Magnificent Vistas of Ignorance | Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado | TEDxKC

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

I have been spending my summers

in the Marine Biological Laboratory in
Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

And there, what I have been
doing is essentially renting a boat.

What I would like to do
is to ask you

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

(Laughter)

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 at 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,

and 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,

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

that inhabit the planet.

So, I'm beginning to suspect that

our specialization is beginning to
impede our progress at best,

and at worst, leading us astray.

That's because life on this
planet and its history

is the history of rule breakers.

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

swimming for millions of years
in the ocean,

until one of those creatures
decided that,

"I'm going to do things
differently today,

today I would like to invent
something called Multicellularity,

I'm going to do this."

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

(Laughter)

but somehow it managed to do it.

And then, Multicellular organisms
began to populate

all these ancestral oceans,
and they thrived,

and we have them here today.

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

and another creature thought,

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

I'd like to move over there.

What, are you crazy?

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

But life found a way,

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

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

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

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

And yet, nature has invented
multiple and independent times

ways to fly.

I love to study animals
that break the rules

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

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

These animals did not
get the memo,

they have broken the rules.

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

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

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

rather than bringing nature into
our laboratories and interrogating them,

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

And there, with our modern
technological armamentarium,

interrogate every new form of
life we find

and any new biological attribute
that we may find.

We actually need to bring all
of our intelligence

to becoming stupid again.

Clueless in the immensity,

in front of the immensity
of the unknown.

Because, after all,

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

that's what we do.

So if we're serious about this,

we are going to have to start
seriously supporting

those institutions that make it
possible

for discovery research to take place.

Institutions like our own

Stowers Institute for Medical Research
in Kansas City, Missouri,

or the National Institute of General
Medical Science in Bethesda, Maryland,

and of course our gateway
to biodiversity,

the Marine Biological Laboratory
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

I have been very fortunate to be able
to do some of this training myself,

and it is a pleasure for me

to actually grab students out of the
confines of their laboratories

away from their computers and
their catalogues,

and throw them into the world
of discovery and exploration.

It is an immense pleasure,
a real pleasure to actually see

how these bright, young minds'
curiosity spreads its wings

and flies away when faced
with the unknown.

This is how we become
real scientists.

So we need these people
to actually go out there

and ask the better questions
that will bring us closer

to the answers that we seek.

Once, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
actually wrote

that if you want to build a ship,

don't drum up people to collect wood

and don't assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.

As a scientist and a teacher,

I like to paraphrase this to read,

that we scientists need to
teach our students

to long for the endless immensity
of the sea

that is our ignorance.

We, Homo sapiens, are the only
species we know of

that is driven to scientific inquiry,

We, like all other species on this planet

are inextricably woven into the
history of life in this planet.

I think that I'm a little wrong when
I say that life is a mystery,

because I think that life is
actually an open secret

that has been beckoning our species
for millennia to understand it.

So I ask you,

are we the best chance that
life has to know itself?

And if so, what the heck
are we waiting for?

We need to do things differently.

Tonight I'm going to ask you

to please help us build the
greatest discovery research vessel

in the history of humankind.

Call your legislators,

ask them to fund basic discovery research,

support and give what you can
to institutions such as these

that are dedicated to discovery research,

and hop on board with us
on a grand expedition

to radically transform our
understanding of life.

And along the way,

change the way we do
biomedical research forever.

Thank you.

(Applause)