Học tiếng Anh cùng Ted talks, Eric Haseltine: Đột phá khoa học lớn tiếp đến sẽ là gì?

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Tonight, I'm going to share with you my passion for science.

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I'm not talking about science that takes baby steps.

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I'm talking about science that takes enormous leaps.

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I'm talking Darwin, I'm talking Einstein,

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I'm talking revolutionary science that turns the world on its head.

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In a moment, I'm going to talk about two ideas that might do this.

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I say "might"

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because, with revolutionary ideas, most are flat wrong,

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and even those that are right seldom have the impact

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that we want them to have.

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To explain why I picked two ideas in particular,

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I'm going to start with a mystery.

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1847, Vienna, Austria.

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Ignaz Semmelweis was a somber, compulsively thorough doctor

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who ran two maternity clinics.

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They were identical except for one thing.

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Women were dying of high fevers soon after giving birth

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three times more often at one of the clinics than at the other.

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Trying to figure out what the difference was that caused this,

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Semmelweis looked at everything he could.

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Sanitation? No.

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Medical procedures? No.

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Air flow? No.

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The puzzle went unsolved until he happened to autopsy a doctor

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who died of an infected scalpel cut.

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The doctor's symptoms were identical to those of the mothers who were dying.

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How was that possible?

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How could a male doctor get the same thing as new mothers?

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Semmelweis reconstructed everything the doctor had done

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right before he got sick,

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and he discovered that he'd been autopsying a corpse.

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Had something gotten in his wound that killed him?

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With growing excitement,

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Semmelweis looked for any connection he could

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between dead bodies in the morgue and dead mothers in his delivery room,

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and he found it.

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It turned out that at the hospital with the high death rate,

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but not the others,

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doctors delivered babies immediately after autopsying corpses in the morgue.

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Aha! Corpses were contaminating the doctors' hands

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and killing his mothers.

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So he ordered the doctors to sterilize their hands,

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and the deaths stopped.

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Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered infectious disease.

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But the doctors of the day thought he was crazy,

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because they knew, and had for hundreds of years,

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that odorous vapors called miasmas caused disease,

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not these hypothetical particles that you couldn't see.

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It took 20 years for Frenchman Louis Pasteur

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to prove that Semmelweis was right.

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Pasteur was an agricultural chemist

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who tried to figure out why milk and beer spoiled so often.

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He found that bacteria were the culprits.

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He also found that bacteria could kill people in exactly the same way

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that Semmelweis's patients were dying.

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We now look at what I want to talk about tonight, in two ideas.

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We saw it with Semmelweis, that he was a revolutionary.

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He did it for two reasons.

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One, he opened our eyes to a completely new world.

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We'd known since the 1680s about bacteria.

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We just didn't know that bacteria killed people.

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And he also demolished fond ideas that people kept close to their heart.

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Miasmas didn't kill people. Bacteria killed people.

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So this brings me to the two ideas I want to talk about tonight.

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One has opened our eyes to a completely new universe,

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and the other attacks long-held beliefs.

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Let's get started with Dr. Eric Betzig.

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He's a physicist who has opened our eyes to an entirely new world

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by violating the laws of physics.

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Betzig is a true rebel.

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He quit a job at prestigious Bell Laboratory

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inventing new microscopes for biology

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because he thought scientists were taking his brilliant inventions

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and doing lousy work with them.

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So he became a househusband,

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but he never lost his passion for figuring out

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how to get microscopes to see finer and finer details

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than had ever been seen before or ever could be seen.

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This is crucial if we're ever going to understand how cells work,

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and how cancer works,

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and how something 150th the size of a head of a pin

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can do all these amazing things,

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like make proteins

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and move charges around

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and all of those things.

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There's just one problem.

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There's this thing called the law of physics,

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and part of the law of physics is the thing called the diffraction limit.

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The diffraction limit is kind of like when you go to a doctor's office,

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you can only see so far down, no matter how good glasses you have.

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This was a so-called impossible problem.

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But one of Betzig's friends figured out how to take a tiny molecule

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that was smaller than the best microscope could see

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and get it to light up and fluoresce.

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"Aha!" Betzig said.

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"I think maybe the laws of physics are not so unbreakable after all."

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So he lashed together a microscope in his friend's living room.

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He had no laboratory.

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This revolutionary instrument got different protein molecules

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to light up in different colors,

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and with a computer, he was able to turn very, very fuzzy blurs

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into very sharp dots and produce images of unprecedented and startling clarity.

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For this work, last year,

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Eric Betzig won the Nobel Prize.

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Why?

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Because now we can see with unprecedented detail

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things that we never had seen before,

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and now doctors can get a better handle on things like cancer.

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But do you think Betzig was satisfied there?

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No.

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He wanted movies.

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The problem was

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that even the genius microscopes that he invented were just too slow.

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So what did he do?

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He came up with a 200-year-old idea

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called moiré patterns.

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So the way that works is if you take two very, very fine patterns

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and you move them across each other,

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you will see a gross pattern

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that a microscope can see

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that otherwise you would not be able to see.

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So he applied this technique to taking a really blurry image of a cell

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and moving lots of structured light patterns across it

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until this cell became crystal clear.

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And here is the result:

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a mysterious new world,

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full of strange things zipping around

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doing things that we don't know what they're doing.

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But when we figure it out, we'll have a better handle on life itself.

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For example, those green globs that you see?

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Those things are called clathrins.

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They're molecules that protect other molecules

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as they move through a cell.

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Unfortunately, viruses sometimes hijack those to infect cells.

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Also, you see those little squiggly wormlike things moving around?

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Those are actin molecules.

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Unfortunately, viruses also climb down those things

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to get into the cell nucleus

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to replicate themselves and make you sick.

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Now that we can look at movies

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of what's actually going on deep inside a cell,

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we have a much better chance of curing viral diseases like AIDS.

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So when you look at a movie like this,

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it's very clear that Betzig has opened our eyes to a completely new world.

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But he hasn't shattered any cherished beliefs.

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That leads us to Dr. Aubrey de Grey

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at Cambridge.

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De Grey definitely has scientists squirming with an interesting idea:

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we can be immortal.

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We can beat aging.

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Now, most scientists think he's a crackpot.

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Any Biology 101 student knows

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that aging is an inevitable consequence of living.

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For example, when we eat,

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we take in food and we metabolize it,

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and that throws off what we call free radicals.

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You might have heard of those.

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Also known as oxygen ions,

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those bind to our DNA, cause it to mutate,

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and cause us to get old and lose our hair.

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(Laughter)

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It's just like, no, it's exactly like

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oxygen binding to iron and making it rust.

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So you age because you rust out.

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(Laughter)

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Oh, and scientists also know there is something called immortality:

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in cancer cells.

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So if you stop aging,

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all of you are going to turn into giant walking malignant tumors.

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These are cherished beliefs, but could de Grey be on to something?

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I think he deserves a closer look.

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First of all, I have a really hard time seeing him as a crackpot.

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Yeah, he started off life as a computer scientist,

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not a biologist,

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but he earned a PhD in biology from Cambridge,

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and he has published some very significant work

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on mitochondrial DNA and a bunch of other stuff.

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Secondly, he started an antiaging foundation

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that has identified seven different causes of aging,

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to me, that seem very plausible,

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and he is hot in pursuit of fixes for every single one of them.

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For example, one of the reasons we age is that our mitochondrial DNA mutates,

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and we get kind of old and our cells lose energy.

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He believes, and he's made a convincing case,

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that using viruses we can do gene therapy,

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fix that DNA

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and rejuvenate our cells.

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One more thing.

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We have an existent proof

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that extreme longevity is possible.

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Bristlecone pine trees live 5,000 years,

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and some lobsters don't age at all.

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Now, this doesn't mean that de Grey is going to revolutionize our lifespans.

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I mean, after all, we're not trees, and most of us are not lobsters.

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(Laughter)

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But I've got to believe that there are Darwins and Einsteins out there,

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and I'll tell you why.

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Consider this:

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there are seven times more people alive today than during Darwin's time.

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There are four times as many people alive today as Einstein.

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When you consider

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that the proportion of scientists in the population has skyrocketed,

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there are now seven million scientists.

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I've got to believe, and I do believe, that there's one of them out there

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who is working right now in obscurity

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to rock our lives, and I don't know about you,

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but I can't wait to be rocked.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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