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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-31
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQpEq-L70Kg
my name is William and I am a scientific researcher at the Swedish university of agricultural sciences in all our and so were my scientific research well my research I study the genetics of insect rock has with a focus on those that damage apple which is the major product here it's gonna ever since I saw the movie Jurassic Park as a teenager I knew that I wanted
to be a genetic engineer but aside from my desire the power of genetics bring big scary monster back from extinction I was also inspired by my high school biology teacher and his lessons on the genetic code at blueprint for life at the agricultural university I have successfully take in jeans Robert past my office and transferred them into the you know okay genetic model organism the comment
reply doing this allows us to more easily studied the genes of the past office and this boat's a better understanding of their basic biology but above and beyond my passion or well the medical genetics I believe that we should not you research or the sake of generating basic knowledge rather that we should we should strive to put that knowledge to practical use or the betterment of
our societies and towards greater economic and environmental sustainability I've chosen to do research in the agricultural sector because I think that who would say you and good security are two very empowered issues that will be facing in the twenty first century as we adapt to a world where is exponentially increasing human population global climate change at diminishing not reveal what resources that is my purpose the
big idea that I'd like to share with you today certain the complicated relationship between science and technology and why what we do as scientists so or we require that you have created scientific discovery and practical application or technology look like this simple easy direct but in reality it quite often looks like this very messy sometimes scientific discoveries and even lead to technological advances in seemingly unexpected
or other related areas over the next ten minutes or so I will be exploring this idea further the footprints although science are all around us hiding in plain sight the benefits of scientific research glad into the background of our daily lives and are taken sweetly for granted but scientific research is so essential to our collective human civilization that world governments invest billions and billions of dollars
in scientific research every year they even put world famous scientists armed paper money or acknowledgement for their contributions to our societies science however is not just yeah then truths revealed it's also the methodical process used to uncover the secrets of nature had while technology is seemingly advancing quite rapidly these days at our last speaker pointed out of scientific research is Hannah staking only slow in this
era of instant communication scientific research is simply not fast enough and %HESITATION with the breathtaking speed up technological progress the expectations for science are greater than ever before there is especially an increasing impatience with the pace at which medical research progresses having failed year after year to provide shares or diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's how much human suffering and devastation result from needs at Webb
will it and in my own field economic costs you to insect pests damage are immense amounting to billions of dollars every year and tons and tons okay food product damaged and destroyed by insects out in the fields before ever even making its market in addition to being slow scientific research is also very expensive and you had better believe that those paying for it expect accountability there
is thus a need to demonstrate tangible public benefits resulting from all of the billions and billions invested and scientific research every year but here's the thing there isn't always an obvious direct pass between science and technology how then can we S. societies go which areas to invest in what the prognosis is so unclear in the post World War two era a scientific adviser to US president
Harry Truman answered this question arguing in favor of investing broad scale in basic scientific research without discrimination or expectation of practicality and I quote him discoveries pertinent to medical progress have often come from remotes and up unexpected sources and it is certain that this will be true in the future now I will give a couple of examples illustrating how this has been true yes was one
of the first impure hers ever created nineteen forty six maybe one of them that appear on stage nowadays however almost everyone here is likely to have a pocket size mini computer that is far more powerful then the computing equipment that was used she sat math for the moon how did this happen well first it would not be possible without semiconductors semiconductors are almost magical yet naturally
occurring materials that have the properties of both a conductor head insulator opal lecture current this makes them incredibly useful semiconductors were actually first discovered way back in the eighteen thirties but it wasn't until advances in quantum physics around one hundred years later that semiconductors Olea understood and eventually apply to integrated circuit boards giving way to the modern computer so this is really a story our two
hundred years in the making the next example is a biotechnology that I will be using in my own research this year call Chris Burke pass genome editing you may have heard of it it's been in the news lately Chris or is a very precise gene editing system that holds great promise you sure are almost a genetic disease imaginable and solve all of humankind's problems okay so
that's a bit of an exaggeration but here's the thing the science behind crisper technology was not originally focused I've been discovering away the edit jeans it's a story that goes back thirty years involving multiple research groups across the globe first in nineteen eighty seven there was the discovery %HESITATION odd genetic features in the genomes of bacteria and then or on twenty years later the demonstration and
that these genetic features were actually part of a primitive bacterial immune system and finally well run two thousand thirteen a couple of reports showing that the genetic features could be exploited true at it virtually any gene and that you know more virtually any life or who could have ever predicted that the immune system of a bacteria would be so useful and so we will be using
crisper to edit genes in our apple past my office and this will allow them with this will allow us you understand their genetics in greater detail that we ever did before so to wrap things up my messages this scientific progress doesn't happen overnight yeah grad outcomes of scientific discoveries are rarely or seen with great clarity had the sources of technological advances often cannot be predicted well
it it perhaps perhaps this is so not due to a lack of direction or randomness but rather that the scientific process reflections UN abilities what I science war then the game beneath the surface hoping at nature and illuminating the invisible it's not easy jeans Adams micro electromagnetic waves these things are not intuitive to us because throughout most of our evolutionary history knowing about them was not
necessary for survival and it's like out of sight out of mind but our shared human civilization has been built upon discovery of the unknown we wouldn't be where we are in the world should day without it at the ag university my group does research on insect pests that damage crops we aim or better more environmentally sustainable ways to install insect damage by exploiting the and sex
sense of smell you just struck invest correct them from the crops but our research approach is rooted in the fields %HESITATION neuro biology chemistry genetics policy and evolution with the life sciences these are all very different disciplines with different methods and different objectives our contributions to these fields man he'd felt her across the scientific community possibly leading to advances I in science and technology better far
removed from patrolling insect pests so my challenge to you is this whatever you next see a story on the news or in social media about some ridiculous absurd sounding scientific research study such as mating ritual of sea slug or or over the study of autism in a group fly remember this if you dig beneath the surface you will likely discover that there is a very important
