I've been spending my summers
in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts
And there, what I've been doing is essentially renting a boat.
What I would like to ask you to do
is to come on a boat ride with me tonight.
So, we ride off from Eel Pond into the Vineyard South,
right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard,
equipped with a drone to identify potential spots
from which to peer into the Atlantic.
Earlier I was going to say
into the depths of the Atlantic,
but we don't have to go too deep to reach the unknown.
Here, barely two miles away,
from what is arguably the greatest marine biology lab in the world,
we lower a simple plankton net into the water
and bring up into the surface things that humanity rarely pays attention to
and oftentimes, have never seen before.
Here is one of the organisms that we caught in our net,
this is a jellyfish.
But look closely, living inside this animal is another organism
that is very likely entirely new to science.
A complete new species.
Or how about this other transparent beauty?
With a beating heart, asexually growing,
on top of its head,
progeny that will move on to reproduce sexually.
Now let me say that again,
this animal is growing asexually,
on top of its head,
progeny that is going to reproduce sexually in the next generation.
A weird jellyfish, not quite,
this is an ascidian, this is a group of animals
that now we know we share extensive genomic ancestry with,
and it is perhaps the closest invertebrate species to our own.
Meet your cousin, Thalia democratica
I'm pretty sure you didn't save a spot
in your last family reunion for Thalia.
But, let me tell you,
these animals are profoundly related to us
in ways we are just beginning to understand.
Next time you hear anybody derisively telling you
that this type of research is a simple fishing expedition,
I hope that you remember the trip that we just took.
Today, many biological sciences only see value
in studying deeper what we already know,
In mapping already discovered continents.
But some of us are much more interested in the unknown,
we want to discover completely new continents,
and gaze at magnificent vistas of ignorance.
We crave the experience of being completely baffled
by something we have never seen before.
And yes, I agree that there's a lot of ego satisfaction in being able to say
"Hey, I was the first one to discover that."
This is not a self-aggrandizing enterprise
because in this type of discovery research,
if you don't feel like a complete idiot most of the time,
you're just not science-ing hard enough.
(Laughter)
Every summer, I bring onto the deck of this little boat of ours,
more and more things that we know very little about.
Very, very, very little about.
I would like to tell you tonight,
a story about life that rarely gets told
in an environment like this.
From the vantage point of our 21st biological laboratories,
our 21st century biological laboratories,
we have began to illuminate
many mysteries of life with knowledge.
We sensed that after centuries of scientific research,
we're beginning to make significant inroads into understanding
some of the most fundamental principles of life.
Our collective optimism is reflected
by the growth of biotechnology across the globe.
Striving to utilize scientific knowledge to cure human diseases,
things like cancer, aging, degeneretive diseases,
these are but some of the undesirables we wish to tame.
What I often wonder is,
"Why is it that we are having so much trouble
trying to solve the problem of cancer?
Is it that we're trying to solve the problem of cancer,
and not trying to understand life?"
Life on this planet shares a common origin.
I can summarize 3.5 billion years of the history of life on this planet
in a single slide.
What you see represented here
are all known species,
representative of all known species of our planet.
in this immensity of life and biodiversity
we occupy a rather unremarkable position.
Homo sapiens, the last of our kind.
And though I don't really want to disparage
all the accomplishments of our species,
as much as we wish it to be so,
and often pretend that it is so,
we are not the measure of all things.
We are, however, the measurers of many things.
We relentlessly quantify, analyze and compare,
and some of these are absolutely invaluable and indeed necessary,
but this emphasis today,
on forcing biological research to specialize,
and to produce practical outcomes,
is actually restricting our ability to interrogate life,
to accept only narrow confines and unsatisfying depths.
We are measuring an astonishingly narrow sliver of life,
and hoping that those numbers will save all of our lives.
How narrow, you ask?
Well let me give you a number,
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
recently estimated, that about 95% of our oceans remain unexplored.
Now let that sink in for a second.
95% of our oceans remain unexplored.
I think it's very safe to say that we don't even know
how much about life we do not know.
It's no surprise that every week in my field
we begin to see the addition of more and more new species
to this amazing tree of life.
This one for example,
discovered earlier this summer,
new to science and now occupying its lonely branch in a family tree.
What is even more tragic is that we know about
a bunch of other species of animals out there,
but their biology remains sorely understudied,
I'm sure some of you have heard about the fact that
a starfish can actually regenerate its arm after it's loss,
but some of you might not know
that the arm itself can actually regenerate a complete starfish.
There are animals out there that do truly astounding things,
and I'm almost willing to bet,
that many of you have never heard of the flatworm
Schmidtea mediterranea.
This little guy right here does things that essentially just blows my mind.
You can grab one of these animals and cut them into 18 different fragments,
each and every one of those fragments
will go on to regenerate a complete animal in under two weeks.
18 heads, 18 bodies, 18 mysteries.
For the past decade and a half or so,
I've been trying to figure out how these little dudes do what they do,
how they pull this body trick off?
But like all good magicians,
they're not really releasing their secrets readily to me.
(Laughter)
So here we are, after 20 years of essentially studying these animals,
genome mapping, chin scratching,
thousands of amputations and thousands of regenerations,
we still don't fully understand
how these animals do what they do.
Each planaria, an ocean unto itself,
full of unknowns.
Now, one of the common characteristics of all these animals
I have been talking to you about is that
they did not appear to have received the memo,
that they need to behave according to the rules that we have derived
from a handful of randomly selected animals that currently populate
the vast majority of biomedical laboratories across the world.
Meet our Nobel Prize winners,
7 species, essentially, that have produced for us
the bulk of our understanding of biological behavior today.
This little guy right here,
3 Nobel Prizes in 12 years.
And yet, after all the attention they have garnered
and all the noise they have generated as well as the lion share of the funding,
here we are standing in front of the same litany of tractable problems
and many new challenges.
That's because, unfortunately,