Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC

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.