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Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC

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    I have 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 have 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.
  • 13:05 - 13:08
    Once, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    actually wrote
  • 13:08 - 13:10
    that if you want to build a ship,
  • 13:10 - 13:12
    don't drum up people to collect wood
  • 13:12 - 13:14
    and don't assign them tasks and work,
  • 13:14 - 13:18
    but rather teach them to long for
    the endless immensity of the sea.
  • 13:18 - 13:20
    As a scientist and a teacher,
  • 13:20 - 13:22
    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
  • 13:34 - 13:37
    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.
  • 13:45 - 13:48
    I think that I'm a little wrong when
    I say that life is a mystery,
  • 13:48 - 13:51
    because I think that life is
    actually an open secret
  • 13:51 - 13:55
    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?
  • 14:01 - 14:04
    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
  • 14:14 - 14:16
    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
  • 14:24 - 14:27
    that are dedicated to discovery research,
  • 14:27 - 14:31
    and hop on board with us
    on a grand expedition
  • 14:31 - 14:34
    to radically transform our
    understanding of life.
  • 14:34 - 14:36
    And along the way,
  • 14:36 - 14:40
    change the way we do
    biomedical research forever.
  • 14:40 - 14:41
    Thank you.
  • 14:41 - 14:45
    (Applause)
Title:
Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC
Description:

Life on this planet is the history of rule breakers – species that didn't get the memo about how they were supposed to behave. So if we are studying rule breakers, then shouldn't how we study them break the rules, too?

This fascinating talk poses the question: is the way science approaches life’s biggest mysteries restricting our ability to solve them?

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is a researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Sánchez Alvarado's current research efforts are aimed at understanding the molecular and cellular basis of animal regeneration.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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

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