ancient China. Dogfish liver is different with any other sharks' liver from its size and weight. The weight of dogfish liver is approximately 40% of its body weight, and 90% of its liver content is squalene.

Japanese fishermen at Suruga gulf are the most experienced and talented fishermen in catching dogfish. They extract the dogfish oil and drink it as a medicine to evade weariness and other threatening illness. They also spread the oil on their skin as their sunscreen. They also use the oil to layer their boat so that the boat wood is not easily rotten, and snails and sea shells do not adhere at boat wall.

Have you ever read the novel of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea? At the novel, Ernest wrote that all of the fishermen in Santiago drank a cup of fish oil that kept in the drum before they went to the sea to prevent them from illness.

So it is undeniable that old fishermen from year to year have known and used the shark oil as their traditional medicine.

According to Dr. Iwan T. Budiarso, an expert from Indonesia, before world war II, there were still many dogfishes in Japanese waters such as in Kochioki, Sagamida, Okinawa and other places. But today, the dogfish is very rare and it is possibly extinct in Japanese sea. The fishermen there now are looking for the fishes for their squalene outside their country's waters.

Translated and concised from the article of Dr. Iwan T. Budiarso , DVM, MSc, Phd, APU, part 2.