I recently had an epiphany. I realized that I could actually play a role in solving one of the biggest problems that faces mankind today, and that is the problem of climate change. It also dawned on me that I had been working for 30 years or more just to get to this point in my life where I could actually make this contribution to a bigger problem. And every experiment that I have done in my lab over the last 30 years and people who work for me did in my lab over the last 30 years has been directed toward doing the really big experiment, this one last big experiment.
我最近有個頓悟。 了解到其實我能扮演一個角色, 協助解決人類現今 所面臨的最大問題之一, 那就是氣候變遷的問題。 我也開始明白,我已經 工作了三十年以上, 只是為了到達 我人生中的這個時點, 讓我能夠為更大的問題貢獻心力。 過去三十年間,我在 實驗室中做的每個實驗, 以及過去三十年間在我實驗室中 為我工作的人所做的實驗, 都是為了要來做這個大實驗, 最後一個大實驗。
So who am I? I'm a plant geneticist. I live in a world where there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere because of human activity. But I've come to appreciate the plants as amazing machines that they are, whose job has been, really, to just suck up CO2. And they do it so well, because they've been doing it for over 500 million years. And they're really good at it. And so ...
所以,我是誰? 我是植物遺傳學家。 在我所居住的世界中, 大氣的二氧化碳含量太高, 這是人類活動造成的。 但我漸漸開始賞識 植物是了不起的機器, 它們一直吸收二氧化碳。 它們做得非常好, 因為它們這樣做已經超過五億年了。 它們非常擅長。 所以……
I also have some urgency I want to tell you about. As a mother, I want to give my two children a better world than I inherited from my parents, it would be nicer to keep it going in the right direction, not the bad direction.
我也有件急迫的事要跟各位談。 身為母親,我想要給 我的兩個孩子更好的世界, 比我父母給我的更好, 比較希望看到的 是世界繼續朝對的方向前進, 而不是壞的方向。
But I also ... I've had Parkinson's for the last 15 years, and this gives me a sense of urgency that I want to do this now, while I feel good enough to really be part of this team. And I have an incredible team. We all work together, and this is something we want to do because we have fun. And if you're only going to have five people trying to save the planet, you better like each other, because you're going to be spending a lot of time together.
但我也…… 我有帕金森氏症, 它跟了我十五年, 這讓我更急著想要現在就做這件事, 趁我的狀況還不錯, 還能為團隊盡力的時候。 我的團隊非常棒。 我們全都同心協力, 我們想要做這件事 是因為我們做得很開心。 且,如果你們只有五個人 在試圖拯救地球, 你們最好喜歡彼此,因為你們 會花很多時間相處在一起。 (笑聲)
(Laughter)
OK, alright. But enough about me. Let's talk about CO2. CO2 is the star of my talk. Now, most of you probably think of CO2 as a pollutant. Or perhaps you think of CO2 as the villain in the novel, you know? It's always the dark side of CO2. But as a plant biologist, I see the other side of CO2, actually. And that CO2 that we see, we see it differently because I think we remember, as plant biologists, something you may have forgotten. And that is that plants actually do this process called photosynthesis. And when they do photosynthesis -- all carbon-based life on our earth is all because of the CO2 that plants and other photosynthetic microbes have dragged in from CO2 that was in the atmosphere. And almost all of the carbon in your body came from air, basically. So you come from air, and it's because of photosynthesis, because what plants do is they use the energy in sunlight, take that CO2 and fix it into sugars. It's a great thing.
好。不要再談我了。 咱們來談談二氧化碳。 二氧化碳是我這場演說的明星。 在座大部分的人可能認為 二氧化碳是污染物。 或者,也許你們認為 二氧化碳是小說中的反派。 總是看到二氧化碳的黑暗面。 但,身為植物生物學家, 我看的其實是二氧化碳的另一面。 我們所看到的二氧化碳, 我們會對它另眼看待是因為, 身為植物生物學家,我們記得 某件你們可能已經遺忘的事。 那就是,植物會進行 一個叫做光合作用的過程。 當它們進行光合作用時—— 地球上所有的碳基生物, 都是因為植物 和其他光合作用微生物 把大氣中的二氧化碳吸收進來。 基本上,你們體內 所有的碳都來自空氣。 所以你們來自空氣, 因為光合作用, 因為植物所做的就是 使用太陽的能量 吸取二氧化碳,轉變成糖。 這是件好事。
And the other thing that is really important for what I'm going to tell you today is that plants and other photosynthetic microbes have a great capacity for doing this -- twentyfold or more than the amount of CO2 that we put up because of our human activities. And so, even though we're not doing a great job at cutting our emissions and things, plants have the capacity, as photosynthetic organisms, to help out. So we're hoping that's what they'll do.
還有一件事,也對今天 要談的主題很重要, 那就是,植物和其他 光合作用微生物 做這件事的能力很強—— 比我們人類活動 所產生出來的二氧化碳量 還要高二十倍以上。 所以,雖然我們在減少排放方面 沒有做得很好, 但,身為光合作用有機體, 植物有能力可能協助我們。 所以,我們希望它們能夠幫忙。
But there's a catch here. We have to help the plants a little ourselves, because what plants like to do is put most of the CO2 into sugars. And when the end of the growing season comes, the plant dies and decomposes, and then all that work they did to suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere and make carbon-based biomass is now basically going right back up in the atmosphere as CO2.
但,沒這麼好的事。 我們自己得要先稍微協助植物, 因為,植物會把大部分的 二氧化碳轉成糖。 在生長季節要結束時, 植物會死亡並分解, 接著,它們之前將二氧化碳 從大氣中吸掉以及製造碳基生物質 所做的所有工作, 現在基本上都以二氧化碳的 形式回到大氣當中。
So how can we get plants to redistribute the CO2 they bring in into something that's a little more stable? And so it turns out that plants make this product, and it's called suberin. This is a natural product that is in all plant roots. And suberin is really cool, because as you can see there, I hope, everywhere you see a black dot, that's a carbon. There's hundreds of them in this molecule. And where you see those few red dots, those are oxygens. And oxygen is what microbes like to find so they can decompose a plant. So you can see why this is a perfect carbon storage device. And actually it can stabilize the carbon that gets fixed by the plant into something that's a little bit better for the plant.
所以,我們要如何讓植物 重新分配它們所帶入的二氧化碳, 製成稍微更穩定一點的東西? 結果發現,植物會製造一項產物, 叫做軟木脂。 它是一種天然產物, 在所有植物的根部都有。 軟木脂非常酷, 因為我希望各位可以在這裡看到, 凡是看到黑點的地方,就代表碳。 在這個分子中有數百個黑點。 還可以看到少數的紅點, 它們是氧。 微生物喜歡去找氧, 這麼一來它們就可以分解植物。 所以各位可以看得出來這為什麼 是個完美的碳儲存裝置。 事實上,它可以穩定 植物所提供的碳, 成為對植物更好一點的東西。
And so, why now? Why is now a good time to do a biological solution to this problem? It's because over the last 30 or so years -- and I know that's a long time, you're saying, "Why now?" -- but 30 years ago, we began to understand the functions of all the genes that are in an organism in general. And that included humans as well as plants and many other complicated eukaryotes. And so, what did the 1980s begin? What began then is that we now know the function of many of the genes that are in a plant that tell a plant to grow. And that has now converged with the fact that we can do genomics in a faster and cheaper way than we ever did before. And what that tells us is that all life on earth is really related, but plants are more related to each other than other organisms. And that you can take a trait that you know from one plant and put it in another plant, and you can make a prediction that it'll do the same thing. And so that's important as well. Then finally, we have these little genetic tricks that came along, like you heard about this morning -- things like CRISPR, that allows us to do editing and make genes be a little different from the normal state in the plant.
所以,為什麼是現在? 為什麼現在是個好的時機點, 很適合用生物解決方案 來處理這個問題? 因為,在過去三十年左右—— 我知道那是很長的時間, 你們說「為什麼是現在?」—— 但,三十年前,我們開始了解 一般有機體中所有基因的功能。 那包括了人類以及植物, 還有許多其他複雜的真核生物。 所以,八○年代是什麼的開端? 那時,我們開始了解 在植物中有許多基因的功能 在告訴植物要如何生長。 那些知識現在被用在基因組學上, 發明出比以前更快速、 更便宜的方法。 我們從中學到的是, 地球上的所有生命都是相關聯的, 但,植物和彼此的關係 比和其他有機體的關係更密切。 你可以選一項 你所知道的植物特性, 放到另一株植物上, 你便可以預測, 它會做出同樣的事。 這點也十分重要。 最後,我們還有 這些小小的基因技倆, 比如今天早上各位聽到的那些—— 像是 CRISPR,可以用來編輯基因 並製造出和植物中 正常狀態不太一樣的基因。
OK, so now we have biology on our side. I'm a biologist, so that's why I'm proposing a solution to the climate change problem that really involves the best evolved organism on earth to do it -- plants. So how are we going to do it? Biology comes to the rescue. Here we go. OK.
好,現在,生物學站在我們這一邊。 我是生物學家,那就是為什麼 我針對氣候變遷問題 提出的解決方案 會需要仰賴地球上演化得 最好的有機體——植物。 所以,我們要怎麼做? 生物學來救援了。來吧。 好。
You have to remember three simple things from my talk, OK? We have to get plants to make more suberin than they normally make, because we need them to be a little better than what they are. We have to get them to make more roots, because if we make more roots, we can make more suberin -- now we have more of the cells that suberin likes to accumulate in. And then the third thing is, we want the plants to have deeper roots. And what that does is -- we're asking the plant, actually, "OK, make stable carbon, more than you used to, and then bury it for us in the ground." So they can do that if they make roots that go deep rather than meander around on the surface of the soil.
請各位記住這場演說的 三個簡單要點,好嗎? 我們要讓植物製造出 比正常量更多的軟木脂, 因為我們需要它們 比現在的狀態再更好一些。 我們要讓它們製造更多根, 因為,如果能製造多根, 就能製造更多軟木脂—— 現在,我們有更多 能夠聚集軟木脂的細胞, 第三點,我們希望植物的根更深。 那樣的用途是—— 我們其實是在請求植物: 「好,製造穩定的碳, 比平常的還要多, 接著,為我們 將這些碳埋在地下。」 所以,如果它們的根很深, 而不是在接近土壤表面處迂迴, 它們就能做到這件事。
Those are the three traits we want to change: more suberin, more roots, and the last one, deep roots. Then we want to combine all those traits in one plant, and we can do that easily and we will do it, and we are doing it actually, in the model plant, Arabidopsis, which allows us to do these experiments much faster than we can do in another big plant. And when we find that we have plants where traits all add up and we can get more of them, more suberin in those plants, we're going to move it all -- we can and we we will, we're beginning to do this -- move it to crop plants. And I'll tell you why we're picking crop plants to do the work for us when I get to that part of my talk.
這三項特性是我們想要改變的: 更多軟木脂、更多根, 以及,最後一項,更深的根。 接著,我們想把這三項特性 結合到同一株植物中, 這很容易,我們將會這麼做, 其實,我們正在這麼做, 用的是模型植物,阿拉伯芥, 這種植物讓我們 做實驗的速度能更快, 比使用其他大型植物更快。 當我們的植物有了 所有這些特性之後, 我們就能從那些植物 取得更多軟木脂, 我們打算全部移植—— 我們能且我們會這麼做, 我們已經開始著手—— 移植到作物植物上。 我等下會告訴各位 為什麼要選作物植物 來為我們做這項工作。
OK, so I think this is the science behind the whole thing. And so I know we can do the science, I feel pretty confident about that. And the reason is because, just in the last year, we've been able to find single genes that affect each of those three traits. And in several of those cases, two out of the three, we have more than one way to get there. So that tells us we might be able to even combine within a trait and get even more suberin. This shows one result, where we have a plant here on the right that's making more than double the amount of root than the plant on the left, and that's just because of the way we expressed one gene that's normally in the plant in a slightly different way than the plant usually does on its own. Alright, so that's just one example I wanted to show you.
好,這就是這種做法背後的科學。 我知道科學的部分我們 沒問題,這我有信心。 原因是因為,就在去年, 我們分別找出了影響 那三項特性的個別基因。 在許多情況中, 大概有三分之二的比例, 我們都有不只一種方法可以辦到。 那就表示,我們甚至可以 在單一項特性中做組合, 來取得更多軟木脂。 這裡呈現的結果是, 在右手邊的植物, 它的根的數量,比左邊的 一般植物高出兩倍之多, 它會變成這樣,是因為我們 將這種植物中的一個正常基因 用和它自己一般的做法 稍微不同的方式來表現。 好,這只是我想 給各位看的一個例子。
And now I want to tell you that, you know, we still have a lot of challenges, actually, when we get to this problem, because it takes ... We have to get the farmers to actually buy the seeds, or at least the seed company to buy seeds that farmers are going to want to have. And so when we do the experiments, we can't actually take a loss in yield, because while we are doing these experiments, say, beginning about 10 years from now, the earth's population will be even more than it is right now. And it's rapidly growing still. So by the end of the century, we have 11 billion people, we have wasted ecosystems that aren't really going to be able to handle all the load they have to take from agriculture. And then we also have this competition for land. And so we figure, to do this carbon sequestration experiment actually requires a fair amount of land. We can't take it away from food, because we have to feed the people that are also going to be on the earth until we get past this big crisis. And the climate change is actually causing loss of yield all over the earth.
現在,我想要跟各位談的是, 我們其實還要面對很多挑戰, 才能解決這個問題, 因為會需要…… 我們得要讓農夫 真的去買這些種子, 或至少讓種子公司去買 農夫想要買的這些種子。 所以,當我們做實驗時, 我們其實無法承受產出損失, 因為,當我們在做這些實驗時, 比如,從現在開始算起十年, 地球的人口將會比現在還多。 人口仍然在快速成長。 在這個世紀末, 我們有一百一十億人, 我們未能有效利用的 生態系統,將無法處理 來自農業的所有負荷。 接著,還有土地競爭。 所以,我們認為, 要做這種碳隔離實驗, 其實會需要相當大片的土地。 我們不能搶食物用的土地, 因為在我們渡過這次危機之前, 我們仍然得要提供 食物給地球上的人。 而氣候變遷其實已經 在世界各地造成了產出損失。
So why would farmers want to buy seeds if it's going to impact yield? So we're not going to let it impact yield, we're going to always have checks and balances that says go or no go on that experiment. And then the second thing is, when a plant actually makes more carbon and buries it in the soil like that, almost all the soils on earth are actually depleted of carbon because of the load from agriculture, trying to feed eight billion people, which is what lives on the earth right now. And so, that is also a problem as well. Plants that are making more carbon, those soils become enriched in carbon. And carbon-enriched soils actually hold nitrogen and they hold sulphur and they hold phosphate -- all the minerals that are required for plants to grow and have a good yield. And they also retain water in the soil as well. So the suberin will break up into little particles and give the whole soil a new texture. And as we've shown that we can get more carbon in that soil, the soil will get darker. And so we will be able to measure all that, and hopefully, this is going to help us solve the problem. So, OK.
所以,農夫為什麼會想要買 可能會影響產出的種子? 所以,我們不能讓它影響產出, 我們得要一直有制衡原則, 來決定實驗要不要進行。 第二點,當植物 真的製造出更多碳, 並這樣將碳埋入土壤時, 地球上幾乎所有的土壤的碳 可能都已經耗盡了, 原因是農業的負擔, 現在地球上有八十億人, 要提供他們食物所造成的負擔。 所以,那也是個問題。 製造更多碳的植物, 那些土壤就會更富含碳。 富含碳的土壤其實也含有氮, 還有硫以及磷酸鹽—— 這些都是植物成長並盛產 所需要的礦物質。 它們也會讓土壤中保有水份。 所以,軟木脂會拆開成為小粒子, 讓整體土壤有新的結構。 我們已經展示過, 若土壤中有更多碳, 顏色會變得比較暗。 我們能夠測量這項特性, 希望這能協助我們解決問題。 所以,好。
So we have the challenges of a lot of land that we need to use, we have to get farmers to buy it, and that's going to be the hard thing for us, I think, because we're not really salesmen, we're people who like to Google a person rather than meet them, you know what I mean?
我們的挑戰包括 需要使用很多土地, 要讓農夫去購買, 我認為,那對我們來說會很困難, 因為我們不是業務員, 我們這種人比較喜歡去 Google 別人而不是去和別人見面。 你們能懂吧?(笑聲)
(Laughter)
大部分科學家是這樣子的。
That's what scientists are mostly like.
But we know now that, you know, no one can really deny -- the climate is changing, everyone knows that. And it's here and it's bad and it's serious, and we need to do something about it. But I feel pretty optimistic that we can do this. So I'm here today as a character witness for plants. And I want to tell you that plants are going to do it for us, all we have to do is give them a little help, and they will go and get a gold medal for humanity.
但我們知道,沒有人能否認—— 氣候正在變遷,大家都知道。 事情發生了,狀況很糟,很嚴重, 而我們得要採取行動。 但對此我是相對樂觀。 所以,今天我是以植物的 品格證人身分來到這裡。 我想要告訴各位, 植物會為我們做這些, 我們只需要給它們一點點協助, 它們就會為人類取得金牌。
Thank you very much.
非常謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
(Cheers)
(歡呼)
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
I finally got it out.
我終於說完了。
Chris Anderson: Wow. Joanne, you're so extraordinary. Just to be sure we heard this right: you believe that within the next 10 years you may be able to offer the world seed variants for the major crops, like -- what? -- wheat, corn, maybe rice, that can offer farmers just as much yield, sequester three times, four times, more carbon than they currently do? Even more than that?
克里斯安德森:哇。 喬安妮,你真了不起。 讓我確認一下我們聽對了: 你認為在接下來的十年間, 你們將會提供世界 主要作物種子的變種, 比如小麥、玉米,也許還有稻子, 且農夫還是能保持產量, 並隔離出比目前還要高 三倍或四倍的碳量? 甚至更多?
Joanne Chory: We don't know that number, really. But they will do more.
喬安妮裘利:我們其實 不知道確切數字。 但它們會產出更多。
CA: And at the same time, make the soil that those farmers have more fertile?
克:且,同時, 讓那些農夫的土壤更肥沃?
JC: Yes, right.
喬:是的,沒錯。
CA: So that is astonishing. And the genius of doing that and a solution that can scale where there's already scale.
克:那好驚人。 且非常天才,這個解決方案能夠 將已經有的規模再擴大規模。
JC: Yes, thank you for saying that.
喬:是的,謝謝你這麼說。
CA: No, no, you said it, you said it. But it almost seems too good to be true. Your Audacious Project is that we scale up the research in your lab and pave the way to start some of these pilots and make this incredible vision possible.
克:不,不,是你說的,你說的。 但聽起來太好了,不太像真的。 你的「大膽項目」是要 把你的實驗室研究擴大規模, 並為一些前導計畫舖路, 讓這了不起的遠景成為可能。
JC: That's right, yes, thank you.
喬:沒錯,是的,謝謝你。
CA: Joanne Chory, thank you so much. Godspeed.
克:喬安妮裘利, 非常謝謝你。祝成功。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
JC: Thank you.
喬:謝謝你。