跟李想死磕TED｜01-03 The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet

But all that time, we thought, well wouldn&`&t it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn&`&t work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn&`&t think it would, because we thought the ship&`&s vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them, one cell at a time, in real time, and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year, before we realized that it wasn&`&t really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus. 那时候我在想，如果我们我们可以拿着这样的设备到船上去，就把海水通过它来检验，来观察各种各样的浮游植物的样子，会不会很得劲？所以我设法搞到一个我称之为大平台的流血细胞计数器，一个大型的、强大的激光发生器，并获得厂商的保证，如果在船上不能用，就退货。一位当时和我一起工作的年轻科学家 Rob Olson 可以把这家伙带上船，安装在一起，一起出海。它运转起来太棒了。我们根本没有想到，因为我们觉得船的震动会阻碍到激光，但是它真的运转得很棒。然后，我们就绘制了海洋浮游植物分布图。这是真正的第一次看到一个细胞，看看正在发生什么，这真是太激动人心了。但是有一天，Rob注意到一些来自仪器以外的模糊信号，而这个信号一年前以来我们以为是可能电子噪声而被忽略了，然而这时意识到它并不像噪声。它又一些规则行图案。长话短说，这是一种极其微小的含有叶绿素的细胞，它比人类的头发宽度的百分之一还小。那就是绿原球藻。 So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn&`&t know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry." 有谁还记得这页我刚刚展示过的幻灯片吗？如果你用蓝光照射那两个样本，这就是你看到的：两点微小的发着红光的细胞。这些就是绿原球藻。他们是地球上最小的，又是量最大的，叶绿素细胞。一开始，我们不知道它是什么，就用“小绿”来称呼它。这是一个非常亲切的名字。后来，我们对它了解足够多了，就命名它叫“绿原球藻”，意思是“远古的绿色浆果”。 And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They&`&ve given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here. 也差不多在这个时候，我被这些小细胞迷得神魂颠倒，以至于我重新调整了整个实验室的研究方向，来专心研究他们，当然我对他们的忠诚回报也是很大的。他们给予我的非常多，包括我来到这里。 (Applause)（鼓掌） So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they&`&re very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They&`&re particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they&`&re not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That&`&s three octillion, if you care to convert. 经过多年，我和其他，非常多的其他人遍及各个海域研究绿原球藻，发现他们非常非常广泛地分布在开放海域生态系统，尤其是在开放海洋环流中。这些有时候会被称为海洋荒漠，但是他们根本就不是荒漠。在深海里也充满着每升水一亿的绿原球藻。如果你把他们像我们培养群那样聚集起来，你可以看到美丽的绿色叶绿素。那些试管里的一根就有10亿个原绿球藻，就像我前面提到过的，地球上有300亿亿亿原绿球藻，那是3乘10的27次方，如果你想转换的话。