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I recently had an epiphany.
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I realized that I could
actually play a role
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in solving one of the biggest problems
that faces mankind today,
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and that is the problem of climate change.
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It also dawned on me that
I had been working for 30 years or more
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just to get to this point in my life
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where I could actually make
this contribution to a bigger problem.
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And every experiment
that I have done in my lab
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over the last 30 years
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and people who work for me
did in my lab over the last 30 years
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has been directed toward doing
the really big experiment,
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this one last big experiment.
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So who am I?
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I'm a plant geneticist.
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I live in a world where there's
too much CO2 in the atmosphere
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because of human activity.
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But I've come to appreciate the plants
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as amazing machines that they are,
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whose job has been, really,
to just suck up CO2.
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And they do it so well,
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because they've been doing it
for over 500 million years.
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And they're really good at it.
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And so ...
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I also have some urgency
I want to tell you about.
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As a mother, I want to give
my two children a better world
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than I inherited from my parents,
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it would be nicer to keep it going
in the right direction,
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not the bad direction.
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But I also ...
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I've had Parkinson's
for the last 15 years,
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and this gives me a sense of urgency
that I want to do this now,
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while I feel good enough
to really be part of this team.
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And I have an incredible team.
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We all work together,
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and this is something we want to do
because we have fun.
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And if you're only going to have
five people trying to save the planet,
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you better like each other,
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because you're going to be spending
a lot of time together.
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(Laughter)
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OK, alright. But enough about me.
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Let's talk about CO2.
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CO2 is the star of my talk.
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Now, most of you probably think
of CO2 as a pollutant.
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Or perhaps you think of CO2
as the villain in the novel, you know?
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It's always the dark side of CO2.
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But as a plant biologist,
I see the other side of CO2, actually.
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And that CO2 that we see,
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we see it differently because
I think we remember, as plant biologists,
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something you may have forgotten.
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And that is that plants actually
do this process called photosynthesis.
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And when they do photosynthesis --
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all carbon-based life on our earth
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is all because of the CO2 that plants
and other photosynthetic microbes
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have dragged in from CO2
that was in the atmosphere.
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And almost all of the carbon in your body
came from air, basically.
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So you come from air,
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and it's because of photosynthesis,
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because what plants do
is they use the energy in sunlight,
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take that CO2 and fix it into sugars.
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It's a great thing.
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And the other thing
that is really important
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for what I'm going to tell you today
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is that plants and other
photosynthetic microbes
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have a great capacity for doing this --
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twentyfold or more than the amount
of CO2 that we put up
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because of our human activities.
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And so, even though
we're not doing a great job
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at cutting our emissions and things,
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plants have the capacity,
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as photosynthetic organisms, to help out.
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So we're hoping that's what they'll do.
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But there's a catch here.
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We have to help the plants
a little ourselves,
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because what plants like to do
is put most of the CO2 into sugars.
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And when the end
of the growing season comes,
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the plant dies and decomposes,
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and then all that work they did
to suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere
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and make carbon-based biomass
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is now basically going right back up
in the atmosphere as CO2.
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So how can we get plants to redistribute
the CO2 they bring in
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into something that's
a little more stable?
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And so it turns out
that plants make this product,
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and it's called suberin.
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This is a natural product
that is in all plant roots.
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And suberin is really cool,
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because as you can see there, I hope,
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everywhere you see a black dot,
that's a carbon.
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There's hundreds of them in this molecule.
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And where you see those few red dots,
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those are oxygens.
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And oxygen is what microbes like to find
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so they can decompose a plant.
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So you can see why this is
a perfect carbon storage device.
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And actually it can stabilize
the carbon that gets fixed by the plant
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into something that's a little bit
better for the plant.
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And so, why now?
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Why is now a good time to do
a biological solution to this problem?
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It's because over the last
30 or so years --
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and I know that's a long time,
you're saying, "Why now?" --
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but 30 years ago, we began to understand
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the functions of all the genes
that are in an organism in general.
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And that included humans as well as plants
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and many other complicated eukaryotes.
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And so, what did the 1980s begin?
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What began then is that we now know
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the function of many of the genes
that are in a plant
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that tell a plant to grow.
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And that has now converged
with the fact that we can do genomics
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in a faster and cheaper way
than we ever did before.
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And what that tells us is that
all life on earth is really related,
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but plants are more related to each other
than other organisms.
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And that you can take a trait
that you know from one plant
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and put it in another plant,
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and you can make a prediction
that it'll do the same thing.
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And so that's important as well.
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Then finally, we have these little
genetic tricks that came along,
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like you heard about this morning --
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things like CRISPR,
that allows us to do editing
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and make genes be a little different
from the normal state in the plant.
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OK, so now we have biology on our side.
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I'm a biologist, so that's why
I'm proposing a solution
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to the climate change problem
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that really involves the best evolved
organism on earth to do it -- plants.
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So how are we going to do it?
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Biology comes to the rescue.
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Here we go.
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OK.
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You have to remember
three simple things from my talk, OK?
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We have to get plants to make more suberin
than they normally make,
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because we need them to be
a little better than what they are.
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We have to get them to make more roots,
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because if we make more roots,
we can make more suberin --
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now we have more of the cells
that suberin likes to accumulate in.
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And then the third thing is,
we want the plants to have deeper roots.
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And what that does is --
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we're asking the plant, actually,
"OK, make stable carbon,
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more than you used to,
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and then bury it for us in the ground."
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So they can do that
if they make roots that go deep
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rather than meander around
on the surface of the soil.
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Those are the three traits
we want to change:
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more suberin, more roots,
and the last one, deep roots.
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Then we want to combine
all those traits in one plant,
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and we can do that easily
and we will do it,
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and we are doing it actually,
in the model plant, Arabidopsis,
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which allows us to do these
experiments much faster
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than we can do in another big plant.
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And when we find that we have plants
where traits all add up
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and we can get more of them,
more suberin in those plants,
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we're going to move it all --
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we can and we we will,
we're beginning to do this --
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move it to crop plants.
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And I'll tell you why we're picking
crop plants to do the work for us
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when I get to that part of my talk.
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OK, so I think this is the science
behind the whole thing.
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And so I know we can do the science,
I feel pretty confident about that.
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And the reason is because,
just in the last year,
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we've been able to find single genes
that affect each of those three traits.
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And in several of those cases,
two out of the three,
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we have more than one way to get there.
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So that tells us we might be able
to even combine within a trait
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and get even more suberin.
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This shows one result,
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where we have a plant here on the right
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that's making more than double
the amount of root
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than the plant on the left,
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and that's just because of the way
we expressed one gene
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that's normally in the plant
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in a slightly different way
than the plant usually does on its own.
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Alright, so that's just one example
I wanted to show you.
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And now I want to tell you that, you know,
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we still have a lot
of challenges, actually,
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when we get to this problem,
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because it takes ...
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We have to get the farmers
to actually buy the seeds,
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or at least the seed company to buy seeds
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that farmers are going to want to have.
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And so when we do the experiments,
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we can't actually take a loss in yield,
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because while we are doing
these experiments,
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say, beginning about 10 years from now,
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the earth's population will be
even more than it is right now.
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And it's rapidly growing still.
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So by the end of the century,
we have 11 billion people,
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we have wasted ecosystems that aren't
really going to be able to handle
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all the load they have to take
from agriculture.
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And then we also have
this competition for land.
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And so we figure, to do this
carbon sequestration experiment
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actually requires a fair amount of land.
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We can't take it away from food,
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because we have to feed the people
that are also going to be on the earth
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until we get past this big crisis.
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And the climate change is actually
causing loss of yield all over the earth.
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So why would farmers
want to buy seeds
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if it's going to impact yield?
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So we're not going to let it impact yield,
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we're going to always have
checks and balances
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that says go or no go on that experiment.
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And then the second thing is,
when a plant actually makes more carbon
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and buries it in the soil like that,
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almost all the soils on earth
are actually depleted of carbon
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because of the load from agriculture,
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trying to feed eight billion people,
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which is what lives
on the earth right now.
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And so, that is also a problem as well.
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Plants that are making more carbon,
those soils become enriched in carbon.
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And carbon-enriched soils
actually hold nitrogen
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and they hold sulphur
and they hold phosphate --
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all the minerals that are required
for plants to grow and have a good yield.
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And they also retain water
in the soil as well.
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So the suberin will break up
into little particles
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and give the whole soil a new texture.
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And as we've shown that
we can get more carbon in that soil,
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the soil will get darker.
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And so we will be able
to measure all that,
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and hopefully, this is going to help
us solve the problem.
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So, OK.
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So we have the challenges of
a lot of land that we need to use,
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we have to get farmers to buy it,
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and that's going to be
the hard thing for us, I think,
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because we're not really salesmen,
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we're people who like to Google a person
rather than meet them,
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you know what I mean?
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(Laughter)
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That's what scientists are mostly like.
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But we know now that, you know,
no one can really deny --
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the climate is changing,
everyone knows that.
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And it's here and it's bad
and it's serious,
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and we need to do something about it.
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But I feel pretty optimistic
that we can do this.
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So I'm here today
as a character witness for plants.
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And I want to tell you
that plants are going to do it for us,
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all we have to do
is give them a little help,
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and they will go and get
a gold medal for humanity.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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(Cheers)
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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I finally got it out.
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Chris Anderson: Wow.
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Joanne, you're so extraordinary.
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Just to be sure we heard this right:
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you believe that within the next 10 years
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you may be able to offer the world
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seed variants for the major crops,
like -- what? -- wheat, corn, maybe rice,
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that can offer farmers just as much yield,
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sequester three times, four times,
more carbon than they currently do?
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Even more than that?
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Joanne Chory: We don't know
that number, really.
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But they will do more.
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CA: And at the same time,
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make the soil that those
farmers have more fertile?
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JC: Yes, right.
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CA: So that is astonishing.
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And the genius of doing that
and a solution that can scale
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where there's already scale.
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JC: Yes, thank you for saying that.
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CA: No, no, you said it, you said it.
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But it almost seems too good to be true.
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Your Audacious Project is that we scale up
the research in your lab
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and pave the way to start
some of these pilots
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and make this incredible vision possible.
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JC: That's right, yes, thank you.
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CA: Joanne Chory, thank you so much.
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Godspeed.
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(Applause)
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JC: Thank you.