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