AD 2017 Q4

RESEARCH, EDUCATION & MEDICINE
RESEARCHER PROFILE
RICHARD L. PYLE
Brian Greene (left) and Sonia Rowley (right) explore a
large buttress at 300 feet off Pohnpei, Micronesia.
layers of what biodiversity has created, I think we’re
going to end up finding bioengineering solutions to
almost every problem. Most of these discoveries will be
at the molecular level in the form of specific proteins
that do specific tasks.
Any time you explore a new domain, the real
magic is in the things you weren’t expecting to find.
The stuff you expected justifies the exploration, but
the unexpected finds are what really makes it all
worthwhile in the end.
We’re still in the very early stages of exploration.
Absolutely. The wealth of information contained
in this genomic library goes far beyond our current
ability to understand it. We are like kindergarteners
running through the aisles of the Library of Congress,
surrounded by an almost incomprehensible trove of
information, yet our ability to read and understand it is
not much beyond “see Spot run.”
Being able to sequence DNA is orders of magnitude
from being able to harness the power of that
knowledge. If we really understood genomics, we
would have the power to do things we can barely
imagine right now. It would be like Christopher
Columbus having a GPS. But we’re learning fast.
Within a few decades we will be able to read and
understand much of what biodiversity has to offer. The
question is: How much of it will be lost by then?
You’re speaking of what scientists are calling the
sixth mass extinction event —the extinctions that
are now occurring because of human activity:
climate change, pollution, deforestation, etc.
There are plenty of lines of evidence that show this
is happening, and it appears the rate of extinctions is
accelerating faster than in some previous extinction
events. In the past these events happened over a couple
of centuries. The fact that we are observing so many
extinctions is the scary part. It means we’ve accelerated
the process to the point that it’s happening over of
decades rather than centuries. As my friend Sylvia
Earle put it, “What we do in the next 10 years will
impact the next 10,000 years.”
The library of life is burning. What is science doing
about it?
Well, the most correct and direct answer to that
question is “not enough.” Of course all scientists say
they need more money for research, so it’s kind of
cliché to say we’re not doing enough. My point is we
aren’t doing enough in this area relative to other areas
of science.
You mean compared to things like funding the
space station or the Large Hadron Collider?
Exactly. I’m a big fan of space exploration, and physics
is my second calling in life. I get why it’s important
to understand the Higgs boson and the finer scale of
matter. What I’m saying is let’s not neglect this other
thing, which is arguably much more pressing, lest its
potential value be lost. Space and the laws of physics
will be here 1,000 years from now, biodiversity will not.
60 | FALL 2017