muster für wohnzimmer
tonight, i'm going to share with youmy passion for science. i'm not talking about sciencethat takes baby steps. i'm talking about sciencethat takes enormous leaps. i'm talking darwin, i'm talking einstein, i'm talking revolutionary sciencethat turns the world on its head. in a moment, i'm going to talkabout two ideas that might do this. i say "might" because, with revolutionary ideas,most are flat wrong, and even those that are rightseldom have the impact
that we want them to have. to explain why i pickedtwo ideas in particular, i'm going to start with a mystery. 1847, vienna, austria. ignaz semmelweis was a somber,compulsively thorough doctor who ran two maternity clinics. they were identical except for one thing. women were dying of high feverssoon after giving birth three times more oftenat one of the clinics than at the other.
trying to figure outwhat the difference was that caused this, semmelweis looked at everything he could. sanitation? no. medical procedures? no. air flow? no. the puzzle went unsolveduntil he happened to autopsy a doctor who died of an infected scalpel cut. the doctor's symptoms were identicalto those of the mothers who were dying. how was that possible?
how could a male doctorget the same thing as new mothers? semmelweis reconstructedeverything the doctor had done right before he got sick, and he discoveredthat he'd been autopsying a corpse. had something gottenin his wound that killed him? with growing excitement, semmelweis lookedfor any connection he could between dead bodies in the morgueand dead mothers in his delivery room, and he found it.
it turned out that at the hospitalwith the high death rate, but not the others, doctors delivered babies immediatelyafter autopsying corpses in the morgue. aha! corpses were contaminatingthe doctors' hands and killing his mothers. so he ordered the doctorsto sterilize their hands, and the deaths stopped. dr. ignaz semmelweishad discovered infectious disease. but the doctors of the daythought he was crazy,
because they knew,and had for hundreds of years, that odorous vaporscalled miasmas caused disease, not these hypothetical particlesthat you couldn't see. it took 20 yearsfor frenchman louis pasteur to prove that semmelweis was right. pasteur was an agricultural chemist who tried to figure outwhy milk and beer spoiled so often. he found that bacteria were the culprits. he also found that bacteriacould kill people in exactly the same way
that semmelweis's patients were dying. we now look at what i wantto talk about tonight, in two ideas. we saw it with semmelweis,that he was a revolutionary. he did it for two reasons. one, he opened our eyesto a completely new world. we'd known since the 1680s about bacteria. we just didn't knowthat bacteria killed people. and he also demolished fond ideasthat people kept close to their heart. miasmas didn't kill people.bacteria killed people.
so this brings me to the two ideasi want to talk about tonight. one has opened our eyesto a completely new universe, and the other attacks long-held beliefs. let's get started with dr. eric betzig. he's a physicist who has opened our eyesto an entirely new world by violating the laws of physics. betzig is a true rebel. he quit a job at prestigiousbell laboratory inventing new microscopes for biology
because he thought scientistswere taking his brilliant inventions and doing lousy work with them. so he became a househusband, but he never lost his passionfor figuring out how to get microscopesto see finer and finer details than had ever been seen beforeor ever could be seen. this is crucial if we're evergoing to understand how cells work, and how cancer works, and how something150th the size of a head of a pin
can do all these amazing things, like make proteins and move charges around and all of those things. there's just one problem. there's this thingcalled the law of physics, and part of the law of physicsis the thing called the diffraction limit. the diffraction limit is kind of likewhen you go to a doctor's office, you can only see so far down,no matter how good glasses you have.
this was a so-called impossible problem. but one of betzig's friendsfigured out how to take a tiny molecule that was smaller thanthe best microscope could see and get it to light up and fluoresce. "aha!" betzig said. "i think maybe the laws of physicsare not so unbreakable after all." so he lashed together a microscopein his friend's living room. he had no laboratory. this revolutionary instrumentgot different protein molecules
to light up in different colors, and with a computer, he was ableto turn very, very fuzzy blurs into very sharp dots and produce imagesof unprecedented and startling clarity. for this work, last year, eric betzig won the nobel prize. why? because now we can seewith unprecedented detail things that we never had seen before, and now doctors can geta better handle on things like cancer.
but do you thinkbetzig was satisfied there? no. he wanted movies. the problem was that even the genius microscopesthat he invented were just too slow. so what did he do? he came up with a 200-year-old idea called moirã© patterns. so the way that works isif you take two very, very fine patterns
and you move them across each other, you will see a gross pattern that a microscope can see that otherwise you would notbe able to see. so he applied this techniqueto taking a really blurry image of a cell and moving lots of structuredlight patterns across it until this cell became crystal clear. and here is the result: a mysterious new world,
full of strange things zipping around doing things thatwe don't know what they're doing. but when we figure it out,we'll have a better handle on life itself. for example, thosegreen globs that you see? those things are called clathrins. they're moleculesthat protect other molecules as they move through a cell. unfortunately, viruses sometimeshijack those to infect cells. also, you see those little squigglywormlike things moving around?
those are actin molecules. unfortunately, virusesalso climb down those things to get into the cell nucleus to replicate themselves and make you sick. now that we can look at movies of what's actually going ondeep inside a cell, we have a much better chanceof curing viral diseases like aids. so when you look at a movie like this, it's very clear that betzig has openedour eyes to a completely new world.
but he hasn't shatteredany cherished beliefs. that leads us to dr. aubrey de grey at cambridge. de grey definitely has scientistssquirming with an interesting idea: we can be immortal. we can beat aging. now, most scientiststhink he's a crackpot. any biology 101 student knows that aging is an inevitableconsequence of living.
for example, when we eat, we take in food and we metabolize it, and that throws offwhat we call free radicals. you might have heard of those. also known as oxygen ions, those bind to our dna, cause it to mutate, and cause us to get old and lose our hair. (laughter) it's just like, no, it's exactly like
oxygen binding to iron and making it rust. so you age because you rust out. oh, and scientists also knowthere is something called immortality: in cancer cells. so if you stop aging, all of you are going to turninto giant walking malignant tumors. these are cherished beliefs,but could de grey be on to something? i think he deserves a closer look. first of all, i have a really hard timeseeing him as a crackpot.
yeah, he started off lifeas a computer scientist, not a biologist, but he earned a phdin biology from cambridge, and he has publishedsome very significant work on mitochondrial dnaand a bunch of other stuff. secondly, he startedan antiaging foundation that has identifiedseven different causes of aging, to me, that seem very plausible, and he is hot in pursuitof fixes for every single one of them.
for example, one of the reasons we ageis that our mitochondrial dna mutates, and we get kind of oldand our cells lose energy. he believes, and he's madea convincing case, that using viruses we can do gene therapy, fix that dna and rejuvenate our cells. one more thing. we have an existent proof that extreme longevity is possible.
bristlecone pine trees live 5,000 years, and some lobsters don't age at all. now, this doesn't mean that de greyis going to revolutionize our lifespans. i mean, after all, we're not trees,and most of us are not lobsters. but i've got to believe that there aredarwins and einsteins out there, and i'll tell you why. consider this: there are seven times more peoplealive today than during darwin's time. there are four times as many peoplealive today as einstein.
when you consider that the proportion of scientistsin the population has skyrocketed, there are now seven million scientists. i've got to believe, and i do believe,that there's one of them out there who is working right now in obscurity to rock our lives,and i don't know about you, but i can't wait to be rocked. thank you. (applause)