Translator: Valérie Boor Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
Hi everyone!
Today, I'm going to talk to you about a living organism
that I'm working on in my research laboratory at CNRS,
that we affectionally call the blob.
So here's what the blob looks like.
Surely you've already seen some.
You didn't know that this was called a blob in the wilderness
and that it often lives in the undergrowth.
So these are big yellow masses
in the trees.
A blob can take on any color.
It can be pink, red, blue,
oftentimes yellow, and also, white.
But the blob's most distinctive feature, is that it's huge. How big?
Well, a blob is big, it can be up to 10 square meters,
although we haven't really managed to grow them any bigger, but they could.
So let's imagine that I am 2 m².
In my body, there are approximately 100 billion cells.
They are all 10 micrometers wide.
Here, you see a blob. Do you know how many cells? It's a single cell.
So you see, it's a single 10m² cell.
Actually, if you compare one of my little cells to the blob's cell --
that would be like comparing my fist to the Earth.
So that's the order of magnitude.
And what's even scarier with the blob, is that it moves.
So of course, when I said that you'd seen it before,
you'd have to get out of the city, into the woods.
but obviously, this is an accelerated video.
You've never seen it cross a road.
In fact, a blob moves at a rate of about one centimeter an hour.
Four centimeters an hour, if it's really hungry.
Remember that what you're seeing here is just a single cell.
Because it's a single cell, this one cell serves all functions:
the function of the eye, the nose, the ear, the stomach, the lungs, etc.
But I still haven't told you what a blob is.
Imagine that in Texas someone asked
that very same question when she found it in her garden.
In Texas a lady found a huge yellow mass in her garden
and asked, "But what is it?" She immediately thought it was an alien.
So she called the fire brigade who set fire to the blob,
she called the police, who shot it, and the next day, imagine her surprise
when she saw it was twice as big.
So that's how – you know about Unidentified Flying Objects, UFO's –
and this is how the UCO came into being, the Unidentified Crawling Object.
This kind of stories obviously feeds
the imagination of film-makers and I don't know if you've heard
about the movie "The Blob" with Steve McQueen.
Let me show you a clip.
Dave, Doc Hallen's been killed! Doc Hallen? What happened?
I don't know what it is, but you've gotta come now!
Well wait a minute Steve, tell us what's happened. Well I'm trying to tell you! This thing has killed the Doc!
But what was it? Out with it, kid!
Well it's kinda like a ... kinda like a mass that keeps getting bigger and bigger!
[Beware of]
["The BLOB!"]
Everyone of you watching this screen, look out, because soon, very soon,
the most horrifying monster menace ever conceived
will be oozing into this theater!
[Run – don't walk!]
[From "The BLOB!"]
[It crawls!]
[It creeps!]
[It eats you alive!]
Starring Steve McQueen and a cast of exciting young people!
[Get set... it's coming soon!]
["The Blob"]
Now, let me reassure you,
the Blob isn't going to eat you today.
In fact, we call the blob by a scientific name whcih is much less appealing:
slime mold, or myxomycete - which comes from the Greek for sticky mushroom.
But let me stop you right there.
The blob is not a mushroom. The blob is not a plant,
the blob is not an animal. In fact, it has the properties of all three at once.
A little bit animal, a litle bit plant, and a little bit mushroom.
We couldn't really classify it.
Therefore, we put it in a family where they put the hodgepodge of biology,
when nobody knows what it is, we put it in a family called protists.
So the blob has been put in with the protists.
There are a thousand different species of blob.
Looking at ourselves, at our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens,
there's only one. There's only one species of mankind.
All the others have disappeared.
With the blobs there are a thousand species of different blobs.
You see, that's why they differ in color, shape, etc.
In fact, with the blob, like the butterfly, there's a Jekyll and Hyde effect.
You have a caterpillar, often not very pretty,
which often results in an extremely pretty butterfly. It's a bit like that with the blob.
You see a not-very-appetizing mass -
it isn't very pretty to see, a blob.
However, during its reproductive period it shows these magnificent iridescent spores
that people collect.
Reproduction, everybody has heard of reproduction.
We're all adults, so that happens between a male and a female.
That is, in the simplest of cases.
With plants, animals, mushrooms, there's always a male and a female.
Of course, there are hermaphroditic animals, we won't go into this kind of detail,
but it remains, male and female.
Blobs have 221 different sexes.
You don't have a male and a female,
so that, when you enter a room, you could say
you have 50% chance of reproducing.
When the blob comes into a room, it has a 99.5% chance of finding
someone of the opposite sex.
Not bad at all!
In fact, you could say that
the blob is kind of the teen myxomycete.
That is, before getting to reproduction, making spores,
what does it have to do, like a teen?
It has to eat, to fatten up so as to
produce the maximum amount of spores.
You'll tell me: since it doesn't eat humans, what does it eat, this blob?
Well, it eats mushrooms. And again I can reassure you,
this is accelerated, it doesn't eat mushrooms in a single minute.
It will take the blob roughly an hour to eat a mushroom.
You see it covering the mushrooms and completely engulf them.
Nothing remains of the mushroom after the blob has passed.
In fact, it absorbs the mushrooms into the interior of its body where, they are digested.
Here you see the little mushroom disappearing very quickly -
it's a bit scary.
Of course, in our lab we don't have the luxury of being able to have --
and grow -- a lot of mushrooms.
So, what we're giving our blob -- and someone from Japan
discovered this in the sixties --
the blob loves oatmeal. You should know that a blob around this size
eats about a kilo of oatmeal a week.
That's still quite substantial, we spend a fortune on oatmeal,
but still, we spend less than if we were producing mushrooms.
Second question: since it's a living organism,
you'd expect that the blob -- like any other animal,
plant, or mushroom -- would die, at a certain point.
The blob is immortal! In fact, there are two things the blob doesn't like:
it doesn't like light and it doesn't like being hungry.
So when it finds itself in those situations that are dangerous for it, what does it do?
It dries out. It forms a completely dry structure that we call a sclerotium.
And that sclerotium can stay like that for years.
So if one day, you're fed up with feeding your laboratory blob,
because you'd like to go on holiday, you just leave it to dry.
You put it in a cupboard, come back two weeks later,
splash some water on it and off it goes again.
What's fascinating with the blob, is that you can cut it into pieces,
into tiny pieces.
In fact it holds a record -- suppose you were to cut
any organ at all in two,
you would bleed, and it'll take a long time to heal.
The blob has a healing time of two minutes!
That is, if you cut a piece off the blob, set it aside,
in two minutes, it's as if nothing ever happened.
Once you cut the blob up,
and put the pieces side by side, what will they do?
They will form a new blob.
So it's important that you know, when growing blob in a lab, when it grows,
when you see it, say, in the evening and then again the next morning,
it's doubled in size. It grows exponentially.
Every day, you'll double the amount of blob in your lab.
So of course the next question,
now that we know it's immortal, has 221 sexes, etc. is -- but is it intelligent, this blob?
Is it worthy of real study?
So first of all -- what is intelligence?
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.
So, we're going to give the blob some problems, and
see if it has any solutions to these problems.
The first problem we gave the blob, was with a Japanese team.
It's a labyrinth problem.
What we did was,
we put lots of pieces of blob in the labyrinth
and the blob had to get out of the labyrinth.
You can see here
that all the little blobs have fused together,
covering the labyrinth, and you see very quickly, in fact,
in the experiment, that it succeeds in finding the way out of the labyrinth.
Next, we gave it a more human problem.
We made a couple of miniature maps of Japan. This is a map of Japan.
And what you can see here, is that we have put a little blob in Tokyo.
And all these little points here, are in fact little oatmeal flakes,
that represent the cities around Tokyo.
So we asked the blob to join all of these little food sources,
so it could eat in the most efficient way.
We looked at the network that it formed at the end.
I've got a little movie here -- you'll see.
The blob grows, like it always does when you put it somewhere,
the first thing it does, it tries to escape.
So you see here that it connects the oatmeal flakes,
and once it's in contact with an oatmeal flake,
it sends out a vein in order to circulate the nutrients in the organism.
So it's going to connect all the little flakes. Next, we analyze
the network of veins formed by the blob, and we compare it to the railway network
made by the Japanese. It took 50 years to make this railway network.
And we compare if the network made by the blob
is more effective than the man-made railway network.
Well, figure this, it is much more effective
this network produced by the blob in 24 hours!
How to measure network effectiveness? Simple, for example,
for this city, what is the shortest route? Alternatively, when I cut
a link, can I make a detour?
That is how we measure a network. We looked at
the effectiveness of the network produced by the blob.
It was much more effective than the railway network built by the Japanese.
Another question arose in our laboratories.
Working on nutrition, we say, "Ok, the blob is smart, it can make networks,
but does it know how to eat properly?"
We know very well that humans, when faced – when we go to the supermarket, we take a little
food, a bit of protein, a little sugar and normally
we should take a diet which is optimal for our survival and our health.
However, often, we don't succeed very well. It can be seen in many animals
we tend to find these tendencies for, for example, obesity a lot.
Therefore we wondered if the blob was able,
if we proposed a lot of diets that would appeal to its taste,
would it be able to choose the best
for its survival and its health?
So here you see food pellets that are characterized by a certain proportion
of sugar and protein.
And one of these tablets is good for the blobs health and survival.
When we deposit a blob in the middle of this device, we saw that
in 100% of the cases, it chose the correctly adjusted diet.
It is never wrong.
Often when we talk about intelligence, we want to go a little further.
Memory is often mentioned, because intelligence is also the ability to learn.
Good the blob, it has a small problem. It doesn't have a brain.
Often for memory, there must be a brain.
The solution it found, it is to have not internal but external memory.
You see, whenever the blob moves, it leaves behind this trail of mucus.
In fact, it is like the ghost of the blob one hour before.
The blob was here, it found nothing, it has repatriated all of its equipment,
and then it went exploring the other side of the box.
This mucus that it leaves behind, it's like a memory.
So the blob knows it's already been here and there's nothing there. It won't go over the mucus again.
That's quite an extraordinary technique, because imagine you don't have eyes,
like the blob, no ears, you have nothing and you're plunged
in a dark room, and you have to find, for example, a red ball.
Imagine how many times you return to the same spot, when you're plunged into darkness.
The blob doesn't have this problem. It leaves mucus behind,
it will never go to the same place twice,
it'll find the ball faster than you, surely.
And so –
We posed it a problem that is often encountered in robotics,
that's the U-shaped trap. So, imagine yourself
in this situation, you are in a dark room and there is a white light in front of you,
and you have to reach the light. But you are immersed in the dark,
and in front of you, there is an obstacle, a wall that you can not see.
So, the first thing you'll do is go right, and in fact, fall in the trap
here, and you will need to get around the wall to get out and go toward the light.
It is not very easy to implement, for example.
So we asked the blob to do the same task.
So here you have its wall and here
there's no light, as it has no eyes. It had to find something else.
So we have tried to lure it by a droplet of sugar because it loves sugar a lot.
So here's what happened. Here you see that
it moves pretty quickly, it explores its environment, it falls into the trap.
But you will see that it'll get out of the trap very fast
and actually join the droplet of sugar water.
So we thought that it was really this memory of the environment that it used.
To test it, we did the same experiment, but this time,
as you see here, we fully covered
the ground on which it moves with mucus, to make it believe that it
already explored the entire environment. So in fact it was
confused at the level of its memory, because it thought it had explored everywhere.
So here is what is happening. Already you see it's growing
much slower. It does not understand, then goes a bit in all directions.
It's not really going towards the sugar, it falls into the trap,
and you'll see here in fact that it will stay stuck
in this trap. So it is the use of this mucus
that makes that the blob can get out of the trap and has a memory of its environment.
The last thing to know about the blobs, which is quite extraordinary,
is – it always has this single cell, it's brainless;
well, this single brainless cell also has a personality.
I was searching for blobs in Australia,
the United States, and Japan and I've compared them.
They are of the same species, it is the same animal,
but it is not an animal, the same protist.
And we compared how they evolved in given surroundings.
You see, it's a box, we look at how they explore their environment.
So here you have the Australian, American and Japanese.
See that the Japanese is already off to explore its environment,
the Australian doesn't do a lot and the American forms these little fingers.
It explores its environment. This one is very, very quick to explore its environment
while the Australian is very slow, takes its time, and the American
has a new strategy, which is to send arms everywhere.
And so we said, it's funny because, finally, the Japanese is a lot
more effective, because it explores its environment very quickly.
But suddenly, they were given tasks.
For example, they had two options to choose from.
Option 1 is a good option, option 2 is a bad option.
For example it can be a source of food that is good
and a source of food that is bad.
The Japanese really wasn't good at these kind of tasks
because it went at top speed, so half the time, it was mistaken.
The Australian, who took its time to explore its environment, was never wrong
and was always going for the best option.
The experiment that you'd want to do, obviously, is to mingle the blobs
and put them together. What would an American do with an Australian,
or a Japanese? Of course, that's what we did.
But first we put them with each other, two Americans together,
two Australians together, two Japanese together.
and they were given a food source. And we looked at what they were doing.
So the blob has two options. Either it will go see its friend
or it goes to the food. What we saw with the American
is that one went to the food very fast
and the other which avoided it completely,
which didn't want to touch the other blob at all.
The Australian has a very cuddly side, which is:
"Ah, me, I'm going to see my friend first and then together we will go to the food."
So the first thing two Australians do when they are together,
It is to merge, to form a single blob.
The Japanese, it is, "We go to the food first, but we share."
Therefore, it is quite sharing. The American, no sharing at all.
So of course we did mixed experiments.
You should know that the Australian, when you put it with a Japanese or an American,
It is still as cuddly.
He runs them after trying to form a blob. Others shun him.
If you put an American with a Japanese, the American kills the Japanese.
In fact, the American, merges with the Japanese and kills it and it takes everything that's there
in its cell, all nutrients, etc., and it leaves
behind him a completely soft blob. As if it's not completely immortal.
So, lastly, regarding their personality, a little lab anecdote.
Often, the laboratory bought the oatmeal at the supermarket.
Once, I said to myself, "Hey, there's organic oatmeal,
it might be nicer for the growth of the blob."
So I bought big buckets of organic oatmeal.
And I feed my three blobs with organic oats.
The Australian feasts, the Japanese feasts, the American didn't eat any organic!
It will only eat the oatmeal purchased
at the supermarket.
So, you are going to ask, is it ever going to invade the world, this blob
that's so smart? Well, I will reply that it already has, for 500 million years.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)