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Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin.

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And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer,

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Roy Chapman Andrews.

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During his time at the American Museum of Natural History,

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Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions,

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like here in the Gobi Desert.

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He was quite a figure.

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He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character.

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And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin,

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I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students.

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And I'm here to tell you,

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if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED,

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it'll be trying to hold the attention

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of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture.

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Don't try that one.

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At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions,

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but there was one that's really stuck with me since then.

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There was a young girl who stood up,

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and she asked the question:

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"Where should we explore?"

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I think there's a sense that many of us have

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that the great age of exploration on Earth is over,

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that for the next generation

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they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans

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in order to find something significant to explore.

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But is that really the case?

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Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore

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left here on Earth?

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It sort of made me think back

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to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology.

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This is an explorer of the unseen world, Martinus Beijerinck.

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So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause

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of tobacco mosaic disease.

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What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants

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and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters.

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And he reached the point

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where he felt that there must be something out there

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that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known --

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bacteria, at the time.

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He came up with a name for his mystery agent.

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He called it the virus --

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Latin for "poison."

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And in uncovering viruses,

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Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us.

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We now know that viruses make up the majority

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of the genetic information on our planet,

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more than the genetic information

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of all other forms of life combined.

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And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications

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associated with this world --

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things like the eradication of smallpox,

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the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer,

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which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus.

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And Beijerinck's discovery,

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this was not something that occurred 500 years ago.

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It was a little over 100 years ago

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that Beijerinck discovered viruses.

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So basically we had automobiles,

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but we were unaware of the forms of life

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that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.

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We now have these amazing tools

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to allow us to explore the unseen world --

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things like deep sequencing,

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which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface

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and look at individual genomes from a particular species,

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but to look at entire metagenomes,

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the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us

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and to document all of the genetic information in these species.

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We can apply these techniques

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to things from soil to skin and everything in between.

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In my organization we now do this on a regular basis

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to identify the causes of outbreaks

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that are unclear exactly what causes them.

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And just to give you a sense of how this works,

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imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you.

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And this is something we commonly do

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to look for respiratory viruses like influenza.

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The first thing we would see

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is a tremendous amount of genetic information.

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And if we started looking into that genetic information,

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we'd see a number of usual suspects out there --

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of course, a lot of human genetic information,

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but also bacterial and viral information,

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mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose.

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But we'd also see something very, very surprising.

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As we started to look at this information,

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we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose

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doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before --

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no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria.

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Basically we have no clue what this is.

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And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data,

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a few of us have actually begun to call this information

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biological dark matter.

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We know it's not anything that we've seen before;

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it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent

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right within our own genetic information.

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And there's a lot of it.

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If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot

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of biological dark matter,

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if we looked at your gut,

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up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter.

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And even in the relatively sterile blood,

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around one to two percent of this information is dark matter --

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can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before.

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At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact.

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These deep sequencing tools are relatively new.

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But as they become more and more accurate,

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we've determined that this information is a form of life,

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or at least some of it is a form of life.

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And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter

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are really only in their infancy,

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there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists:

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that buried in this life, in this genetic information,

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are signatures of as of yet unidentified life.

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That as we explore these strings of A's, T's, C's and G's,

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we may uncover a completely new class of life

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that, like Beijerinck, will fundamentally change

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the way that we think about the nature of biology.

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That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us

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or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with

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or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology.

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I'm pleased to announce that,

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along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF,

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we're currently starting an initiative

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to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life.

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A little over a hundred years ago,

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people were unaware of viruses,

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the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.

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A hundred years from now, people may marvel

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that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life

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that literally was right under our noses.

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It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet

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and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there,

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but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth.

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Beijerinck and his kind

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provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers --

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people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin.

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And I think if we phrase that lesson, it's something like this:

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Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story.

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Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore.

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There are unknowns all around us

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and they're just waiting to be discovered.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)