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Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC

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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 do
    is to ask you
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    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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    (Laughter)
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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 at all
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    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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    and 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.
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    We actually need to bring all
    of our intelligence
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    to becoming stupid again.
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    Clueless in the immensity,
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    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
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    those institutions that make it
    possible
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    for discovery research to take place.
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    Institutions like our own
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    Stowers Institute for Medical Research
    in Kansas City, Missouri,
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    or the National Institute of General
    Medical Science in Bethesda, Maryland,
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    and of course our gateway
    to biodiversity,
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    the Marine Biological Laboratory
    in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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    I have been very fortunate to be able
    to do some of this training myself,
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    and it is a pleasure for me
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    to actually grab students out of the
    confines of their laboratories
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    away from their computers and
    their catalogues,
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    and throw them into the world
    of discovery and exploration.
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    It is an immense pleasure,
    a real pleasure to actually see
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    how these bright, young minds'
    curiosity spreads its wings
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    and flies away when faced
    with the unknown.
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    This is how we become
    real scientists.
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    So we need these people
    to actually go out there
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    and ask the better questions
    that will bring us closer
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    to the answers that we seek.
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    Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    actually wrote
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    that if you want to build a ship,
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    don't drum up people to collect wood
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    and don't assign them tasks and work,
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    but rather teach them to long for
    the endless immensity of the sea.
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    As a scientist and a teacher,
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    I like to paraphrase this to read,
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    that we scientists need to
    teach our students
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    to long for the endless immensity
    of the sea
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    that is our ignorance.
  • 13:30 - 13:34
    We, Homo sapiens, are the only
    species we know of
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    that is driven to scientific inquiry,
  • 13:37 - 13:40
    we, like all other species on this planet
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    are inextricably woven into the
    history of life in this planet.
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    I think that I'm a little wrong when
    I say that life is a mystery,
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    because I think that life is
    actually an open secret
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    that has been beckoning our species
    for millennia to understand it.
  • 13:55 - 13:57
    So I ask you,
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    are we the best chance that
    life has to know itself?
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    And if so, what the heck
    are we waiting for?
  • 14:04 - 14:08
    We need to do things differently.
  • 14:08 - 14:10
    Tonight I'm going to ask you
  • 14:10 - 14:14
    to please help us build the
    greatest discovery research vessel
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    in the history of humankind.
  • 14:16 - 14:18
    Call your legislators,
  • 14:18 - 14:21
    ask them to fund basic discovery research,
  • 14:21 - 14:24
    support and give what you can
    to institutions such as these
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    that are dedicated to discovery research,
  • 14:27 - 14:30
    and hop on board with us
    on a grand expedition
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    to radically transform our
    understanding of life.
  • 14:34 - 14:36
    And along the way,
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    change the way we do
    biomedical research forever.
  • 14:40 - 14:41
    Thank you.
  • 14:41 - 14:46
    (Applause)
Title:
Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
14:52

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