Jonathan Coddington: Yeah, so I'm John Coddington; I'm the head
of science here at the Natural History Museum.
And I am not going to talk to you about human disease.
I'm not even going to talk to you about the human genome except to say that, I think I
should -- it might be a little bit of intellectual transition here as I start to talk about the
implications of these technologies for non-human science and non-human biology, but I think
I should put humans in context here.
It's actually not true that humans are very diverse.
If you take the human variation, the genetics of humans, and you compare it to other species,
we're actually not very diverse at all.
And, in fact, it was sort of an inspired choice to choose to sequence humans because it's
really not all that difficult to do.
If you start trying to sequence rice, for example, you run into real trouble.
Let's see, it's this one.
The other thing to know about humans, I think, that's interesting is that we feel that we're
unique, but let's just reflect on why we're unique.
We're unique because we're the only ones left, of humans.
Not very long ago, in just our lineage, we're homo sapiens, there were about 20 species
of homo sapiens, and all of them went extinct, and we're the only ones left.
So the reason that humans are unique is not because we're on some long evolutionary branch
that has been going on for a long time, it's because there -- we used to have a lot of
neighbors in our evolutionary neighborhood, they all died out, and, in fact, the reason
that humans aren't very diverse is because about 50,000 to 75,000 years ago, we went
through some sort of population bottleneck in which all the genetic diversity of humans
narrowed down to a really small set of people, perhaps only 10,000 individuals, maybe only
1,000 breeding pairs.
That's one of the reasons it was easy to do a human genome.
But transitioning from that, I'm going to talk to you about biodiversity inventories
to genomics, towards sequencing the entire genome.
The way -- I'm an evolutionary biologist, and the way we look at this is that actually
there's not, you know, there's about 1.9 million species described so far, it's not really
1.9 million genomes on earth, there's just one.
Life originated once, and life has been ramifying, it's been dividing, it's been changing, it's
been evolving, it's been going extinct, but it happened once, and we're all related, so
we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants in the sense that it was the Human Genome
Project that gave us the technology to look at the genomes of other species, but at the
Smithsonian, we're thinking about sequencing the global genome.
What does that mean?
It means understanding and preserving the genomic diversity of life on Earth.
This planet faces a number of environmental challenges.
The worst-case scenario is that about half of life on Earth may go extinct in the next
50 years.
At the Natural History Museum, we're devoted to understanding that diversity, and we think,
therefore, that there are a couple of strategic initiatives and actions that we should take
to confront that possibility.
First of all, we need a global network of bio-repositories, places to keep things.
We want to do a lot of evolutionary and ecological research.
We think that we should be, based on the technology that we're using for the human genome, we
should be placing reference genomes, sequencing genomes across the tree of life.
I'll explain what that means in a minute.
And because James Smithson said, sort of presciently in 1826, the increase and diffusion of knowledge,
this institution at least is very aware of the need for public awareness and understanding.
By the way, about the humans, there's the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins downstairs,
you can see all the other species of extinct humans eyeball to eyeball.
Take it in.
So what is biodiversity genomics?
What we mean by this is, what's out there?
What kinds of diversity actually are we sharing the planet with?
What do we have?
What do we know about?
What are in collections?
What can we get to?
What is the library of genomics from which we can do the sort of research?
How did it evolve?
How does it work?
I mean, how does the genomics of other species on Earth influence ecosystems?
So that's evolution ecology, conservation, and environmental management; all those are
things that the Smithsonian is deeply involved in, and as I said, working to -- oh, you want
to give me one of these?
Oh, usually people can hear me.
Male Speaker: John, we're on -- we're webcasting.
And you're walking.
Jonathan Coddington: I'm walking.
All right.
There you go.
And then, finally, training the next generation.
So where are we at so far?
This is as of this morning, from the website that NIH hosts, for multicellular life in
protists, we've done about 1,000 genomes so far.
Let me remind you, I said there's about 1.9 million out there.
Bacteria and archaea, about 11,000; that's because those genomes are simple to do.
And the viruses, about 3,500.
So a very small fraction of life on Earth is actually understood genomically.
One of the projects that biologists are investigating or thinking about now, I'm part of the coordinating
group for doing about 5,000 insect genomes.
Other people in the museum are working on doing about 7,500 invertebrates.
And the first one was about 10,000 vertebrate genomes of which only a few hundred of those
are done so far.
Now why does this matter?
This is a picture of Kris Helgen, one of our mammologists, up close and personal with an
echidna.
Other speakers this morning mentioned that a bunch of the genome actually is not -- does
not code for proteins, about 99 percent, in fact.
How do we found out that, whether or not, about 20 years ago, that people -- they called
that "junk DNA" because they thought that, well, if it doesn't code for proteins, it
must not do anything.
It was actually sequencing 29 mammal genomes, as I think Eric mentioned, that gave us the
context for the human genome to understand what portions of the human genome actually
were functionally important.
So knowing about mammal genomes is a good thing to do.
Understanding diseases.
About 75 percent of the emerging diseases that we know of now come from other animals.
They are called zoonotic diseases because first they are in an animal reservoir, and
then they hit humans.
One of the things you can do now with genomics is proactively go out and look for those diseases
while they're still in their animal models; that's biodiversity genomics.
Another example, here you have scientists producing cloned embryos of extinct frogs.
Those are because tissues of that frog were in a biorepository somewhere, and you were
able to thaw those tissues out, there were living cells there, and you can shock those
into producing pluripotent stem cells.
So that there's a -- at least you can see the emerging outline of a technology where
living cells preserved in perpetuity, for example, in biorepositories, you could actually
bring species back to life, or otherwise influence conservation dramatically.
So this is what our collections have looked like for the last 200 years.
All of those red dots are just the ones that have been georeferenced, which means we know
here their latitude and longitude is, about 2 million of those.
It's the largest such collection of these things on Earth.
We have about another 80 million to go.
But down below that you see displays of how our collections look.
To us, we think of biodiversity genomics and genomic technology as taking this and turning
it into something like this, where you can take all the specimens in the museum and turn
them into genomic -- in fact, people often ask me, you know, where is the richest place
on earth?
I'm a tropical biologist; is it in a tropical forest, is it on a coral reef?
No, it's on the fifth floor of the etymology department.
[laughter]
There are more species per cubic foot in that collection than anywhere else on earth.
And we see our collections as being a library of life on Earth.
That beetle up there, diabrotica barberi, collected in 1870, that individual beetle
moved about a billion dollars in agriculture because it gave us, gave science, the key
to how to deal with the corn rootworm borer in corn.
That's a new species of fish, that's a new species of plant.
What we want to do is take the technology that has been developed for the human genome,
and apply it to things like this to understand all the secrets that life has on Earth.
Life does, you know, great things, right?
I mean, you think about, for example, photosynthesis as a substitute for solar panels.
Or, for example, we have the world's specialist in nemertean worms here.
What is a nemertean worm?
There are about 1,000 of them on earth.
They're a predacious worm.
They are an entirely different form of life.
But the thing they do that is strange is they regenerate.
They regenerate better than almost any other kind of organism on Earth.
You cut them up, they break; each little bit grows a new worm.
How do they do that?
That would be a really interesting thing to know, and life is filled with organisms that
do interesting things.
So the Smithsonian has made a big bet in this respect.
We've -- out at the Museum Support Center which is about nine miles away, I invite all
of you to go out and see this thing, is the largest bio-repository, which is basically
a tank farm of freezers, 58 freezers, 24 liquid nitrogen tanks, devoted to biodiversity on
Earth.
It has a capacity of about 4 to 5 million tubes.
Remember, there's only about 1.9 million species on earth that have been described so far.
So this is our idea of how to grow a museum in the 21st century, to -- basically to molt
museums, or to reboot them, so that we become not only museums of life on Earth as they
are in the entomology department, but museums of life on Earth as it would be for genome-quality
tissues and even living tissues of living organisms.
We have a major portfolio in biodiversity already.
We host "The Barcode of Life," which is an effort to devise genetic barcodes which are
unique genetic signatures, one for every species; that's called "The Consortium for the Barcode
of Life."
We also host "The Encyclopedia of Life," which is an effort to have a webpage for every single
species of life on Earth.
They are up to about 1.2 million of the 1.9 million that have names.
And just this February, we opened a relatively large, about 10,000 square foot, cutting-edge
genomics laboratory actually in this building.
So as I said this morning, it's probably the most advanced lab on the Mall, in Washington,
D.C.
And it's a great thing to have a research facility like that with a collection like
this so close to a museum that's devoted to public education.
It's a very powerful combination.
Now why would you say I could do any of this?
Well, the reason is that life is structured as a tree.
This is a phylogenetic tree, or a tree of life; imagine all of these -- the things at
the tips as being species, or as groups of species are called genera.
There are actually only about 9,500 families of life on Earth.
Everything from bacteria to primates fits in 9,500 things.
So the first goal of the Global Genome Initiative is to get genome-quality tissues, and to initiate
the sequencing of those things.
I don't think we're going to be able to get to the species level, although who knows,
if the technology gets really good.
But the sweet spot might be what are called genera, which are groups of species.
Remember, as I said, humans are monotypic; there's only one species in the genus homo,
homo sapiens.
There were 20; the rest went extinct.
Most of the other species on earth occur in genera, so that they have relatives close
to them.
Another reason it's easy to do is because, for a long time, the Smithsonian has been
involved in what are about to become genomic observatories.
We used to call these things Earth observatories.
This is 40 plots of about 50 hectares a piece, in which we've mapped, and identified, and
measured every tree in the plot.
It's a relatively concentrated way to get to the biodiversity on Earth; for example,
there are 40 plots about 4,300 genera, that's about 60 percent of the world total of trees,
that is, waiting for us to go out and collect those genomes and put them -- life on ice
so they can be preserved.
Here's another example of a Smithsonian initiative.
These are the same idea but repeated in marine stations around the world.
Those red spots are the Smithsonian field stations.
All of these efforts, by the way, are done in collaboration these days.
Science is a very highly-collaborative science, and these are the 28 marine genomic observatories,
in which -- what are people going to do there?
They're going to take samples of biodiversity, and they're going to use genomic tools to
understand what's going on.
It's going to enable the -- a tremendous increase in the precision, and accuracy, and speed
of understanding what's going on with global climate change, and how to maintain environments.
So just to sort of sum up, then, our vision is to preserve and understand genomic diversity
all over the planet with our partners.
And finally, to get that out, as I say, to -- particularly to the next generation.
A lot of kids, a lot of future scientists, a lot of stem education, they get their first
real jazzed notion of how cool it is to be a scientist by visiting a museum, so this
exhibit, compared with the number of assets we have, I think will go a long way towards
recruiting those kids into that kind of work.
So, thank you.
[applause]
Larry Thompson: Thank you, Dr. Coddington.
I wanted to ask you to talk about this because it's a great example of the application of
genomic science and really basic biology stuff.
Do we have any questions for John before we let him go?
And going once, going twice.
If I could ask Jim Evans to come up.
You can probably take that off, too.
Oops.
Jim Evans: I'll take it since I kind of wander.
Larry Thompson: You wander, too?
Thank you, sir.