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.

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How narrow, you ask?

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Well let me give you a number,

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration

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recently estimated, that about 95% 
of our oceans remain unexplored.

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Now let that sink in for a second.

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95% of our oceans 
remain unexplored.

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I think it's very safe to say
that we don't even know

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how much about life
we do not know.

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It's no surprise that every 
week in my field

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we begin to see the addition
of more and more new species

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to this amazing tree of life.

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This one for example,

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discovered earlier this summer,


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new to science and now occupying
its lonely branch in a family tree.

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What is even more tragic is that 
we know about

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a bunch of other species of 
animals out there,

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but their biology remains
sorely understudied,

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I'm sure some of you have heard
about the fact that

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a starfish can actually regenerate
its arm after it's loss,

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but some of you might not know

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that the arm itself can actually
regenerate a complete starfish.

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There are animals out there 
that do truly astounding things,

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and I'm almost willing to bet,

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that many of you have never heard
of the flatworm

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Schmidtea mediterranea.

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This little guy right here does things
that essentially just blows my mind.

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You can grab one of these animals
and cut them into 18 different fragments,

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each and every one of those fragments


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will go on to regenerate a complete
animal in under two weeks.

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18 heads, 18 bodies, 18 mysteries.

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For the past decade and a half or so,

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I've been trying to figure out how
these little dudes do what they do,

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how they pull this body trick off?

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But like all good magicians,

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they're not really releasing their
secrets readily to me.

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(Laughter)

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So here we are, after 20 years
of essentially studying these animals,

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genome mapping, chin scratching,

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thousands of amputations and 
thousands of regenerations,

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we still don't fully understand

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how these animals do
what they do.

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Each planaria, an ocean
unto itself,

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full of unknowns.

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Now, one of the common characteristics
of all these animals

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I have been talking to you about is that

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they did not appear to have 
received the memo,

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that they need to behave according
to the rules that we have derived

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from a handful of randomly selected
animals that currently populate

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the vast majority of biomedical 
laboratories across the world.

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Meet our Nobel Prize winners,

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7 species, essentially,
that have produced for us

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the bulk of our understanding
of biological behavior today.

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This little guy right here,

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3 Nobel Prizes in 12 years.

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And yet, after all the attention
they have garnered

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and all the noise they have generated
as well as the lion share of the funding,

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here we are standing in front of the 
same litany of tractable problems

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and many new challenges.

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That's because, unfortunately,

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these 7 animals correspond to 
0.00009% of all of the species

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that inhabit the planet.

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So, I'm beginning to suspect that

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our specialization is beginning to
impede our progress at best,

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and at worst, leading us astray.

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That's because life on this 
planet and its history

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is the history of rule breakers.

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Life started on the face of this 
planet as single-cell organisms,

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swimming for millions of years
in the ocean,

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until one of those creatures 
decided that,

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"I'm going to do things 
differently today,

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today I would like to invent
something called Multicellularity,

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I'm going to do this."

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I'm sure it was not a popular
decision at the time,

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(Laughter)

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but somehow it managed to do it.

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And then, Multicellular organisms
began to populate

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all these ancestral oceans,
and they thrived,

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and we have them here today.

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Land masses began to merge
from the surfaces of the oceans,

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and another creature thought,

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"Hey, that looks like a really nice
piece of real estate,

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I'd like to move over there.

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What, are you crazy?

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You're going to dessicate out there,
nothing can live out of water."

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But life found a way,

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and there are organisms now
of course that live on land.

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Once on land, they may have looked up
into the sky and said,

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"Hey, it'd be nice to go to the clouds,
I'm going to fly!

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You can't break the law of gravity,
there's no way you can fly."

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And yet, nature has invented
multiple and independent times

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ways to fly.

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I love to study animals 
that break the rules

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because every time they break a rule,
they invent something new

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that made it possible for us
to be able to be here today.

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These animals did not
get the memo,

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they have broken the rules.

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So if we are going to study
animals that break the rules,

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shouldn't how we study them
also break the rules?

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I think that we need to renew
our spirit of exploration,

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rather than bringing nature into
our laboratories and interrogating them,

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we need to bring our science into
the majestic laboratory that is nature.

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And there, with our modern 
technological armamentarium,

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interrogate every new form of 
life we find

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and any new biological attribute
that we may find.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We actually need to bring all 
of our intelligence

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to becoming stupid again.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Clueless in the immensity,


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in front of the immensity
of the unknown.

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Because, after all,

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science is not really about knowledge,
science is about ignorance,

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that's what we do.

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So if we're serious about this,

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we are going to have to start
seriously supporting

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
those institutions that make it
possible

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
for discovery research to take place.

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Institutions like our own

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Stowers Institute for Medical Research
in Kansas City, Missouri,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or the National Institute of General 
Medical Science in Bethesda, Maryland,

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and of course our gateway
to biodiversity,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the Marine Biological Laboratory
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.