-
I want you to touch your face.
-
Go on.
-
What do you feel?
-
Soft, squishy. It's you, right?
-
You're feeling you.
-
Well, it's not quite true.
-
You're actually feeling
thousands of microscopic creatures
-
that live on our face and fingers.
-
You're feeling some of the fungi
-
that drifted down
from the air ducts today.
-
They set off our allergies
-
and smell of mildew.
-
You're feeling some
of the 100 billion bacterial cells
-
that live on our skin.
-
They've been munching away
at your skin oils and replicating,
-
producing the smells of body odor.
-
You're likely even touching
the fecal bacteria
-
that sprayed onto you the last time
you flushed a toilet,
-
or those bacteria that live
in our water pipes
-
and sprayed onto you
with your last shower.
-
Sorry.
-
(Laughter)
-
You're probably even giving
a microscopic high five
-
to the two species of mites
that live on our faces,
-
on all of our faces.
-
They've spent the night
squirming across your face
-
and having sex on the bridge of your nose.
-
(Laughter)
-
Many of them are now leaking
their gut contents onto your pores.
-
Now look at your finger.
-
How's it feel? Gross?
-
In desperate need of soap or bleach?
-
That's how you feel now,
-
but it's not going to be
how you feel in the future.
-
For the last 100 years,
-
we've had an adversarial relationship
-
with the microscopic life nearest us.
-
If I told you there was
a bug in your house
-
or bacteria in your sink,
-
there was a human-devised
solution for that,
-
a product to eradicate, exterminate,
-
disinfect.
-
We strive to remove most
of the microscopic life in our world now,
-
but in doing so, we're ignoring
the best source of new technology
-
on this planet.
-
The last 100 years have featured
human solutions to microbial problems,
-
but the next 100 years
-
will feature microbial solutions
to human problems.
-
I'm a scientist, and I work
with researchers
-
at North Carolina State University
and the University of Colorado
-
to uncover the microscopic life
-
that is nearest us,
-
and that's often in our most intimate
and boring environments,
-
be it under our couches, in our backyards,
-
or in our belly buttons.
-
And I do this work because it turns out
that we know very little about
-
the microscopic life that's nearest us.
-
As of a few years ago,
-
no scientist could tell you what bugs
-
or microorganisms live in your home,
-
your home, the place you know
better than anywhere else.
-
And so I and teams of others
-
are armed with q-tips and tweezers
-
and advanced DNA techniques
-
to uncover the microscopic
life nearest us.
-
In doing so, we found
over 600 species of bugs
-
that live in USA homes,
-
everything from spiders and cockroaches
-
to tiny mites that cling to feathers.
-
And we found over 100,000 species
of bacteria and fungi
-
that live in our dust bunnies,
-
thousands more that live
on our clothes or in our showers.
-
We've gone further still,
-
and we looked at the microorganisms
-
that live inside the bodies
of each of those bugs in our home.
-
In each bug, for example, a wasp,
-
we see a microscopic jungle
unfold in a petri plate,
-
a world of hundreds of vibrants species.
-
We hold the biological cosmos.
-
So many of the species
you're looking at right now
-
don't yet have names.
-
Most of the life around us
remains unknown.
-
I remember the first time I discovered
and got to name a new species.
-
It was a fungus that lives
in the nest of a paper wasp.
-
It's white and fluffy
-
and I named it [[myukwor nidikola]],
-
meaning in Latin that it lives
in the nest of another.
-
This is a picture of it
growing on a dinosaur,
-
because everyone
thinks dinosaurs are cool.
-
At the time, I was in graduate school,
-
and I was so excited that I
had found this new life form.
-
I called up my dad, and I go,
-
"Dad, I just discovered
a new microorganism species."
-
And he laughed and he goes,
-
"That's great. I hope you also
discovered a cure for it."
-
Now, my dad is my biggest fan,
-
so in that crushing moment where he wanted
to kill my new little life form,
-
I realized that actually I had failed him,
-
both as a daughter and a scientist.
-
In my years toiling away in labs
and in people's backyards
-
investigating and cataloging
the microscopic life around us,
-
I'd never made clear
my true mission to him.
-
My goal is not to find technology to kill
the new microscopic life around us.
-
My goal is to find new technology
from this life that will help save us.
-
The diversity of life in our homes
is more than a list
-
of a hundred thousand new species.
-
It is one hundred thousand new sources
of solutions to human problems.
-
I know it's hard to believe that anything
that's so small or only has one cell
-
can do anything powerful,
-
but they can.
-
These creatures are microscopic alchemists
-
with the ability to transform
their environment
-
with an arsenal of chemical tools.
-
This means that they
can live anywhere on this planet,
-
and they can eat whatever
food is around them.
-
This means they can eat
everything from toxic waste to plastic,
-
and they can produce waste products
like oil and battery power
-
and even tiny nuggets of real gold.
-
They can transform the inedible
into nutritatve.
-
They can make sugar into alcohol.
-
They give chocolate its flavor
-
and soil the power to grow.
-
I'm here to tell you
that the next 100 years
-
will feature these microscopic creatures
-
solving more of our problems.
-
And we have a lot
of problems to choose from.
-
We've got the mundane --
-
bad-smelling clothes or bland food --
-
and we've got the monumental --
-
disease, pollution, war.
-
And so this is my mission,
-
to not just catalog
the microscopic life around us,
-
but to find out what it's uniquely
well-suited to help us with.
-
Here's an example.
-
We started with a pest,
-
a wasp that lives on many of our homes.
-
Inside that wasp, we plucked out
-
a little-known microorganism species
-
with a unique ability:
-
it could make beer.
-
This is a trait that only
a few species on this planet have.
-
In fact, all commercially produced
beer you've ever had
-
likely came from one of only
three microorganism species.
-
Yet our species, it could make
a beer that tasted like honey,
-
and it could also make
a delightfully tart beer.
-
In fact, this microorganism species
-
that lives in the belly of a wasp,
-
it could make a valuable sour beer
-
better than any other species
-
on this planet.
-
There are now four species
that produce commercial beer.
-
Where you used to see a pest,
-
now think of tasting
your future favorite beer.
-
As a second example,
-
I worked with researchers
to dig in the dirt in people's backyards.
-
There, we uncovered a microorganism
that could make novel antibiotics,
-
antibiotics that can kill
the world's worst superbugs.
-
This was an awesome thing to find,
-
but here's the secret.
-
For the last 60 years,
-
most of the antibiotics on the market
-
have come from similar soil bacteria.
-
Every day, you and I
and everyone in this room
-
and on this planet
-
are saved by similar soil bacteria
that produce most of our antibiotics.
-
Where you used to see dirt,
-
now think of medication.
-
Perhaps my favorite example
comes from colleagues
-
who are studying a pond scum microorganism
-
which is tragically named after
the cow dung it was first found in.
-
It's pretty unremarkable
and would be unworthy of discussion,
-
except that the researchers found
that if you feed it to mice,
-
it vaccinates against PTSD.
-
It vaccinates against fear.
-
Where you used to see pond scum,
now think of hope.
-
There are so many more microbial examples
-
that I don't have time
to talk about today.
-
I gave you examples of solutions
that came from just three species,
-
but imagine what those other
one hundred thousand species
-
in your dust bunnies might be able to do.
-
In the future, we might be able
to make you sexier
-
or smarter
-
or perhaps live longer.
-
So I want you to look
at your finger again.
-
Think about all those
microscopic creatures
-
that are unknown.
-
Think about in the future
what they might be able to do
-
or make
-
or whose life they might be able to save.
-
How does your finger feel right now?
-
A little bit powerful?
-
That's because you're feeling the future.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)