WEBVTT

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I've been spending my summers

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in the Marine Biological Laboratory in 
Woods Hole, Massachusetts

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And there, what I've been doing is
essentially renting a boat.

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What I would like to ask you to do

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is to come on a boat ride with me tonight.

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So, we ride off from Eel Pond into
the Vineyard South,

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right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard,

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equipped with a drone to
identify potential spots

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from which to peer into the Atlantic.

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Earlier I was going to say

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into the depths of the Atlantic,

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but we don't have to go too deep
to reach the unknown.

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Here, barely two miles away,

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from what is arguably the greatest
marine biology lab in the world,

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we lower a simple plankton net
into the water

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and bring up into the surface things
that humanity rarely pays attention to

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and oftentimes, have never seen before.

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Here is one of the organisms
that we caught in our net,

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this is a jellyfish.

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But look closely, living inside this
animal is another organism

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that is very likely entirely 
new to science.

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A complete new species.

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Or how about this other 
transparent beauty?

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With a beating heart, 
asexually growing,

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on top of its head,

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progeny that will move on to
reproduce sexually.

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Now let me say that again,

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this animal is growing asexually,

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on top of its head,

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progeny that is going to reproduce
sexually in the next generation.

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A weird jellyfish, not quite,

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this is an ascidian,
this is a group of animals

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that now we know we share 
extensive genomic ancestry with,

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and it is perhaps the closest 
invertebrate species to our own.

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Meet your cousin,
Thalia democratica

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I'm pretty sure you didn't 
save a spot

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in your last family reunion for Thalia.

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But, let me tell you,

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these animals are profoundly related to us

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in ways we are just 
beginning to understand.

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Next time you hear anybody 
derisively telling you

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that this type of research is a
simple fishing expedition,

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I hope that you remember
the trip that we just took.

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Today, many biological sciences
only see value

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in studying deeper what we 
already know,

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In mapping already discovered continents.

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But some of us are much more 
interested in the unknown,

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we want to discover completely 
new continents,

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and gaze at magnificent vistas
of ignorance.

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We crave the experience of being
completely baffled

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by something we have 
never seen before.

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And yes, I agree that there's a lot of 
ego satisfaction in being able to say

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"Hey, I was the first one 
to discover that."

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This is not a self-aggrandizing
enterprise

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because in this type of 
discovery research,

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if you don't feel like a complete 
idiot most of the time,

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you're just not science-ing
hard enough.

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(Laughter)

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Every summer, I bring onto the deck
of this little boat of ours,

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more and more things that
we know very little about.

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Very, very, very little about.

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I would like to tell you tonight,

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a story about life that
rarely gets told

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in an environment like this.

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From the vantage point of
our 21st biological laboratories,

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our 21st century
biological laboratories,

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we have began to illuminate


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many mysteries of life with knowledge.

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We sensed that after centuries
of scientific research,

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we're beginning to make significant
inroads into understanding

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some of the most fundamental
principles of life.

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Our collective optimism is reflected


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by the growth of biotechnology
across the globe.

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Striving to utilize scientific knowledge
to cure human diseases,

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things like cancer, aging,
degeneretive diseases,

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these are but some of the 
undesirables we wish to tame.

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What I often wonder is,

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"Why is it that we are
having so much trouble

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trying to solve the 
problem of cancer?

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Is it that we're trying to solve
the problem of cancer,

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and not trying to
understand life?"

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Life on this planet 
shares a common origin.

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I can summarize 3.5 billion years
of the history of life on this planet

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in a single slide.

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What you see represented here

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are all known species,

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representative of all 
known species of our planet.

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in this immensity of life
and biodiversity

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we occupy a rather
unremarkable position.

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Homo sapiens,
the last of our kind.

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And though I don't really
want to disparage

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all the accomplishments
of our species,

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as much as we wish it to be so,

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and often pretend that it is so,

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we are not the measure of all things.

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We are, however, the measurers
of many things.

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We relentlessly quantify, 
analyze and compare,

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and some of these are absolutely
invaluable and indeed necessary,

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but this emphasis today,

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on forcing biological research
to specialize,

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and to produce practical outcomes,

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is actually restricting our ability
to interrogate life,

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to accept only narrow confines
and unsatisfying depths.

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We are measuring an astonishingly
narrow sliver of life,

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and hoping that those numbers
will save all of our lives.