Translator: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
When I was a little girl, I loved to read.
I still do, actually, but I remember
- this was in elementary school -
I remember this illustrated chemistry book
that captivated me for a long time.
And as this little girl, reading about atoms and learning about
these beautiful, complex systems underlying everything in the world,
all delicate and whirring like clockwork to make the universe tick,
I found myself wondering about the people behind those initial discoveries.
I found myself wondering
what had it been like to be Marie Curie, or Albert Einstein, or Lise Meitner.
What would it be like to discover something new?
What would it be like
to look at the results of an experiment you designed and know
no one else in the world has ever seen what I'm looking at right now?
Well, that's what I wondered.
And honestly, to a grade schooler, such a thing like that,
getting to experience that, seemed absurdly out of reach.
I mean, I couldn't contribute to science.
It's an idea that's so big and beyond me that I really had no idea.
And all the experiences that I'd had with science experiments
had been weekend affairs:
tiny projects, paper mache volcanoes,
nothing that truly smacked of actual science, right?
I mean, that whole vinegar and baking soda trick,
that was something someone told to me; that wasn't a discovery.
But my ideas about research got turned on their head
when I went to my first science fair in middle school.
The project that I was doing was a pretty simple one.
I was just testing the effects
of some unconventional antibiotics on bacteria in petri dishes.
And as you can see, my project board is mostly handwritten,
and all in eye-watering neon,
which I felt to be the height of scientific professionalism.
(Laughter)
But what was so special to me about this experience
was that I was asking a question that I didn't already know the answer to.
I was asking a question that my teachers, my textbooks didn't know the answer to.
I was dipping my fingers, just a little bit, into the unknown,
and that sent this shiver up my spine.
And then of course, there were the other kids.
I found this community of people who were also loving science,
who were doing their own research,
making amazing innovations and discoveries,
and they would talk to me about chemical assays,
and they would make math jokes with me.
(Laughter)
I was in a place where I could learn about these fields of research
that I hadn't even dreamed about, with peers, with my elders in high school.
And I saw that I could be a scientist
just by asking a question that I didn't know the answer to,
and struggling through the difficulties of finding some sort of solution.
And all that led me to where I was when I was 12 years old,
and that was looking for an idea for my next science fair project.
So, I heard about biodiesel,
and biodiesel is a renewable fuel that's made from any sort of natural oil.
I found out that with a bit of old vegetable oil,
some chemicals, and a bit of patience,
I could actually make this alternative energy in my kitchen,
which was a really intriguing idea to me.
It's clean, it's carbon neutral.
It can go straight into a regular diesel engine,
and, bonus, if you use old cooking oil, it even smells a bit like french fries.
(Laughter)
So with my parents' permission, of course, I started to experiment
with different reaction conditions and different oil types in the back yard.
It was really a perfect fit for me because I really loved biochemistry,
and I had this passion for alternative energy.
It was an issue that very much was of interest to me.
But I was soon to find an even better fit in 9th grade,
and that was with the emerging field of algae biofuels.
That's right, pond scum can make petrol.
(Laughter)
And, it's even better at it than other crops.
So, algae are actually very efficient oil-producers.
But more importantly, they don't take up food land to produce fuel
the way that corn and soybean fuels do,
and that's an essential consideration to make.
The real problem with algae is an economic one.
Algae biofuels just simply aren't competitive with fossil fuels.
But, if we can increase the oil yields of algae,
we might be able to make them a feasible contender.
I knew that other researchers were looking at different ways
of trying to get algae to produce or store more oil.
They were looking at complicated genetic manipulations
or temporary environmental changes,
but all that had varying degrees of success,
and that's because the mechanism for this production of oil
is a pretty complicated one.
So instead, I had the idea to let mother nature
take care of all the fiddly bits for me.
(Laughter)
That is, instead of trying to change one particular facet of this reaction pathway,
I instead changed the environment that my cells were growing in,
so that in order to survive, the cells had to overproduce oil.
So in order to pressure these populations,
I used a type of chemical, an herbicide, in fact, that kills cells
by blocking an extremely important reaction on the way to producing oils.
And the idea behind this mechanism,
this idea of artificial selection or guided evolution,
is that if you have a really big population,
and we're talking 100 million cells per milliliter in a dense culture,
there are going to be rare variant cells with unusual characteristics.
And this genetic diversity is the basis behind my idea
because just such a variant cell might have unusually high oil production.
Normally these cells would be invisible in this vast population
because they're so rare,
but once you add that herbicide, the low oil cells begin to die,
and suddenly, that trait of high oil production
becomes a very, very successful one.
And suddenly, in order to survive,
the population as a whole has to evolve, has to shift to produce more oil.
And this was the idea that I worked on developing, designing, and implementing
over the past couple of years.
As you might imagine,
a great deal of experimentation and frustration went into
working on a process like this.
One of the concerns that I always had,
especially in the beginning, with science fair,
was this anxiety about, "I can't do real science
if I'm not in a real laboratory and doing real sciencey things."
I heard about these other kids with their school-sponsored mentorships
and their formal research classes, and I had this sinking feeling.
I thought, "Well, how can I compete with that?"
But I found that not having a mentorship all planned out for you,
or not having access to formal resources,
or not having training in a specific area,
none of that is a deal-breaker.
and even answering a significant question.
In fact, I was able to answer most of my questions in my bedroom.
(Laughter)
This is the lab that I built under my loft bed a few years ago
(Laughter)
to grow and culture my algae, perform my experiments.
I've got the requisite bubbling flasks of green goo
next to the microscope that I got for Christmas,
and the plethora of chemical equipment and measuring supplies,
and a clunky old centrifuge.
I even sleep on my algae's light cycle:
16 hours on, eight hours off.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
(Cheers)
It's a good life.
It's a great life.
(Laughter)
But of course, there were some techniques that are sophisticated enough
to not really belong in a typical bedroom,
and for those I had to turn to professors.
I emailed professors and faculty members at universities asking questions,
begging for lab time, sending them research proposals,
and I did run into a lot of closed doors before finding open ones,
some really wonderful open ones.
But even once in the laboratory, things are difficult.
The thing is that research isn't easy.
It's actually hard, it's really hard sometimes,
and it's not like reading a book,
because there aren't easy answers, and there's certainly not a test key.
Techniques that are supposed to go smoothly, don't.
An idea that works beautifully on paper completely fails in the beaker.
Delays, malfunctions, and frustrations are all a part of the ballgame.
I've had to restructure my entire growth set-up multiple times
when algae cultures kept dying or getting contaminated.
I've had to completely scrap entire plants for analysis
when the samples representing months of data collection
broke down in the freezer.
But, I always thought, "You know what, if this were easy,
it wouldn't be something new and exciting."
I thought, "Maybe this idea won't work, but, maybe it will."
And it was that open question that was enough to keep me fumbling forward.
Because in the end, to me, the thing that's most fundamental about humanity,
the most basic instinct that ties all of us together
can be summed up in one word:
inquiry,
discovery, unraveling, problem-solving,
hacking into the universe,
trying to see how all the delicate, little bits and wires all fit together
and work to make this thing we call the world.
It's asking questions, and poking and prodding, and research.
That's what we are; that's what the future is,
and it's what we make it, today.
And this lens of research is the single, most fundamental,
and critical tool to making a difference in the world.
In the end, my frustration did seem to pay off.
The little blue bar on the left represents the oil content of untreated cultures,
and on the right,
that's the oil content of cultures that I treated with this herbicide,
my artificially selected cultures.
So what this seems to mean
is that I seem to have caused a lasting genetic change in my algae populations
to increase their oil content and therefore, their fuel content.
When I was 9, I tried to imagine what the thrill would be like,
but it turns out there aren't really words to describe the magic
that comes from seeing something that you wrought, work.
But, it turns out in the end, that a lot of this was due to persistence,
and a lot of this was just due
to not letting roadblocks keep me down for too long.
And for so many young scientists, all of these roadblocks are prohibitive.
And that's why we need more tools and more resources available to students
to let innovation be a star that's just a little bit closer to reach for.
Because in the end,
if you want to create something that no one else has seen before,
or if you want to discover something that no one else has known,
the key is just not to give up.
The key is just to ask everything you can,
and try to learn everything that you can,
and to try all the solutions you can think of,
and get the knowledge and apply that to your concepts in real space and time.
And that's science.
Science is nothing more or less than the realization
that nothing can keep you from making discovery into reality.
Thanks.
(Applause) (Cheers)