Karen Lloyd: This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life
كارن ليود: كيف يغير غموض هذا البحر العميق فهمنا للحياة
Karen Lloyd studies novel groups of microbes in Earth's deep surface biosphere, collecting them from disparate remote places such as Arctic fjords, volcanoes in Costa Rica, even deep in mud in the Marianas Trench Full bio
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at the University of Tennessee,
في جامعة تينيسي،
about some microbes
عن بعض أنواع الميكروبات
about what life is like on Earth.
حول طبيعة الحياة على الأرض.
if you've ever thought it would be cool
of the ocean in a submarine?
the oceans are so cool.
to go to the bottom of the ocean
a little bit closer
how deep we can go into the Earth
anything, that's alive,
أي شيء، على قيد الحياة،
the answer to this very basic question
على هذا السؤال الأساسي للغاية
named John Parkes, in the UK,
كان العالم البريطاني (جون باركس)
deep, and living microbial biosphere
حي وشاسع وعميق
into the seafloor,
is that nobody believed him,
may be the most boring place on Earth.
قد تكون أكثر الأماكن مللًا على وجه الأرض.
for literally millions of years.
حرفيًا لملايين السنين.
to go looking for life.
للبحث عن الحياة فيه.
convinced enough people
عددًا كافيًا من الأشخاص
that he actually got an expedition
حتى أنه قام ببعثة استكشافية
called the JOIDES Resolution.
Bo Barker Jørgensen of Denmark.
(بو باركر يورجنسن) من الدنمارك.
from surface microbes.
thousands of meters underneath the ocean,
لآلاف الأمتار في قاع المحيط،
one after the other --
واحدة تلو الأخرى...
such as myself who go on these ships,
الذين يذهبون على متن تلك السفن،
and then we send them home
ثم نرسلها إلى الوطن
for further study.
deep-sea pristine samples,
من أعماق البحار،
that looked pretty much like this,
from a more recent expedition
من رحله استكشافية حديثة
in the background.
stained with the green fluorescent dye
الملطخة بالصبغة الخضراء الفلورية
something really tragic about microbes.
شيئًا مأساويًا حقًا عن الميكروبات،
organisms in the world,
الأكثر روعة في العالم،
breathes uranium,
to tell them apart.
كبصمة الأصبع،
how to do it right now.
to show you some data that are not real.
وسأظهر لكم معطيات زائفة.
what it would look like
were not related to each other at all.
بين بعض أنواع تلك الكائنات.
of A, G, C and T,
and nothing looks like anything else,
ولا شيء يشبه أي شيء آخر،
are totally unrelated to each other.
البعض إطلاقًا.
happen to share.
so many of those vertical columns
من تلك الأعمدة الرأسية
or every species has a T,
had to have had a common ancestor.
لابد أن يكون لها سلف مشترك.
because, I mean, obviously.
لأنه، أعني، شيءٌ واضح.
that we don't look like,
which is that gastrointestinal disease
وهو أحد أمراض المعدة والأمعاء
your water while you're hiking.
أثناء نزهتك الطويلة.
like E. coli and Clostridium difficile,
مثل (إي كولاي) و(كلوستريديوم ديفيسيل)،
pathogen that kills lots of people.
يقتل الكثير من الناس.
like Dehalococcoides ethenogenes,
مثل (دلكوكويد اثينوجينز)،
our industrial waste for us.
and differences between them,
and bunnies and pine trees
والأرانب وأشجار الصنوبر،
are like our ancient cousins.
living thing on Earth.
against existential loneliness.
ضد الوحدة الوجودية.
للحمض النووي،
from the deep subsurface,
is that they were not aliens,
with everything else on Earth.
مع كل شيء آخر على الأرض.
on our tree of life.
على شجرة حياتنا؟
is that there's a lot of them.
in this horrible place.
like anything we've ever seen before.
that we've known before
a completely new and highly diverse
نظامًا بيئيًا ميكروبيًا على الأرض،
before the 1980s.
these exotic species in a petri dish
هذه الأنواع الغريبة في طبق بتري
do real experiments on them
and many expeditions later,
of these exotic deep subsurface microbes
على جعل هذه الميكروبات الغريبة
tantalizing unknowns to work on.
مجهولة ومحيرة للعمل عليها.
what we thought was a really great idea.
إلى ما كنا نظن أنه فكرة رائعة حقًا.
like a recipe book,
and put it in their petri dishes,
was the food we were already feeding them.
كان الطعام الذي كنا نطعمها إياه بالفعل.
that they wanted in their petri dishes
from many different places
من أماكن عديدة مختلفة
of Southern California,
of these deep-sea microbial cells
a zepto is 10 to the minus 21,
هو 10 أس سالب 21،
to look that up.
if you take a pineapple
to the ground 881,632 times a day.
إلى الأرض 881.632 مرة في اليوم.
and then linked it up to a turbine,
to make me happen for a day.
لجعلي موجودة ليوم واحد.
in similar terms,
a tiny, tiny, little ball
of that one grain of salt
than the wavelength of visible light,
من طول موجة الضوء المرئي،
to make these microbes live.
لجعل هذه الميكروبات تعيش.
would be capable of supporting life,
أنه سيكون كافيًا للحياة،
with energy than we previously thought,
with time as well,
on such tiny energy gradients,
to colonize our throats and make us sick,
استعمار حناجرنا وجعلنا مرضى،
by fast-growing streptococcus
initiate cell division.
find them in our throats.
subsurface is so boring
in our petri dishes
that I'll never be able to give them.
الذي لن أستطيع منحهم إياه.
that I pass to my PhD students,
ومررتها إلى طلابي في الدكتوراه،
PhD students, and so on,
for thousands of years
of the deep subsurface,
grown them in our petri dishes.
نمت في أطباق بتري لدينا.
we offered them and said,
الذي قدمناه لها وقالت:
a new cell next century.
of biology moves so fast?
after only a hundred years?
arbitrarily short limits
of time in the universe.
the energy of the Sun
and get on day and night cycles.
في دورات الليل والنهار.
both a reason to be fast
like a circulatory system,
كنظام الدورة الدموية،
is like a circulatory system
disconnected from the Sun.
by long, slow geological rhythms.
بإيقاعات جيولوجية بطيئة وطويلة.
on the lifespan of one single cell.
لعمر خلية واحدة.
a tiny energy gradient to exploit,
كمية طاقة صغيرة لاستغلالها،
of years or more,
broken parts over time.
القطع المكسورة مع الوقت.
to grow in our petri dishes
Sun-centric, fast way of living,
المعتمدة على الشمس،
better things to do than that.
how they managed to do this.
كيف تمكنت من القيام بذلك.
ultra-stable compounds
على عناصر رائعة ومستقرة للغاية،
to increase the shelf life
لزيادة العمر الافتراضي
the mechanism that they use
and slow runaway cell division.
وإبطاء الانقسام الخلوي.
a hundred billion billion billlion
biomass of humans on this planet.
الكتلة الحيوية للإنسان على هذا الكوكب.
a fundamentally different relationship
مختلفة اختلافًا جذريًا
about my petri dishes ...
creative ways to study them,
على طرق مبتكرة لدراستها،
what life, all of life, is like on Earth.
ماهية الحياة، كل الحياة، على الأرض.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Karen Lloyd - Marine microbiologistKaren Lloyd studies novel groups of microbes in Earth's deep surface biosphere, collecting them from disparate remote places such as Arctic fjords, volcanoes in Costa Rica, even deep in mud in the Marianas Trench
Why you should listen
Karen G. Lloyd applies molecular biological techniques to environmental samples to learn more about microbes that have thus far evaded attempts to be cultured in a laboratory. She has adapted novel techniques to quantify and characterize these mysterious microbes while requiring minimal changes to their natural conditions. Her work centers on deep oceanic subsurface sediments, deep-sea mud volcanoes and cold seeps, terrestrial volcanoes and hot springs, serpentinizing springs, Arctic marine fjord sediments and ancient permafrost. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee.
Karen Lloyd | Speaker | TED.com