[Applause]
somebody once said to me that the
solutions to some of our big global
challenges lie not so much in technology
but in changing people’s minds but as a
scientist I found it really really hard
to change people’s minds no matter how
many papers you’re right and how much
thinking you do things aren’t changing
and so for me it became the idea of
maybe I have to lead and by example to
make a change and maybe it’s just down
to some good food and conversation so
I’ve brought you some good food today a
seaweed corn chip in the hope that I
might be able to change your mind or at
least start engaging you in the
conversation so why seaweed because
seaweed to me connects me directly to
the molecular pathways in our global
systems but not half as much as it does
for this guy the marine iguana of the
Galapagos Islands he loves seaweed so
much indeed that his life and his size
depend on it he’s connected to the
global cycles because the patterns of El
Nino and La Nina Drive different
productivity rates of seaweed in the
Galapagos and some years there’s lots of
seaweed and other years there’s not so
much and then years when it’s abundant
he looks as handsome as this and in the
years where it’s not so abundant he
still looks he’s handsome he’s just a
whole lot smaller he’s one of the few
and few vertebrates that can actually
shrink and when I say that he’s not just
losing weight he’s actually shrinking
his body mass his bone mass and he can
shrink by about 20% in response to the
food resources available to him imagine
if we as humans could do that in a year
of drought like this year to be able to
adapt to the food and water that’s
available to us but unfortunately we
haven’t evolved to be able to do that
and
so it’s up to us to create the food
production systems that support us
sustainably and feed each and every one
of us into the long-term but that are
also balanced and supply us with the
nutrition that we need for our health
and happiness as human beings this is
why seaweed excites me because with the
formula of Sun hitting the seaweed on a
day like today the photons create energy
that forces together simple molecules
like carbon dioxide and water and create
the battery of life that is glucose and
starch fueling every living thing around
us that we see today
these starch molecules are a storage of
energy that can be used to create new
molecules in the seaweed and these
molecules might be something like
omega-3 that could go through the corn
chip and end up in the gray matter of
your brain cells helping you to make
smart decisions in the next few days or
it could create lutein an antioxidant
pigment that will reside at the back of
your retina and protect your eyes from
the oxidative blue light of the Sun but
the most exciting molecules for me are
ones that are really only been looked at
in science for the last decade it’s the
dark matter of biology as a recent
science paper called it it’s the glue of
life it’s what glues ourselves together
and seaweeds particularly rich in it we
might otherwise know it as the slime on
the seaweeds but we have this type of
connective tissue in our own cells in
our own bodies and this connective
tissue is is like a sponge underneath
and around the cells and the and the
blood systems that we’re more familiar
with this connective tissue has been
identified as something we may need to
be eating more of and some of you might
know other competitive tissue that we
eat
that’s called glucosamine chondroitin
sulfate or even bone broth well I’m
fascinated by this molecule and I
extract it and I’ve put it in the corn
chip for you to eat today
but what happens when we’ve eaten the
corn chip and this slime that’s now
dried in the seaweed well it ends up in
our gut and we’ve known about the human
gut for an awful long time the structure
here drawn in the 1800’s shows how
detailed we were looking at the
complexity of the gut but what we
haven’t looked at since looking at the
physical structure of the gut too much
is the ecosystem that’s functioning and
working and biology and chemistry and
our metabolism that’s turning over the
molecules that we swallow it’s 30 square
meters of our surface area exposed to
the environment every day and 70% of our
immune system resides there so we’re
only just still touching on the very
beginnings of understanding what goes on
in our gut and what happens to the
seaweed molecule once we swallowed it we
know that it can block enzymes so maybe
it’s blocking the enzyme that would
break down glucose and slow its
progression so that you down into your
lower gut so that it can be fermented
there and create the butyrate gas that
we need to protect our colon from things
like bowel cancer or we know now that
this molecule in our particular green
seaweeds
is actually recognized by human skin
cells and the epithelium of our gut may
be binding to it and connecting it to
the other immune cells floating around
in our ecosystem or maybe there’s a
bacteria that latches onto this molecule
and started to break it down into unique
components like endocannabinoids and
these are the signal molecules that will
unlock and open and close they’re the
junctions between our gut cells and let
things pass through into our bloodstream
or not so you can appreciate this so
much going on in our gut and with the
things that we’re putting in there and
the function of molecules like the
but after that the molecules have done
their job and they’re broken down to
their smallest components again and
we’re excreting them either through our
breath or I’ve taken you on a molecular
journey from the Sun to the toilet but
it doesn’t end there
it
continues back to the ocean again where
the carbon dioxide and the water can
once again with seaweed in the Sun be
formed into new molecules of life now
this seems small but these systems are
really big how bigger these systems if
you think about the highways that we
drive on they’re a fossil fossil of the
photosynthesis that happened many years
ago all of the highways around the world
if you look at the White Cliffs of Dover
they’re an impressive collection of only
one species of algae that accumulated
and died in that spot and all of the
life around us today
you me the plants and the animals are
products of photosynthesis so my
moleculus perspective and seaweed have
inspired me to hike a ride on the back
of the molecular journey through seaweed
and create seaweed farms where we
capture the road molecules of nitrogen
carbon dioxide and water and create new
molecules through the production in
marine ecological systems and create
products that then enter your own
internal ecological system and that’s my
contribution to a future solution of
more balanced food production on the
planet and a more nutritional balance for healthy and happy people thank you
somebody once said to me that the
solutions to some of our big global
challenges lie not so much in technology
but in changing people’s minds but as a
scientist I found it really really hard
to change people’s minds no matter how
many papers you’re right and how much
thinking you do things aren’t changing
and so for me it became the idea of
maybe I have to lead and by example to
make a change and maybe it’s just down
to some good food and conversation so
I’ve brought you some good food today a
seaweed corn chip in the hope that I
might be able to change your mind or at
least start engaging you in the
conversation so why seaweed because
seaweed to me connects me directly to
the molecular pathways in our global
systems but not half as much as it does
for this guy the marine iguana of the
Galapagos Islands he loves seaweed so
much indeed that his life and his size
depend on it he’s connected to the
global cycles because the patterns of El
Nino and La Nina Drive different
productivity rates of seaweed in the
Galapagos and some years there’s lots of
seaweed and other years there’s not so
much and then years when it’s abundant
he looks as handsome as this and in the
years where it’s not so abundant he
still looks he’s handsome he’s just a
whole lot smaller he’s one of the few
and few vertebrates that can actually
shrink and when I say that he’s not just
losing weight he’s actually shrinking
his body mass his bone mass and he can
shrink by about 20% in response to the
food resources available to him imagine
if we as humans could do that in a year
of drought like this year to be able to
adapt to the food and water that’s
available to us but unfortunately we
haven’t evolved to be able to do that
and
so it’s up to us to create the food
production systems that support us
sustainably and feed each and every one
of us into the long-term but that are
also balanced and supply us with the
nutrition that we need for our health
and happiness as human beings this is
why seaweed excites me because with the
formula of Sun hitting the seaweed on a
day like today the photons create energy
that forces together simple molecules
like carbon dioxide and water and create
the battery of life that is glucose and
starch fueling every living thing around
us that we see today
these starch molecules are a storage of
energy that can be used to create new
molecules in the seaweed and these
molecules might be something like
omega-3 that could go through the corn
chip and end up in the gray matter of
your brain cells helping you to make
smart decisions in the next few days or
it could create lutein an antioxidant
pigment that will reside at the back of
your retina and protect your eyes from
the oxidative blue light of the Sun but
the most exciting molecules for me are
ones that are really only been looked at
in science for the last decade it’s the
dark matter of biology as a recent
science paper called it it’s the glue of
life it’s what glues ourselves together
and seaweeds particularly rich in it we
might otherwise know it as the slime on
the seaweeds but we have this type of
connective tissue in our own cells in
our own bodies and this connective
tissue is is like a sponge underneath
and around the cells and the and the
blood systems that we’re more familiar
with this connective tissue has been
identified as something we may need to
be eating more of and some of you might
know other competitive tissue that we
eat
that’s called glucosamine chondroitin
sulfate or even bone broth well I’m
fascinated by this molecule and I
extract it and I’ve put it in the corn
chip for you to eat today
but what happens when we’ve eaten the
corn chip and this slime that’s now
dried in the seaweed well it ends up in
our gut and we’ve known about the human
gut for an awful long time the structure
here drawn in the 1800’s shows how
detailed we were looking at the
complexity of the gut but what we
haven’t looked at since looking at the
physical structure of the gut too much
is the ecosystem that’s functioning and
working and biology and chemistry and
our metabolism that’s turning over the
molecules that we swallow it’s 30 square
meters of our surface area exposed to
the environment every day and 70% of our
immune system resides there so we’re
only just still touching on the very
beginnings of understanding what goes on
in our gut and what happens to the
seaweed molecule once we swallowed it we
know that it can block enzymes so maybe
it’s blocking the enzyme that would
break down glucose and slow its
progression so that you down into your
lower gut so that it can be fermented
there and create the butyrate gas that
we need to protect our colon from things
like bowel cancer or we know now that
this molecule in our particular green
seaweeds
is actually recognized by human skin
cells and the epithelium of our gut may
be binding to it and connecting it to
the other immune cells floating around
in our ecosystem or maybe there’s a
bacteria that latches onto this molecule
and started to break it down into unique
components like endocannabinoids and
these are the signal molecules that will
unlock and open and close they’re the
junctions between our gut cells and let
things pass through into our bloodstream
or not so you can appreciate this so
much going on in our gut and with the
things that we’re putting in there and
the function of molecules like the
but after that the molecules have done
their job and they’re broken down to
their smallest components again and
we’re excreting them either through our
breath or I’ve taken you on a molecular
journey from the Sun to the toilet but
it doesn’t end there
it
continues back to the ocean again where
the carbon dioxide and the water can
once again with seaweed in the Sun be
formed into new molecules of life now
this seems small but these systems are
really big how bigger these systems if
you think about the highways that we
drive on they’re a fossil fossil of the
photosynthesis that happened many years
ago all of the highways around the world
if you look at the White Cliffs of Dover
they’re an impressive collection of only
one species of algae that accumulated
and died in that spot and all of the
life around us today
you me the plants and the animals are
products of photosynthesis so my
moleculus perspective and seaweed have
inspired me to hike a ride on the back
of the molecular journey through seaweed
and create seaweed farms where we
capture the road molecules of nitrogen
carbon dioxide and water and create new
molecules through the production in
marine ecological systems and create
products that then enter your own
internal ecological system and that’s my
contribution to a future solution of
more balanced food production on the
planet and a more nutritional balance for healthy and happy people thank you
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