Genetic Potential and Future Discovery

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Let me take you back to where it began New York, two thousand four Picture the scene It is the fifty eighth session of the UN General Assembly and we have reached a gendnder item fifty two. A Literally dozens of delegates are still awake we reach paragraph sixty seven It was titled Op ended informal consultative process It read requests the Secretary General to convene the fifth meeting of the consultative process in New York from the seventh to the eleventh of june two thousand four and provide it with the necessary facilities. You still with me This was the starting pistol and after that things moved pretty fast. How fast an informal ad hoc open ended working group was convened Sometimes informal, open ended working groups do big things Last year Their recommendations were ratified by the sixtieth country, which means that this year the UN highigh seas Treaty has entered law. For the first time we have environmental rules to deal with the tragedy of our biggest and probably most tragic, collective commons The sea This is possibly the most important year for sea politics and sea science in decades. And with me to talk about what that means But also remind us about why the seas are so important. We have two great guests Vanon Dumisell is the United Nations addvisor to the Oceans. Helen Cherssky is Professor of the Environment and Society at UCL. Please welcome them to the stage Vanil, let's start with you. You're actually an economist. Tell us how you got into the sea? Yeah, started my career in Africa in fact and witnessed world anunger there when I was like twenty years old and I decided to devote my career to mitigate world anunger. And after twenty years of experience, I realized that there was not much solution on land because of the population growth and the high demand in calories. And then I look back and realize that our planet is seventy percent covered by ocean. And these oceans, they contribute to less than two percent of our food calorie in calorie supply. I mean, we moved from prehistory to modernistory back twelve thousand years ago when we stopped being hntters gasaers and became farmers. but that was only on land And know it's time to become civilized with the ocean and understand what it means and rely a bit more on the ocean to remember that these oceans they are the real source and the core metrics of life on our planet. mean When you want to rebuild something, when you want to rebuild your house, you don't start with a rooftop, you start with a foundation. The foundation of life on this planet is the ocean So if we want to take care of our planet, we have to start with the ocean Thank you. You've written a book Power of Plankton. Now Helen wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Blue Machine and it's about the mechanics of the ocean and there's a passage in it that I love that I think gets across some of the myopia of us land dwellers. You're a physicist by training and so you'd like to talk about energy. You say, the ocean is an engine for converting sunlight into movement and life and complexity before the universe reclaims the loone. And then when the lone, the light continues its journey, that signature is dominated by blue. Our message to the universe is we are ocean How did you get into oceans? It was only after I'd done an undergraduate degree and a PhD in physics that I started looking around and I accidentally came across the science of bubbles. and bubbles took me to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where they studied breaking waves and bubbles. and so I rocked up at Scripps without really understanding what the ocean was And within three weeks, I had worked out there was something big here that there's this liquid engine that no one had told me about. And I was really frustrated. How is it that I was that kid, I read all the magazines, I read all the books. How has no one told me about the ocean And to the extent that I went aroundound scripts and I said, canan you recommend books about the ocean? And they were all about fish. And I was like, but that's not the ocean. you're not telling me, this isn't fair. So I basically became an oceanographer by the back door. and really that's where the book came from. It's interesting you use the word liquid engine We're sitting here and thank you, Hey Festival Gers for coming because this is Monday for radio listeners and it is the hottest recorded day in May ever in Britain. and this Liquid engine is extremely pertinent to it in particular the currents and there's one current in particular that come on to in a bit the AMOC. I wanted Helen to talk about some of these currents and The way is imagine you are a raindrop and you're falling in the North Atlantic and you land about a thousand years ago on Eric the Red on his way across to Greenland and you land in his beard and he shakes you off his beard and you land in the water, what happens next? Well, so that part of the world is really interesting around Iceland and Greenland because it's a place where Water doesn't just go sideways, it can also go downwards. So most of the currents in the ocean are sideways because the ocean is kind of layered by density like a cocktail. So things tend to stay in their layer and currents go sideways But if that range up fell on Eric the Red's head, and if it dropped down into the water, and if it mixed down a little way, it would meet another water mass just underneath. So just underneath that part where Eric the Red crossed, there's a kind of like a wall in the ocean, a sill, a bit of the ocean floor that kind of sticks up. and on the northern side of it is the Arctic basin cold and salty and dense. And so water kind of spills over that lip and then runs all the way down the other side into the A How far is this s of underwater water? So it goes down three and a half kilometers. So if that raindrop got sort of mixed down just a little way, got entrained by all that cold water, it gets carried then down into the depths of the Atlantic. What then happens is it kind of slithvers along the bottom of the ocean southwards for hundreds of years and actually that raindrop is probably still going. But the point is that there's a very slow majestic set of currents around the globe that go all the way around the globe and they are moving things around. So the ocean engine, this liquid engine is it's not important just because the water is going somewhere. It's important because that water is carrying things. It's carrying nutrients and heat and carbon and life And so it's moving all of these things around the ocean and it's different in different places. So that's kind of the big scale. So let's now get on to AOC. What does it stand for and where What Hollywood films might people have come across this far So it's the Atlantic Maridginal oververturning circulation, and it's the day after toomorrow that everyone thinks of. That's the Hollywood film that everyone associates with this. But there's a really important point here. that the AMOC is not the goulf stream. And I'm going to get my little oceanographer's high horse here. There are the horizontal currents, that's what the goulf stream is. It's kind of going round and round in a circle on the surface The really important bit of AMOC is that it's that downward bit. So the Gulf stream carries warm water north and then that water will sink and underneath cold water is carried back south, deep down. And so what's important about that is that it is overturning. It comes one way on the surface and it goes back the other way underneath, and it carries heat northwards. and then know you have this huge global system of currents on the other side of it And the thing is it's carrying a lot of heat towards Northern Europe. So it matters for our weather because it's basically carrying energy from the equator up towards where we are And then it's carrying cold water back the other way and the concern is that it's somehow going to stop The problem is predicting the future is very difficult. We've only got direct measurements of the AMOC itself for twenty two years now. So it seems it's slowing down a little bit. It's very hard to tell whether that's part of just natural variation or whether it's some big shutdown And so people have got different opinions on this. and there's some recent papers where people have said, well, if you think about it as this kind of system and you use this kind of wobble as the important bit, then it looks like it might slow down a lot in the next few years. But it's important to say that we're talking about a weakening. It's not like it's going to switch off tomorrow. If it does cross this line where it is going to stop, it's probably going to take a hundred years to happen. There's plenty of other things in the ocean, bad things happening right now. We don't need to wait for fifty years for this thing that may or may not happen. You that should be enough reason for action OkayK, well, things that we need to pay attention to in the ocean that we don't is a perfect segue for Vanon Now we're going to get onto the highigh seas treaty First something else that happened at the UN. You recently presented a manifesto at the UN, and it was called the Pankton. manifesto. You think that plankton have been woefully overlooked in discussions about biodiversity, and you lament in the document that we focus on charismatic and visible organisms such as ans list Fish, corals, and seaweeds. tellell us about it Well, they are totally overlooked in any discussion. I mean, The ocean absorbed thirty percent of the global emission and it took twenty one cup to start mentioning the ocean in the scP agreement. And no we are yet to mention the Pankton, which is a large part of the biological carbon pump. So basically, what is Plankton first? I mean, as's be described. Plankton is anything that does not go against the current, that cannot swim against the current. More importantly So it gathers a wide wide range of organisms which go from tiny, tiny virus to very long jellyfish, including archaea, including bacteria, fungi, Plankton has created everything on earth. I mean, there were there at the very beginning. As you mentioned, this blue en genine has been also a blue engine for life And over the last four billion years of that life is existing on this planet for four billion years three point five billion years are purely in the ocean. I mean, this terrestrial life. It's a very recent epip phenomenon And it's not so important for the environment in the end even though we have Plankton did have a very strong impact on the environment and all these tiny cerature. when you look at the droplet of water You think because it's too transparent you think it's empty, but actually it's millions of organisms there invisible organisms. It's an abundant ecosystem teeming with life And there started the the most incredible epic ever which is the story of life. Plankton has terraformed our planet. I mean, it has created a climate sinking carbon in the deep ocean. It has released oxygen. The stroke of genus from Plankton was two billion years ago when they invented photosynthesis. So Plankton has created the oil, the petroleum we are using. I mean every year we are burning as throughil one million years of sedimented plankton So the thing about it when you feel your tank, you may use a couple of fears of planet activity And the thing that no one talked about them while pllankton, they are still responsible for creating a large part of the oxygen, for enabling the water cycle, releasing sulfur gas in the atmosphere, sequesttering carbon, maintaining our climate. and no one talks about them I mean, at school we talk to our kids about dinosaurs, but come on, who care about dinosaurs? They are dead for sixty five million years. They are useless. I mean, stop talking about dinosaur and come on talk about diatoms and cocooltophore and dinoflagellates. There are the future These the most important and the least understood ecosystem on earth. But the most interesting thing is that now with new technology it becomes visible 's become understandable. I mean it's revealing its secret and miracles because with AI, with genomics, with satellite as well because Plankton gives color to the oceans so you can see them from the sky. So with all with moving systems and so for with all these remote transors We know we can understand the complexity of this amazing complexity of of this ecosystem. And if we do Th thenen we understand the entire planet biology and we can fix most of our problems. So I think it's a great, great source of hope for the next generation. I mean, more importantly, Plankton to me, and that common twit of this book Plantton and Hope. I think we are feeding way too much in a generation with doom and gloom and fear and drama. I think our role as adults is to feed them with a hope and solution. And Plankon is a huge solution to activate. And I think that's why we raise that as the United Nations in order as a call for action to all the policymakers and the NGOs and so forth Id just like to add something about how much plankton matters for us, because yes, we affect the plankton, but it's also true that even if you never see the ocean, we depend on things pllankton do on land. And my favorite example of this is that I'm sure all of you at some point have stood in a building with a foundation made of concrete or you've poured concrete in your garden. The calcium that went into concrete, all of it was collected by plankton in the ocean. An even more striking example for all of us I mean, the test of champpagne. Yes, it comes from the pllanktonic activity. back millions years ago, which created this specific land and rocks and lemmonstone that gives the taste to champpnees. so we have to be grateful to pl. Very important. so one thing that you touch on in your Plankton manifesto that I find is again, very interesting given what we're experiencing today Is the possibility that we could use the Plankton to get ourselves out of this climate change that they could perhaps be cultivated in a way that we can engineer the oceans. talkal us through the ideea and the upsides and downsides. That's very complicated first. I mean, the ocean is the most complex ecosystem. So we should be very, very careful about this Ultimately, yes, possibly we can try to at some point one day driven by science being very, very careful trying to understand this. We can try and that. Well we were this is extremely hey, but we me and Helen last night were in bookop and we were having some champagne and we were toasting pllankton wells we did. and then Helen Some of us were counting bubbles. Yeah. Eactly See Helen was having a arrguments slash debate about civilised very civilised debate Stong disagreement about geo engineering. And for the purpose of this, I'm going to take we're going towards brick wall side of things Yes, these things might have all sorts of unintended consequences, but given we're clearly We're not going to keep one point five alive in the UN phrase. We're not going to keep two alive. We're going to overshoot massively. why not feed those planks some nice iron and see what happens. Well the first thing is, whatever you do, you've got to be sure it's going to work and we're still doing the basic science. There's actually lots of ideas. So the ocean, the deep ocean water is a huge store of carbon naturally. and so the thinking is that if you can add a little bit more to it, it won't make much difference to the chemistry of the ocean, but it might take it out of the atmosphere What we care about is how much carbon is in the atmosphere. So the first thing is you've got to be sure, if you're going to put effort into one of these things that it actually works. And for almost all of these techniques, and there are lots of different techniques. You can enhance the alkalinity of the ocean, you can directly strip carbon dioxide out, you can try these things with iron fertilization We haven't done enough science to know whether it works. So it's all very uncertain. And I think a lot of environmental scientists who see how complicated, if we think our own bodies are complicated, scientists are still studying the human body. The ocean is probably more complicated than that, and the ocean is much further away and harder to study. And I think that's the concern that we see how complicated this is and we see there's lots of ways to mess up the planet in new ways and let's face it, we've got enough old ways of messing up the planet. We definitely don't need any new ones. I think that's a nice way to segue into controls the ocean A reminder, you're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World C. Sking Pushing Creating Learning, discovering At ArAamCco, we believe in harnessing the power of data to push the limits of what's possible. That's how we deliver reliable energy to millions across the world. ArAamco, an integrated energy and chemicals company. Learn more about us at Aramco. com Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'twas a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight, we feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carmana. Pick up fees man apply. this As I said, it's a momentous year for ocean governance. Can you talk us through the high seas Treaty, Vancent? How important is it? Sure Well, I think that's an amazing achievement after twenty years of negotiation and for all the good things and positive things we don't talk about it enough I think I see sixty five percent of the ocean So which is not under contl at the moment and we should try to control them and prevent anything wrong to be done there. And that agreement, which has been a very, very complex agreement, once again, is trying these trying to develop the marine protected area to better redistribute the profit generated from these IC resources and so forth. So I think that's all very good. on the ocean starting on the tenth of january in New York next year. that's for the first time ever, we will have a global meeting from all the head of states in order to define what's practices for the ocean. and I think that's so important The thing is that it's a framework. It's not got all the hows and the why's in it yet, but what it does do is it gives everyone a way to sit down together and actually, for example, agree on marine protected areas. So at the moment, there's been no standardized way of saying, this is going to be a marine protected area and everybody agrees on what that means. And one of the big things about this treaty is it's going to define that, so there's going to be a process. And that opens the way to something which people have been talking about for a few years now and people might have heard of, which is thirty by thirty and the idea that thirty percent of the ocean should be protected by twenty thirty. So basically, it's not the final answer, but it opens the door to how to actually have these agreements in a way that everybody can get on board with. And that's the really important. What does protected mean? Can you fish there? Can you mine there? Is there anyone policing it There's many different ways. I mean, there's many different levels of protection. I think that's something we need to improve as well. And my callal on that being a plankton advocate at the UN is that we should take more into consideration the planktonic activity. Typically the marine protected area are based on fish stocks But we don't really care about what's feeding these fish. I mean, we keep talking about protecting whales and dolphin and turtles, but who cares about what's feeding them? The whales, they are starving more than they are overfish today, actually. And so we should take care. And in this agreement, typically in the marine Potected discussion, we have right now introduced very recently what we call the Copa, which is the key ocean Plankonck area So the place where plankton will grow and will feed the rest of the life on the ocean because that's what needs to be protected as well somehow. So where is your fantasy Plankton marine protected area? Where are you going to give? Well there are multiple. I mean, you need to see the ocean. It's not one common thing. I mean, there are many landscapes in the ocean, many different typees ecosystem there and we need to protect them. So there's one thing, we need to protect them in advance. And then another topic that was even more discussed than a marine protected area, which was the way to redistribute the benefit of all these activities. tyypically. I mean just to give you some figures on this, We launched an expedition in France back twenty years ago, we knew about forty virus in the ocean. After this expedition, we now know about half a million. virus in the ocean Over the last twenty years, we have discovered one hundred fifty million new genes Comparing the ocean with our body, our body as you did, our body is twenty thousand genes. So we have discovered one hundred fifty million new genes in the ocean over the last twenty years and that's an untapped potential for innovation. Just one quick example, easy one We have some glass here. The most abundant organism on the planet by very far is diatom The atom is capable to create a glass shell around their body. They do it at four or five, ten degrees. We with our big brain, we need one thousand five hundred degrees to create glass So you know the potential for biomimicking what's happening in the ocean is almost unlimited We need huge capacities, we need twenty people, We need very strong infrastructure. So only a few countriry can afford this. So typically over the last thirty years, there was forty thousand patent on marine jes declared at international level. Half of them are from BSF a global leader in chemistry, which is a bit worrying in hisself. And if you look at ten richest country in the North. They own ninety eight percent of the patents around the marine Jans So there' the risk of neoc cololonialism of these marine resources right now. and we should avoid that. This was one of the fascinating things about the High Seas Treaty or the BBNG as you've been calling it, is actually there was a lot of it that was about this thing that I thought was quite niche, which was who owns the genes It's not the ocean at all. It's absolutely key. I think most of us were unaware. I rem if you remember Craig Wentter died a couple of weeks ago. He was the Maverick geneticist who was involved in sequencing the human genome. He spent his latter years, which sound lovely going on his own yacht around the oceans finding genes patenting them Yeah. But I think that's the next stage for the next area of of discoveries. I mean, the nineteenth century has been very prolific in science discovery. So we travel the world and we discovered the visible world. I bet the twenty first century because of the new tool will be key to discover the invvitible world from the ocean and there We really reach the core engine of life on our planet. So that's what is very fascinating and full of open solutions as well. So I think it's a really, really a lot of premises from the for the next generation.en. A lot of these genes in the ocean are coming from single cells. We get very obsessed because we're animals and we're quite big and we have lots of cells and we walk around, we assume that the world is dominated by big animals like us. But actually, the vast majority of life in the ocean is too small for us to see. And what's happening is that there are an astonishing diversity of bacteria, of algae, of microbes of all different types, and they're all little factories And the thing is that they have been working out how to do things biochemically for millions of years. And the reason that the genetic riches are so enormous is that you've basically got a big petry dish out of all these little micrombs. Every single one is a little factory that's doing lots of things. And we don't even know all of the things that they do. And so those are potentially really useful little ory processes that we could basically borrow from them I remember I think one of the easiest ways to make you cross is to say that we know less about the deep sea than we do about the hate it surface of the moon. Don't say it's not true. It is. So this thing about the ocean being us knowing more about the moon than we do about the deep ocean is first of all categorically not true, right? Tens of thousands of ocean scientists have spent huge careers finding out all kinds of things about the ocean twwelve men went to the mooon once and But the other thing is there is much, much more to know about the ocean. It's living, it's moving, it's dynamic, it's got all these complexities in it. The moon The moon is very nice, but it's a dead rock that hasn't changed for two billion years, right? There is more interesting science in one weird little worm somewhere in the ocean than there is in the moon. And I like the moon, it's fine, right? It's just that every time you compare tides without. Every time you compare the deep ocean to the moon, you make the deep ocean sound like the moon. You make it sound like a barren dead place that doesn't do anything really winds me up as you might be able to tell When To me, I think we should try to use that and get interested into anything that uses this. I mean, if your children are looking for a meaning in their life, I mean, let's get them to study the ocean I agree with you. On the other hand, you know, I come from France and used I was in Syweed, I come from France. We have twenty times more ocean in terms of economic zone in France than we have land If you look at the number of scientists who are working on two typees of weeeds the crop We have six hundred scientists working on two type of weeds that are very similar and that we cultivate for twelve thousand years. We have eighty scientists working on twelve thousand type of seaweed So if you see the science gap is here, I think we are lacking science. we are lacking marine biologists by far And in order to understand it better, I mean we need more forces, we need more budget