HOWARD SHAPIRO: I'm probably the worst possible
after dinner speaker, or after lunch speaker.
Because what I'm going to talk about
is a plague that is so grotesque, that it's actually
almost unbelievable.
And it's called stunting.
Stunting means that an individual neurologically,
physically, or economically never reaches their potential.
Never.
Remember the word never.
They never recover from it.
It's not like you have a bad cold and you get better.
Stunting is a plague that affects
more or less 37% of the rural population of Africa,
52% of the rural population of India,
and 7% of the United States.
So the numbers are staggering.
And the idea of having generations of people who
are stunted is really pretty much unacceptable.
So what is the source of all life?
And the answer will be-- if it clicks on,
let's hope the video will work.
It's making food crops more nutritious.
Because it's not caloric.
India has plenty of calories.
It's just not nutritious.
And so what I'd like to do is take you through, as quickly as
possible, this is what I do.
I look at plants at large scale, both molecularly-- I
have a big lab at Davis.
I have one in Indonesia.
I have one in West Africa, all around the country.
So I look at millions of plants a year.
But it all starts with a seed.
And I don't know if anybody in this room
knows what the seed is.
Raise your hand.
It's usually zero.
So this is at two days old.
And this is what it looks like at around two months.
Still, maybe someone from California
might guess this tree.
And then at 2,000 years, it starts to look like this.
Yeah, so this is General Sherman.
It weighs as much as six 747s.
It's off the beaten track.
You're not allowed to go to it, because they don't want people
surrounding it and stomping the roots.
But all of that information was in that seed,
which weighs 1/600 of a gram.
So yield is the issue.
Yield is the game.
It's not just nutrition.
If you don't have yield, it doesn't work.
But yield is simple.
And if you look at this picture, on the left hand side
is teosinte.
On the right hand side is modern corn.
Imagine the amount of information
that had to change to go from teosinte to modern corn.
Teosinte is the progenitor of all corn in the world.
So there's something to be said.
And originally, people judged plants on this kind of basis.
They won prizes at the Iowa State fair
when they had the best, most beautiful corn.
But that's not enough anymore, and here's why.
Here's what we get to look at now.
This is all about the power of 10.
A kernel, very simple information, mostly endosperm.
It goes from there, as you can see,
to endosperm, a single cell.
And it goes from there to the next phase that we can see now
easily, condensed chromosomes.
And then we get to scaffolds which hold it all together,
just like a mechanical device.
Histomes, and finally we get to DNA.
So today, we can go that far down
and understand the information that's available to us
to breed more nutritious plants.
That shouldn't happen again, let's go by.
So we have to double the amount of food by 2040 in the world.
And we're already operating on 1 and 1/4 planets on earth.
So there's almost no way that this is going to happen.
It's certainly not going to happen
just because we wish it to happen.
But nutritional optimization is probably
the most important thing we can do.
So all seed is basically endosperm.
And when you look at endosperm, it's
what we're trying to improve-- protein, starches, vitamins,
micronutrients.
But no one breeds for those things.
They breed for yield, and a little bit
for disease resistance.
So the outcome of this is grotesque malnutrition
caused from chronic hunger.
Mal is bad, and you know what the nutrition word means.
So it's bad nutrition.
Imagine that your whole headset is about bad nutrition.
So if you look at carrots, what do you get from carrots?
Well, that was an easy one.
But actually, it's more important.
We'll skip carrots for a minute.
You actually get other things.
But if you look at green vegetables, you get folate.
Here's a hemoglobin that looks like the way you want
to look at it, with iron in there.
And here's a normal red blood cell colony.
But here's what it looks like when
you don't have iron in your diet.
That's what a fatigued cell looks like, fatigued blood.
And for other types of greens, you need iodine.
Iodine stops cretinism.
This is what cretinism causes in people.
And I can go on and on through a different series of plants,
and every one of them will offer you something that is unique.
Now, this problem of stunting doesn't start when you're born.
It starts in the mother's pregnancy.
And it actually starts probably 12 months before the pregnancy
itself.
But if you look at what folate does,
it's critical for neural tube development.
Nuts, which grow everywhere in the world,
outside of the problem with aflatoxin,
give you zinc, which helps to overcome stunted growth.
Remember, neurologically stunted, physically stunted,
and economically stunted.
So you're not going to be Jascha Heifetz.
You're not going to be Bill Gates.
You're not going to be Usain Bolt.
You're just not going to be those people.
And 300 children every hour die because of this problem.
Stunting will kill you, as well as other diseases.
So our goal is to improve nutrition, make plants better.
And the way we went about it was,
I formed this group called the African Orphan Crops
Consortium.
When I say formed, it was myself and Ibrahim Mayaki,
the CEO of NEPAD, the development arm
of the African Union.
He said do whatever you want to do, I think it's a great idea.
Keep me informed.
And he walked away.
So what we did was we decided we were going to do this thing.
And at the Clinton Global Initiative, we announced it.
This is the opening of the Plant Breeding Academy, December 3.
The gentleman in the center-- I don't have a pointer,
but between me and Tony Simons is the minister of Agriculture
from Kenya, welcoming the first 30 students to the Institute.
It's men and women.
We're training people in Africa, with African scientists,
to go back to the African institutions
that they work for.
We're not coming in from the outside
and determining what needs to happen.
So we're going to do 101 genomes.
So when I started in science-- that's long before some of you
were born-- it was very clear to us
that if you can work on one genome sequence
in your lifetime, it was like just beneath the Nobel Prize.
And that's all changed.
Because now, we can take on 101 food crops simultaneously.
This is the list.
It's hard to read.
The point is, it was a list that was determined, pan-Africa,
by Africans scientists, African nutritionists, African food
scientists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists
said, fix these 100 crops, and you'll
go a long way towards fixing the rural sector of Africa.
The first tree we're working on is baobob, 13.6 gigabytes.
Much, much bigger and much, much more complex
than the human genome.
Most of the plants are 2 gigabytes.
So it's an enormous amount of information
that is going to be generated in sequencing.
Assembly and annotation.
And why this one first?
Because it's the icon of all Africa.
And we were asked to do it by the African Union.
It's an uncommon collaboration, which sounds like a corny term.
But look at the list of people who are involved.
None of them had ever worked before.
None of them ever collaborated-- certainly not
Life Technology and World Wildlife Funds,
certainly not the iPlant and BGI.
None of them had ever been brought together,
except when they were asked to collaborate on this project.
There is no management to this project.
There are no administrators to this project.
It's a collective that's working together to do this project.
And maybe I'll go back just for a second.
Everyone has donated something in kind.
BGI, 101 sequences.
Life Technology, the IM proton platform.
Four sequences were set up at the World Agroforestry Center
in a purposeful space.
The iPlant collaborative is going
to host all the data at the University of Arizona
through the Texas supercomputer.
Not a single penny has been spent
on administration or anything like that.
UC Davis is doing the Plant Breeding Academy.
And we at Mars pay for all the teachers.
So this is what happens.
You start with your sequences, assemblies and annotations,
101 fully-referenced genomes.
You move very quickly to African scientists
taking this information.
And then resequencing the local cultivars of the reference
genomes, maybe 150 times.
So that means we will do as many as 15,500 full sequences.
The amount of data really is staggering.
I'm sure everyone in this room understands it.
And I'm working with Google Earth Engine
to try to build a couple pipes, a term I had never
heard before, to move the data to the cloud
and drop it off in Arizona.
Oh, I should go back.
The highlight is everything's in the public domain.
You can not own this information.
There's no way in hell you can own it.
To access it, you go to a portal.
You sign in and say, I promise not to patent these sequences.
And you get full access.
And everyone said this wouldn't work.
But I did it with the cocoa genome and it worked perfect.
Mars Incorporated gave away the genome.
It's been used by 250,000 scientists
around the world as a model genome.
And nobody complains that they can't own it.
This is what happens when you breed in the public domain.
And the most important thing, going
through all these little funny words that some of you
may or may not know, is the phrase at the bottom.
This is sustainable society.
And why do you do this?
Because I cannot go to bed at night and think that African
crop breeders, working for the benefit of the citizens,
would not want to change the scenario of stunting
in the world.
So we've identified the 101 crops in Africa.
We are getting ready to move forward with the 101 genomes.
26 will be done this year.
It's all based on seed and roots and tubers.
We're going to create optimally nutritious plants
over the next three to five years
to put in place to improve the nutrition
of an entire continent.
That's my shot, my moon shot, and to end
stunting as much as humanly possible
based on what we can do as a small collective,
a small collaboration.
Thank you.