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  • 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.

  • 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 ...

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • (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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • And now I want to tell you that, you know,

  • we still have a lot of challenges, actually,