“A Better World From Biology”
Claudia Glubenthal, Ph.D., Alumni, Class of 2022
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2042 as part of the team responsible for large scale implementation of ocean carbon dioxide into recalcitrant calcium
Hello to all of you budding scientists, poets, health care administrators, and whatever else people are graduating with these days. You worked hard. And this part of your life is over. Congratulations. Now comes the rest of the hard stuff.
The administration, most likely against its better judgment, asked me to deliver the commencement address to you all. Why? I’m not sure. I’m not particularly good at them, since I don’t have a lot of practice. This is my first. (That’s a joke, I’ll hold for your laughter.). I’m a chemical oceanographer, so I’m extremely good at a subset of two dozen different very esoteric things, and a little bit garbage at everything else.
I told them that, and they said they wanted me anyway.
They also told me they wanted the speech to be titled: “A Better World from Biology.” From biology, I asked? Not through biology? And they said yes, from biology. Sure, a perfectly normal thing for a chemical oceanographer to deliver. Apparently all the biology alumni were too busy, so here I am.
I look around this campus and at all of your eager, and politely confused young faces and I think about the state of the world at my graduation, almost thirty years ago. We’d just had the hottest year on record. Again.
Extreme weather events were ravaging the globe.
The climate catastrophe was a speeding bus with no feasible way to stop it. And there we were—all trapped in our own academic silos, writing grants and churning out publications to stay relevant.
We all had ideas to fix everything, of course. There were a lot of damn ideas. But nobody was really doing anything about them.
Some of them were obvious but hard to implement—stop spewing fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Others were…let’s say they were less useful. One of the money guys suggested putting a giant solar sail above our atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. (Hold for laughter.) Yes, I know, because creating a gold foil candy wrapper around the planet was the most efficient way to do this.
You laugh but that’s what it was like! Billions of dollars in funding to solve the biggest threat humanity had ever faced and people were trying to build space mirrors. I look around at the blue sky above us today and see a coastal campus that I thought would be underwater by my 50th class reunion. Well, that was if the country lasted that long, which I wouldn’t have bet on. I look around and I must tell you that a better world from biology has already happened.
The better world from science is the one that you’re sitting in right now.
And I want to tell you how we got here. If you crane your heads, some of you in the back might be able to see far enough in the distance to see where the answers were. Like the source of life itself, the answer came from the ocean.
Well, the ocean and the scientists. We helped. Just a little. (Also a joke.)
But mostly it was the ocean and the weird little things that live there.
Cyanobacteria were the secret to saving humanity from its self-imposed climate catastrophe. Yes, the tiny single-celled microbes found in nearly every environment on the planet. The cyanobacteria that can multiply so fast and turn your favorite lake lime green and make it stink like a long-abandoned septic tank—those little blue-green algae were the unlikely source of our salvation.
Sorry for the ocean scientists in the crowd who already know this, but your parents don’t. And I’m saving you from having to explain it over Thanksgiving dinner. You’re welcome. First, you have to understand that cyanobacteria are the original geo-engineers. They’ve impacted Earth’s climate for billions of years in a way unrivaled until the anthropocene. (i.e.: Until human beings pumped a bunch of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and upended the planet in a way not seen since the Great Oxygenation Event).
That was the cyanobacteria’s doing, too, by the way.
The Great Oxygenation Event took place about 2.7 billion years ago, by anyone’s best guess, when our single-celled heroes unveiled the world’s greatest party-trick: Photosynthesis. Take a little bit of carbon dioxide. Combine that with water. Add a little light energy from the sun. And what do you have? Glucose and, BAM, oxygen gas. The basis for life as we know it.
The cyanobacteria oxidized vast amounts of methane in the atmosphere of primordial Earth. They helped form the ozone layer that would shield Earth’s surface from UV emissions. They prompted the expansion of life on land, turning into the chloroplasts in plants and algae. The cells that would become the fish that would grow legs that would become the dinosaurs that would die so the squirmy little mammals could take over: thank the cyanobacteria.
In fact you should just start everyday thanking the more than two-thousand species of cyanobacteria.
Wake up, take a dump, have a cup of coffee. Maybe reverse the last two. And while you do, thank the cyanobacteria.
That’s the routine.
These little microbes fundamentally changed life on our planet 2.7 billion years ago. And thanks to the help of scientists, they did it again in 2032.
I was going to say “thanks to a group of very clever scientists,” but I don’t need to toot my own horn.The Nobel committee already did that.
It wasn’t the “big picture thinking” that saved us from the ocean warming and the predicted collapse of the ocean conveyor belt. It wasn’t the venture capitalists or the politicians. It was an interdisciplinary team of scientists that chased a weird idea down an even weirder rabbit hole. It was microbial genomics, ocean chemistry, and molecular biology. It was a drive to understand how the tiniest parts of things work, how they don’t, and how to use tools like CRISPR to tweak them into working the way you want.
That’s how you change the world with science. By working together.
Humans had been pumping carbon dioxide into the air since the onset of the industrial revolution. About 30 percent of that gets sucked into the ocean, the biggest carbon sink on Earth. But all that carbon doesn’t just sit there. The ocean is a giant living thing filled with countless other living things. That CO2 exists in water in a bunch of different states—but mostly it bonds with calcium to produce carbonic acid, which lowers the pH of the ocean and stops all those pretty shells from forming by halting the creation of calcium carbonate. Fewer pretty shells mean less strong animals, which mean less thriving ecosystems, which means the whole house of cards starts to wobble.
To the administrators who are annoyed I’m giving a chemistry lecture as part of my speech, well, what did you expect? You invited a chemist.
A reminder that in 2030, about 40 percent of the human population lived within 100 kilometers of the ocean. As a species, we rely on that big beautiful blue part of our planet to be happy and healthy. You think we would have been acting like it the whole time.
Instead, in the two plus centuries since the British built their first industrial manufacturing plant, the pH of the oceans have dropped by 0.1 pH units. So what? The scale is logarithmic, human induced climate change represents a 30 percent increase in ocean acidity since 1740.
For those of you that are bad with numbers: Thirty percent is a lot.
It took the cyanobacteria a hell of a lot longer than it took humans to change the face of the planet.
But it’s thanks to them that we not only stopped the devastation in its tracks—but started turning back the clock. If only the original IPCC report folks could see us now, huh? Back in the 2020s, the “ideas” guys, the politicians, and the moneymakers were all looking towards the sky. Carbon capture and storage had been a buzzword for decades. Why pump out less CO2if you can just “capture” it at the source. Picture putting a giant balloon on top of a smoke stack while people trad each other imaginary points that said they could emit more carbon. People said “carbon capture” a lot without actually capturing any carbon. Stupid, right? Yes. Well, sort of.
They had the idea right, they were just looking in the wrong spot.
Something special I forgot to mention about our little blue-green saviors while I was talking about their ocean chemistry is that these photosynthetic microbes can produce more than just oxygen and glucose. Biomineralization of CO2 by calcium carbonate precipitation is a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle.
That’s just a fancy way of saying that sometimes the environment can take up elements and turn them into minerals. Do you want three guesses as to which of our favorite planet-saving microbes has that power?
The chemical oceanographers, me included, just about lost our minds when the biologists suggested pumping even more acid into the ocean. After all, wasn’t the problem? Oceanographers are just physicists for waves and currents—we tend to forget that you can’t just assume the cow is a sphere and do math to solve the problem in a vacuum—I can say that because I’m an oceanographer.
The biologists and the ecologists are the ones that have to remember that there’s a whole huge ecosystem in there. The world isn’t a static image, it’s a tapestry of moving parts. And sometimes those parts act in unexpected ways.
So the biologists tweaked some of the cyanobacteria to make them more efficient. A quick nip of a gene sequence here, a tuck somewhere else, and you had a super-microbe. One that was very good at doing what it was designed to do—convert carbon dioxide into recalcitrant calcium.
It’s something these little algae have been doing for billions of years, along with creating the ozone layer and making life livable for squishy organisms like us. Cyanobacteria have been the primary contributors to the production of carbonate rocks on Earth since about four billion years ago.. We just helped those little microbes do what they were doing—but better. We removed some kinetic barriers in the sea water, switched some gene sequences to increase the sequestration rate, and our noble cyanobacteria started turning that excess carbon dioxide into rocks.
That’s right: rocks.
Beautiful, wonderful, chemically-inert rocks.
Our beautiful blue-green algae didn’t just capture the carbon, they removed it from the system completely. Matter can be neither created or destroyed but it can be sequestered. And the cyanobacteria biomineralized the carbon right out of the equation.
Once we incorporated the cyanobacteria into the biofuels process, it launched the next industrial revolution—the greenvolution. It only took us three centuries, but humans finally started healing some of the damage we’ve caused to the planet.
So when you ask me to describe a better future from biology, I tell you to look around. This is that future.
So remember to work together, share your passions—especially if that passion is for a tiny microbe no one else cares about. The world is a living tapestry and so is your life. And the next time you’re out and enjoying a planet that didn’t slip into climate catastrophe, I want you to take a minute to thank the cyanobacteria.
Congratulations graduates. Go change the world.
This is an honorable entry for the Ideas Writing Challenge