Whats left to explore Nathan Wolfe

recently I visited Beloit Wisconsin and

I was there to honor a great 20th

century Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews

during his time at the American Museum

of Natural History

Andrews led a range of expeditions to

uncharted regions like here in the Gobi

Desert he was quite a figure he was

later it said the basis of the Indiana

Jones character and when I was in Beloit

Wisconsin I gave a public lecture to a

group of middle school students and I’m

here to tell you if there’s anything

more intimidating than talking here at

Ted

it’ll be trying to hold the attention of

a group of a thousand 12 year olds for

45-minute lecture don’t try that one at

the end of the lecture they asked a

number of questions but there was one

that’s really stuck with me since then

there was a young girl who stood up and

she asked the question where should we

explore I think there’s a sense that

many of us have that the great age of

exploration on earth is over that for

the next generation they’re gonna have

to go to outer space or the deepest

oceans in order to find something

significant to explore but is that

really the case is there really nowhere

significant for us to explore left here

on earth sort of made me think back to

one of my favorite explorers in the

history of biology this is an explorer

of the unseen world Martinus by rank so

by rank set out to discover the cause of

tobacco mosaic disease what he did is he

took the infected juice from tobacco

plants and he would filter it through

smaller and smaller filters and he

reached the point where he felt that

there must be something out there that

was smaller than the smallest forms of

life that were ever known bacteria at

the time he came up with a name for his

mystery agent he called it the virus

Latin for poison and in sort of

uncovering viruses by rank really opened

this entire new world for us we now know

that viruses make up the majority of the

genetic information on our planet more

than the genetic information on all

other forms of life combined and

obviously there’s been tremendous

practical applications associated with

this world things like the eradication

of smallpox

the advent of a vaccine against cervical

cancer which we now know is mostly

caused by human papilloma virus and

Byron’s discovery this was not something

that occurred 500 years ago a little it

was little over a hundred years ago that

bio-ink discovered viruses so basically

we had automobiles but we were unaware

of the forms of life that make up most

of the genetic information on their

planet we now have these amazing tools

to allow us to explore the unseen worlds

things like deep sequencing which allow

us to do much more than just sort of

skim the surface and look at individual

genomes from a particular species but to

look at entire metagenomes the

communities of teeming microorganisms in

on and around us and to document all of

the genetic information in these species

we can apply these techniques to things

from soil to skin and everything in

between in my organization we now do

this on a regular basis to identify the

causes of outbreaks that are sort of

unclear exactly what causes them and

just to give you a sense of how this

works

imagine that we took a nasal swab from

every single one of you and this is

something we commonly do to look for

respiratory viruses like influenza the

first thing that we would see is a

tremendous amount of genetic information

and if we started looking into that

genetic information we’d see a number of

usual suspects out there of course a lot

of human genetic information but also

bacterial and viral information mostly

from things that are completely harmless

within your nose but we’d also see

something very very surprising as we

started to look at this information we

would see that about 20% of the genetic

information in your nose doesn’t match

anything that we’ve ever seen before no

plant animal fungus virus or bacteria

basically we have no clue what this is

and for the small group of us who

actually study this kind of data a few

of us have actually begun to call this

information biological dark matter we

know it’s not anything that we’ve seen

before it’s sort of the equivalent of an

uncharted continent right within our own

genetic information and there’s a lot of

it if you think twenty percent of

genetic information in your nose is a

lot

biological dark matter if we looked at

your gut up to forty or fifty percent of

that information as biological dark

matter and even in the relatively

sterile blood around one to two percent

of this information as dark matter can’t

be classified can’t be typed or matched

with anything that we’ve seen before at

first we thought that perhaps this was

artifact right these deep sequencing

tools are relatively new but as they’ve

become more and more accurate we’ve

determined that this information is a

form of life or at least some of it as a

form of life and while the hypotheses

for explaining the existence of

biological dark matter are really only

in their infancy there’s a very very

exciting possibility that exists that

buried in this life are signatures and

this genetic information are signatures

of as of yet unidentified life that as

we explores these strings of AIDS t CS

and G’s we may uncover a completely new

class of life that like bio ink will

fundamentally change the way that we

think about the nature of biology the

perhaps will allow us to identify the

cause of a cancer that afflicts us or

identify the source of an outbreak that

we don’t familiar with or perhaps create

a new tool in molecular biology

I’m pleased to announce that along with

colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and

UCSF we’re currently starting an

initiative to explore biological dark

matter for the existence of new forms of

life a little over a hundred years ago

people were unaware of viruses the forms

of life that make up most of the genetic

information on our planet a hundred

years from now people may marvel that we

were perhaps completely unaware of a new

class of life that literally was right

under our noses it’s true we may have

charted all the continents on the planet

and we may have discovered all the

mammals that are out there but that

doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left

to explore on earth by rankin is kind

provide an important lesson for the next

generation of explorers people like that

young girl from Beloit Wisconsin and I

think if we phrase that lesson it’s

something like this don’t assume that

what we currently think is out there is

the full story go after the dark matter

in whatever field you choose to explore

or their unknowns all around us and

they’re just waiting to be discovered

thank you

you