Just about everyone thinks that fruits and vegetables are the healthiest part of a diet, and who can blame them? This idea is so ingrained in modern culture and conventional wisdom that people don't really question it. There's a very popular quote by plant-based dieters, don't eat too much, mostly plants. But are fruits and vegetables actually healthy? There are several considerations here. One is that modern fruits and vegetables are far different than wild plant foods we've had in the past that our hunter-gathered ancestors used to procure. They are much higher calorically yielding, they are lower in vitamins and minerals, and not only that, there's much less variety. Certain groups of indigenous aborigines, the natives to Australia, used to literally consume thousands of different wild plant foods throughout the year. The second thing is that they are specific to certain parts of the world. Most of these plant foods were adapted from their wild counterpart several thousand years ago, and only in the past few hundred years have they become accessible through trade routes. And even more recently, in the past maybe 75 years, has the average person been able to consume fruits and vegetables as a regular part of their diet. Another thing is the poor conditions that we're growing our fruits and vegetables in now. This relates back to the caloric yield. The mineral content of the soil and the ratios of the minerals and the lack of nutrients in the soil are causing us to have these very high calorie yielding fruits and vegetables that don't really have much nutrition whatsoever. Another factor to consider is the actual on paper value of new nutrition in these animal foods, how the vitamins and the minerals are drastically different from the animal forms. And not only that, they don't contain a lot of vitamins and minerals that animal foods do. In addition, the overarching flaw in the idea that we need to obtain a lot of nutrition from plants is that they require fat to be absorbed. And the only way you can procure fat in most climates at all parts of the year in all regions is from animal foods. So if animal foods are necessary to absorb the nutrients from plant foods, how can we argue the necessity of plant foods in the diet? One thing to go over in general is dietary history for the past 10 to 12,000 years. We know this is when the Neolithic Revolution started. We know this is when humans started agriculture. But how has our diet actually evolved over these years? Before that, it's safe to say that indigenous groups would have gotten all of their calories from either animal foods or wild plant foods. Agriculture comes around and grain consumption replaces wild plant food consumption. So instead of consuming 70% animal foods and 30% plants, now we're consuming, I don't know, 50% to 60% animal foods and 40% grain. And a lot of indigenous groups were still very healthy on these diets if they prepared the grains properly. Because one of the main purposes for plant foods is calories and opportunity. Same thing with grains, except grains are a bit easier to cultivate once you have a system going. So this goes on for maybe five, six, seven thousand years. Some of these groups of people stay true to their indigenous roots and continue to gather plants and procure animal foods. Other groups of people started things like animal husbandry, incorporating agriculture, cultivating grains. And an example of a diet of the Australian Aborigine might be literally hundreds of different animal foods and thousands of different plant foods. Whereas a Swiss civilization in the Loschento Valley might have literally only consumed cheese and rye bread. Some very interesting comparisons here, but oddly enough, the only thing present in both of those diets is the fat soluble vitamin content. And both of these groups of people were incredibly healthy. It's something amazing just to think about in the context of human history and surviving. So let's say for, you know, five, six thousand years, humans subsist mostly off of grains and animal foods. About three to four thousand years ago is where we see these vegetables starting to be cultivated. Whether it's carrots being created, most of these fruits and vegetables have a wild origin three to four thousand years ago. And then they were introduced into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries for the most part. And then modern access to food, refrigeration has given us access to these plant foods in the past 75 years or so. It's safe to say that even before just the 1900s, that just about everyone consumed predominantly animal foods and grains as if you have a limited amount of resources, whether it's time or money, you need to put those resources where the calories are in animal foods and grains. Because fruits and vegetables, these plant foods weren't exactly excellent sources of calories. It's certainly safe to say that grain consumption through agriculture and fruit and vegetable consumption over the past few thousand years is unrealistic from a logical standpoint. And not only from just looking at the timeline of human history, but also from how we create these foods now and how the access to foods that were only specific to certain regions is available to everyone. I can go to the supermarket, I can get rice, I can get oats, I can get barley, I can get rye, I can get 10 different grains, whereas in nature, one group of people might have lived on rye bread their entire lives. The cruciferous vegetable family is interesting because with a lot of these grains and fruits and vegetables, they can be traced back to their wild origin. But cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, arugula, bok choy, watercress, all of these originate from one vegetable at the top of the brassica family. So if we could say that well, there are dozens of vegetables that we've literally never consumed before, they are all a result of modern agriculture. Is this something we should actually be doing? And when you look at the nutrient content of these foods, considering the availability, it definitely leaves something to be desired. So it's relatively safe to say that grains and animal products have taken precedent in our diet for most of the past 10 to 15,000 years. And more recently, in the past 75 to 100 years, we've increased our plant food consumption through fruits and vegetables dramatically. Indigenous people used to consume 30 to 35 percent of their calories from wild plant foods in some cases. So it's safe to say that for the majority of the past 10 to 15,000 years, any settled group of people were consuming probably 50 to 60 percent of their calories from animal foods and almost all of the remainder from grains. Maybe fruits and vegetables accounted for literally one or two percent of their total caloric yield for the year. Of course, indigenous groups consumed upwards of 25 to 35 percent of their calories from plant foods. Now, how dramatic of a difference have we made here? Maybe in the year 1900, people had 50 percent animal food, 45 percent grain, five percent fruits and vegetables, and I think that's being generous for fruits and vegetables. Now, people consume 70 percent of their calories from plant foods and 30 percent of their calories from animal food. It's safe to say our fruit and vegetable consumption is way higher than five percent of our total calories. I would even argue that it's closer to the 35 percent that indigenous people used to consume. The main difference is that the types of foods we're consuming, they're lower in nutrients, we have a lack of these animal food nutrients in our diet. The main thing here that we're looking at is what I spoke about earlier, the food access, the resources, and the necessity of consuming grains from a caloric standpoint. Humans need to survive in nature and if you're eating berries in the forest all day, it doesn't matter if you have unlimited access to berries, you will starve to death eating fruit, literally as simple as that. So we can argue from an accessibility standpoint, a timeline standpoint, agricultural standpoint that these foods are not natural, but what about actual nutrients? The forms of vitamins and minerals that occur in plant foods are different than animal foods. Vitamin A is in the form of carotene, vitamin K is in the form of K1.  All of the minerals tend to be bound to phytates or oxalates, which greatly inhibits their absorption rates. This ties into properly preparing grains and soaking them as certain indigenous groups of people that didn't prepare their grains properly had skeletal problems, rotted teeth that we see in anthropological studies.  Not everyone has access to coconuts or avocados, which most vegans would have you believe. So a bit of a logical fallacy here saying that you literally would need to consume animal fat to absorb the nutrients in these plant foods. And one overarching thing, if these fruits and vegetables were so healthy and so nutrient dense and so good for you, why do vegans look like ghouls and zombies? Why do vegetarians look like they're withering away? Why are Americans who are consuming higher rates of fruits and vegetables compared to our recent history where there are people in, especially Weston Price's book that's subsisted off of grains and animal foods exclusively that were in far better health than we are now? Of course, there's an answer of well refined foods, sugar, blah, blah, blah, but for me, the two key factors in diet are the removal of inflammatory foods and the increase in nutrient density. Consuming certain fruits and vegetables might remove inflammation from the diet, but they are lacking the key nutrients that are only obtained from animal foods. So of course, various foods, vegetables, tubers, not so much grains did play a role in indigenous groups for dozens to hundreds of thousands of years. I'd like to elaborate more on grains separately as they are an interesting topic of discussion, but overall grains essentially just replaced plant foods in various periods of history. I don't really want to go into specific plant foods because there are so many, but there are definitely some commonly available ones that have a place in the modern diet and exceptions can be made. I could argue that iron corn wheat bread is more natural than modern apple, but reality is, even though that apple has an unrealistic amount of sugar and doesn't have a high nutrient content compared to even heirloom wheat, it's much less inflammatory for most people. So just because something is natural, because our indigenous ancestors consumed it doesn't mean there's a lot of like specific nitpicking we have to do with plant foods now. Foods like wild rice, coconut, seaweed, wild berries, local biodynamic fruit, sweet potatoes, and even really just any local high-quality fruit or vegetable that you have access to in your farmers markets, even in your supermarkets throughout the year, there are plenty of plant foods that I would deem acceptable to consume and add many benefits to your diet. In most cases, the benefits you're getting from plant foods are going to be the mineral content. Yeah, even though these minerals are bound to phytates and oxalates, some mineral absorption is not too impaired. You know, potassium is usually pretty good and magnesium is usually good as well. So you are getting minerals, maybe a small vitamin content from certain foods. I wouldn't focus too much on the vitamin content. Of course, now it's weird because spending $16 for a pound of wild rice doesn't make sense when I can get a grass-fed steak. But in most cases, these foods would have been used for an energy source. So what's the verdict? These foods were gathered out of necessity and used for either calories, medicinally, or enjoyment. If you want to include fruits and vegetables in your diet, then by all means keep our ancestors in mind. So if you guys would like to check out some plant products that I deem acceptable, I have some on my Amazon shop. I don't really use them myself. If you guys want to support the channel, please subscribe and share the video. If you guys would like to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations in regards to diet overall health, maybe you want to know what plant foods are okay to incorporate in your diet and especially how to prepare certain plant foods. I know I didn't really touch on it in this video, but especially grains need to be soaked and fermented in various ways in order to reduce the phytic acid content so they don't harm the mineral composition of the body. Most fruits and vegetables did have specific indigenous preparations. Maybe some of them were toxic in some ways, especially things like nuts and seeds. Although I didn't speak too much about them, they did require specific preparation. But that's it guys. If you have any further questions on this topic, please let me know. I think I've covered this fairly well enough to give you guys an idea of some points of argument and contention about fruits and vegetables. If there was really one sentence to say about fruits and vegetables, it would be that indigenous groups consumed them out of necessity and they had to procure actual nutrients from animal foods as the ones present in plant foods were not as available. Something along those lines. Man, I almost forgot to do a makeup check for you guys because with all the comments I've been getting the past few weeks, I might actually lose my mind. So here I have a wet towel. Okay, so I'm wiping my face.  Is there makeup on the towel? I don't see any. Okay.


Super Bowl 56 is coming up this Sunday right here at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. And while we are now just days away from kickoff, the preparation to keep this week, this national event, and the surrounding community safe are the results of dozens of agencies, local, state, and federal, all coming and working together. And this call, oh yes, we want to come in and support the the event the best way we can without trying to intrude on our partners. Our role is to kind of come in and help identify any gaps that there could possibly be, and be there in support if things were to escalate radio, communication failures, or incident to escalate to be able to kind of provide some state resources or insight. Want to turn it off? This Super Bowl event is a perfect example of that. So many different public safety entities coming together, working together for a common goal to address how complex this event is and the things that could go wrong around it. With any incident, usually you do kind of fall back on some other plans and the things you plan for kind of change as the event kind of goes on. So we always kind of plan out a bunch of different backup to the backup to the backup plan. So that's kind of what we did here with Super Bowl. To see more on Cal OES and our Public Safety Communications branch, visit our website at caloes.ca.gov.


Let me know when it gets any better because it's definitely on I can move okay Okay, so it's a great honor for me to be part of this project And I'm delighted to be back in Trieste, which is both science and literature city for me I I just want to have a caveat. I am not Representing UNESCO because once you're retired you're not allowed to represent the organization But what I'm going to talk about relates to the more than ten years where I was the lead gender focal point for the natural Sciences sector and the consulting that I did this year for the division for gender equality and During that period. I revised two books that I'll be talking about here today So my talk is going to cover briefly what has been done in for gender equality and the empowerment of women within the UN System so that you have some context for some of you this will be Well-known stuff, but for other people it might be new and it's good that everybody have this as a Basis to start our work in this area Then I'll talk about gender equality in the empowerment of women at UNESCO leading up to the revision of UNESCO's second gender equality action plan, which I did and I'll highlight Work that UNESCO does not only in natural sciences, but in its other domains as they're pertinent to the work We've been doing here and finally I'll update you on the saga project. I was on the steering committee for the saga project so within the United Nations gender equality was affirmed in the UN Charter and a Gender equality in the empowerment of women But I'm not going to say GEW because that's just too awkward, but I thought it would make the slide be easier to write so I Have a microphone on me is it not working well Is there a way to turn the volume up I Could hold it in my hands is that better and not use this Okay, I'm gonna put this up. I can hear it. Okay, so okay now should I start all over? No, okay, so we're talking about gender equality in the empowerment of women in the United Nations to give us some context So United Nations was created in 1945 there was a Charter on human rights Which stressed that there should be no discrimination including on the basis of gender and this photograph is from 1948 a special meeting of the United Nations General Assembly where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed this happens to be in Paris There was an exhibition last year with photos of the time and I took a photo of the photo One of the first things related to women was the creation of the Commission on the status of women And this is a photograph from the sub-commission as it was known at that time from 1946 in their first meeting in New York and The Commission on status of women plays a key role in documenting what the current situation is in Countries around the world so that you can chart progress The Commission led to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women or CEDAW Which has been described as the first human rights treaty for women. It was voted into force in 1979 highlighting areas of inequality and it takes all necessary measures to ensure Human rights are equal for women and for men It's been ratified by 96% of UN member states and It's up to the member states to ensure that these rights are Actually given to people so there has to be reporting to the committee on progress Every few years and UNESCO can help member states figure out how to do better so that they can fulfill their Commitments UNESCO itself reports regularly both to the Commission on status of women and to the Convention on the Elimination of discrimination against women But furthermore in the UN context there's another body relevant for us working on gender and science and That's within the UN Economic and Social Council There's a UN Commission on science and technology for development and the Commission Created a gender advisory board in 1996 From the very beginning it worked very closely with UNESCO and UNIFEM which is one of the precursors to today's UN women and The gender advisory board has a close link with gender insight Which is one of the organizations located in this building because the experts in the world at least back in 1996 who understood development gender and science were fairly few in number Finally the UN has four days every year that are relevant for gender equality and UNESCO always has Solid social media campaigns about them These are the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February International Women's Day on 8 March the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25 November and the International Day of the Girl Child on 11 October The first one I mentioned the International Day of Women and Girls in Science was established in the in the near the end of 2015 and it was Mandated by the General Assembly of the United Nations that it be under the joint responsibility of UNESCO and UN women now at the United Nations fourth world conference on women which took place in Beijing in 1995 there were close to 50,000 attendees and That was where the Beijing Declaration and platform for action Described as the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women's rights came into force and it established that Mainstreaming was supposed to be the main way to go forward to achieve gender equality all of the parts of the Beijing platform are relevant for UNESCO, but as with the CDA whether The promises made in Beijing come into reality is up to individual member states So far no country has fulfilled all the Beijing platform objectives Every five years the Beijing platform is looked at to renew commitment and chart progress And the last meeting in 2015 talked about the persisting challenges between norms and implementation The persistence of gender stereotypes and the low level of female participation in many areas of the economy Here too UNESCO has a role to play to help countries Improve their performance The next meeting will be next year the 25th anniversary and UNESCO and UN women are going to launch framework for action Coalitions with a major event at UNESCO in Paris next July All this work within the UN system has led up to what we call the System-wide Action Plan to mainstream gender equality and the empowerment of women The first iteration of it when 2012 had 15 elements and every UN agency or Fund all the different bodies of the UN was required to track its progress and Report to the secretary general through the chief executives board it helps to create a common understanding in the UN of what gender equality means for the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and Gives ways of having accountability by agency for that In the latest review in 2018 UNESCO came out very well It met 87 percent of the indicators and the UN average was only 64 As you can see here things have gotten more complicated in the second iteration of the UN swap There are now 17 different elements I won't go through them, but they cover in general things about results-based management Oversight accountability and human and financial resources dedicated to gender equality And how to improve knowledge communication and coherence in this sort of work Now we switch to UNESCO and I created the phrase that it UNESCO gender equality in the empowerment of women is everybody's business so that will be in the new book I'll talk about but what what is the mission of UNESCO some of you might not know today? It's a phrase like this since wars began in the minds of men and women It's in the minds of men and women that the defenses of peace must be constructed in the 1945 Constitution men was considered to cover men and women was just a given But we actually went and changed the wording a few years ago today UNESCO's duty Remains to reaffirm the humanist mission of education science and culture But that word humanist is important This is a photograph from the very first general assembly of UNESCO and the gentleman who is standing is the first director general Dr. Julian Huxley he along with Joseph Needham helped to include the s in UNESCO It otherwise would have been UNECO. They felt that science was a vital way for countries across the world to collaborate and talk to each other about something specific so that they could learn to trust each other Huxley was one of the most eminent zoologists and evolutionary biologists of the last century But it was he was also very important in creating evolutionary humanism as a basis for modern ethics Coming back to gender equality at UNESCO women in development as it was called was first addressed only in 2077 but since 2007 gender equality has been one of the two global priorities of UNESCO and there's been a gender equality action plan since that time Each one covered a certain number of years to help with how all the programming of everything at UNESCO would go forward It was coordinated by the division for gender equality which used to be in the Bureau of strategic planning But to give it higher visibility it moved under directly under the director general in her office in 2011 So the first gender equality action plan Explained what gender equality should mean at UNESCO and I'm going to read this definition It's one that I continue to use and all the things that I've been doing for UNESCO Gender equality is where women and men enjoy the same status and have equal opportunities To realize their full human rights and potential to contribute to political economics social and cultural development of their communities and Societies and to benefit from the results It is the equal valuing by society of both the similarities and the differences between women and men and the different roles They play so it is not saying that men and women are the same thing by any means Whoops the gender equality action plan also provides guidance to the organization how to ensure that a gender perspective is Reflected in all the policies and programs so that the institutional processes within the secretariat as well as the work with UNESCO does with member states have gender equality mainstreamed it enabled clear and consistent Implementation and monitoring and gave chains of responsibility if it's everybody's business It doesn't mean everybody has the same thing they have to do to achieve this objective and UNESCO for several years has been one of only five UN bodies to have overall gender parity in its staffing so Why was it considered important to do a revision of the current action plan? It should have continued until 2021, but I was asked to do a revision this year Well, there are several reasons first of all the transforming our world the 2030 agenda for sustainable development came into play There is a dedicated SDG sustainable development goal on gender equality I mapped the work we were doing in all parts of UNESCO against the targets within that SDG Then there was the UN swap second version that I just talked about and there were further refinements to the programming at UNESCO so that more needed to be done to Capture the resources used for gender equality and I'll have a slide about that and then there were evaluations of the work UNESCO does overall particularly by Mopan the Multilateral organization performance assessment network and it looked it gave very positive Grade for how UNESCO Organizes itself in order to try and work on gender equality But it said that the results on the ground for women Actually are only satisfactory and we UNESCO wants to be more than satisfactory So we hope that this new revision will enable UNESCO to do better One thing that we instituted and it's now being used as a model in other UN agencies is what we call the gender equality Marker which is a way of capturing the resources that are dedicated to gender equality So this is just a screenshot of when you Create your plan for the work you're going to be doing for the for a two-year period You have to go into the gender equality action plan and you have to say how much Your resources of your project your activity your program are going to be dedicated to gender equality and there are four levels It's gender neutral of only up to 10 percent of your resources will be spent on it It's gender sensitive between 10 and 30 percent gender responsive between 30 and 50 percent and gender transformative if at least half the resources of your Activity are dedicated to gender equality So you probably want to know What are the areas that UNESCO works in we have five program sectors? Education culture which is linked with the World Heritage Program communication and information social and human sciences and The natural sciences which is linked to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in addition There's the UNESCO Institute for statistics, which I think everybody here knows about that gives support to all the things I've just mentioned There are also key areas for Intersectoral work that the gender division for gender equality overseas the division also Helps to ensure that there is a common understanding of what gender equality means ensures everybody receives some training that there be gender focal points in every unit of UNESCO and that they receive Even further training that there is a common knowledge base that you can receive support from the division and They work as advocates for gender equality both within UNESCO and Outside to ensure that there are high-level reports about gender equality in the different domains and things like that The human resources office tracks the number of staff at every level by sex and reports that to the Governing bodies at every meeting and there are many ways by which gender inclusive language is enforced and everything that we publish So the current director of Executive director general of UNESCO Audrey Osoley asked the director of the division for gender equality Could could she produce a nice book that she could give to visitors that? Captures everything we do in gender equality because it's all over the place and it hadn't been consolidated anywhere So one of the things I was asked to do was to produce this book And I called it UNESCO in the promise of gender equality and it's going to be launched next week And so it's under embargo and even I don't know if what I proposed it looked like is what it's actually going to look like But it should be about 70 pages long For today's talk I'm only going to focus on the things that I think you would be interested in so it leaves out quite a lot But within the division for gender equality and I've got the URI listed up there because all the publications that I will mention you can find there There'll be links to other pages If you want them so there's one project that the division for gender equality is managing called defining measuring and promoting gender transformative skills for women and girls in the digital age UNESCO and the International Telecommunication Union are working together on this area in the run-up to Beijing plus 25 and on International Women's Day this year they launched this book called I'd blush if I could Closing gender divides and digital skills through education, which has a lot of recommendations in it one one part of the book talks about the the concern about voice assistants that have female names and voices and express a Personality that is engineered to be uniformly subservient giving a female veneer to technology is affecting perceptions of gender in digital environments and The coalition called equals Hosted by ITU and UNESCO are creating a multi-stake or stakeholder partnership to try to address this Here's one illustration from the book and in the book It doesn't look any more legible than it does on the screen and fortunately But it's showing the gender equality paradox That those countries with the highest scores for gender equality overall, which in many cases are the Nordic countries or highly developed economies are Absolutely not the ones where the highest number of women are Getting advanced degrees in information and communication technology So where you're getting the most degrees are in the Arab States and several other Parts of the world where you would not expect it. Does that necessarily translate into jobs? I'm not sure At the UNESCO Institute for statistics, and I also give you their URL There are all kinds of things being done to measure gender equality in all of UNESCO's domains And they have visualization tools Information sheets and booklets that you can look at I'm sure you're familiar with the one on women in science But there are also things like the new e-atlas on gender equality and education Left behind girls education in Africa information and communication technology and education and the status of women's work in the culture section So here this is the 2018 Figures on the gender gap in science and the number of researchers Now I'm going to go through the five different sectors of UNESCO The first line is always going to be from the gender equality action plan revision What is the current amount of funding and percent of the budget for that sector that's dedicated to gender equality in the empowerment of women in? the education sector at UNESCO is the lead UN agency for SDG for which is the education goal and In order to be able to track that they have the gold global education monitoring reports and those have an annual gender review there's a new strategy For gender equality and women's empowerment in education There's a picture of the cover of it there and a new campaign going along with that called her education our future and the strategy tries to improve data improve policy and planning frameworks and lead to better quality learning opportunities Also in education. There's the Malala's fund for girls right to education established by Pakistan and UNESCO in 2014 and The money from this fund enables UNESCO's education work to go where the needs of women and girls are the greatest remote and rural areas the workplaces of the low skilled and marginalized and minority women Amongst the things that the education sector says that it wants to focus on our technical and vocational education STEM education and ICTs So they do have some projects that are specifically devoted to this I'm going to talk about the book cracking the code girls and women's education in STI or in STEM I you might recall that Justine sass came to the first meeting at UNESCO She's the person who oversees this area and this figure is both in cracking the code and it's reprinted in Saga's fifth working paper because I think it really gives a good Framework they call it the ecological framework of different actions for changing perception and changing things so Also from the book There are examples of how the sex of the teacher on the left and then the textbook content on the right Send messages whether implicit or not about what are appropriate subjects for girls and boys to study Turning to the social and human sciences It supports inclusive social policies that are ethical based on human rights and on scientific evidence And one of the things they did recently was to update the recommendation on science and scientific researchers the woman on the cover is Michelle Simmons who was a UNESCO Loreal fellow she's a fantastic person working in quantum computing and With the help of the saga project this recommendation has included gender equality in every single one of its sections to to give more strength to our cause Just as with the division for gender equality in the social and human sciences program There is work on artificial intelligence and implications for gender equality the commission on the ethics of science and technology or Comest Has proposed to come up with a recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence This will be debated by the UNESCO general conference next week And if it's approved then they will go ahead and make such a recommendation and it will include gender equality principles within it Finally this sector has a new Masculinities initiative aiming to figure out ways of engaging men and boys in the fight for gender equality and to promote positive redefinitions of social norms for masculinity Turning to the culture sector They have worked on all the different cultural conventions such as the convention on world heritage the convention on Intangible heritage so the gender gender equality is addressed anywhere that it makes sense such as the collection of information on who is benefiting from these what kinds of economic opportunities are developing around the world heritage sites and They ensure that capacity building to learn how to do the conventions always includes a large number of women And if you want to get funding to do anything related to the culture convictions Gender equality is one of the criteria for funding the illustration is from a book called reshaping cultural policies and In it they try to ensure that women and men can enjoy and benefit from heritage and creativity But they show that women in cultural and creative industries are less likely to earn a high salary Are more likely to work part-time and face a glass ceiling when they reach senior management positions or Decision-making positions now somehow that sounds quite familiar So one thing that they've done is they created the international fund for cultural diversity last year Setting aside one million dollars just to support women Entrepreneurs in digital creative industries that kind of links with the next major program of UNESCO on communication and information which does Outstanding work to try to address Stereotypes but in areas that you wouldn't even think might make sense for us So their big areas are working on safety of women journalists the media coverage of sports Access to ICTs Their information for all program notes that there's a gender divide within the digital divide and that it's really important that women have access to both to new technologies and knowing how to use them because a much large lower Percentage of women actually know how to use the tools so the development Continues this year. They've published two books setting the gender agenda for communication policy new proposals from the Global Alliance on media and gender and that has working papers on how to achieve the SDGs on how to include gender equality in media decision-making positions in regulatory policy Talks about gender and freedom of expression and the rights of women media workers The second book is gender media and ICTs new approaches for research education and training and it maps all the educational opportunities Related to gender equality in media and ICTs Some of its work and overcoming stereotypes There you can read it yourself, but only 24% of the people represented in the news are women only 4% of newspapers radio and TV stories challenge gender stereotypes and Even though the number of women in the media industry is grown it again has not Resulted in more women being at the top and it also made no change on how women are portrayed in media content so they The communication Information sector has some programs to try to address this one is called women make the news Which helps women get internships in media organizations, but it also makes sure that they create stories about women who are newsmakers and Then there was an important book about gender sensitive indicators for media and that is being used in training programs such as here in New Delhi for the guidelines for women in media in Southeast Asia and now we're almost at science for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission The first ever global ocean science report came out in 2017 and One groundbreaking thing it did was show what the numbers are of women in marine science And they were in the opinion of the IOC really good 38% of Researchers in this area are women compared to an overall figure for women in all sciences of about 28% So they thought they didn't have a problem The IOC is leading the United Nations decade of ocean science for sustainable development which will start in 2021 and It created a science plan and a decade implementation plan for this decade I was working in 2018 for the United Nations Secretary General Special Envoy on the oceans so I had the opportunity to review the implementation plan and my Advice was that it was genderblind and that there needed to be a lot of places where Things could be inserted that would improve the situation But I was ignored Then there was an international Consultation meeting to for to look at the plan in a large meeting and the conclusions They drew were priced precisely the same as my own and so they have been working on it since I've been trying to convince them that 38% is not where you want to stay So they have said in the gender equality action plan revision that they aim that the target for Capacity building in marine science is now 40% women. I'd like to see it be higher than that and finally we turn to the natural sciences sector itself and I had always Organized it when I was overseeing this into about five different areas where we do things data collection which is where the saga project came in and another area where we did data collection was in water water data the World Water Assessment Program created a toolkit on how to collect sex disaggregated data Mentoring networks and role models you know about the UNESCO L'Oreal for women in science program and the Organization for women in science for the developing world The third area is international advocacy for the science development gender nexus done by gender insight and by women for science Activities in the interacademy partnership and these last three Organizations are all located in this building We also at UNESCO's natural sciences sector worked on workshops in summer schools for women in STEM at all educational levels particularly in Africa and we did a lot of work UNESCO is known for its Valorization of indigenous and local knowledge, but they also tried to identify different knowledges held by women and by men separately So it's just so much that is being done that I didn't want to go into too much detail about it But I wanted to talk about what we've done on gender and climate science and climate policy I'm really proud of this work UNESCO was not participating in the UNFCCC the Framework Convention on climate change until 2007 I organized the first ever UNESCO site event at one of these cops it was in Bali and At that time there were two or three new organizations that spontaneously came up about women and climate change So I ensured that UNESCO joined all these organizations Then in 2009 there was the third world climate conference The first one had created the IPCC the second had created the UNFCCC And we thought something would come out of this one It was the global framework for climate services, which is probably invisible to the general public But we organized a panel at at this event to look At gender inclusion and explain my why women are more vulnerable than men to climate change in the short story is women are on average Are poorer why are they poorer because they don't have the same educational opportunities the poor are the people who are the most vulnerable in any community Then in 2014 there was an international conference organized between 12 UN agencies on the gender dimensions of weather and climate services And I was part of that as well I organized five of the working groups and the French government itself in the run-up to cop 21 the Paris Agreement really wanted to do work on To ensure that gender would show up very well in the final outcome document So they had a series of meetings in the French Senate the General Assembly and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs I was invited to speak there one of the few times in my life where I've had to speak French in front of public But the results of all this work didn't mean that agenda 21 had a section on gender equality It didn't but it did mention the words gender responsive gender balance gender equality empowerment of women so the next cop they looked at this again, and they agreed to continue Previous work that had been done on gender equality in climate change and they asked that that work Continue until the cop that's taking place this year and they created a website for good practices And I made sure that the World Water Assessment Program's gender indicators on water are included in that at the same time The IPCC is using UNESCO's resources on indigenous and local knowledge within their research and so there is information at the IPCC on women's in indigenous and local knowledge about climate change and Whoops I'm Tanya Blowers is going to have the opportunity to tell you a little bit about OST So I won't go into any detail on this slide But I just wanted to say that if you're not all already a member of the OST network Consider joining you don't have to be in a developing country, and you don't have to be a woman to be a member I'm a member, and I think that it's a wonderful thing if you're interested in joining you can talk to Tanya and Now we're at the last section of my talk which is on the saga project If you want to have more information about saga than what I tell you you can take one of these cards That gives you the URL if you can't write it down You'll remember that the stem and gender advancement project was contributing both to the conceptual framework of task three But also our survey on drivers and barriers To careers in science and engineering was shared with AIP for consideration in the development of the survey but our survey is much more detailed and so Not that much of it was taken up, but it did inform a little bit We already know that there were a lot of problems before the work we're doing so I'll skip that this these are the advisory committee members and the partners and you'll see ISC down in the partners to stand for this the project we're working on here Saga tried to do four different main areas to develop the methodology and tools that are in the working papers capacity building workshops with member states of UNESCO who Who so desired to learn how to review the gender equality? components of their national policies teach them how to collect data and information about their policies and then we did advocacy work About gender equality in science by participating in conferences all around the world especially the gender summits So in the end we had five working papers you most of you know already the first working paper Which is the science technology and innovation gender objectives list with those seven gender objectives With concise number of sub objectives You couldn't believe how much time was spent going into refining that we talked to Scores of experts read hundreds of papers Trying to make it as synthetic as possible so it wouldn't be overwhelming for a member state to you know have a list of a thousand things We wanted it to be under a hundred so that it was manageable and it was Makes perfect sense that in your project that we're looking at a different thing than policies So if you add to it, I think that that it's good. It served as a as a basis The second working paper is the toolkit and that provide definitions of key terms and Classifications guidelines where you can find indicators Describes tools for policymakers to look at their results so that they can understand them and provide Evidence-based policies in their own context. There is a page in that working paper Addressing scientific unions, but I couldn't carry everything with me and I don't have it memorized But you can go go into that to see what the recommendations were at looking at your own membership the third working paper is a survey of STI policies with a model questionnaire and advice on how to complete it the fourth one is the Survey of drivers and barriers to careers in science and engineering and that's a modular thing It gives every possible thing that we think you might want to look at but you pick the parts You want to use at your institution? It also since we know that the audience isn't necessarily well versed in statistics It gives advice on how to assess data and how to present it to others so that it can be meaningfully used and the fifth working paper is telling saga improving measurements and policies for gender equality in science technology and innovation and There we present a short history of gender equality in STEM The preliminary findings on the relevant importance of each of the STI gender objectives a summary of the trends and the case studies of the pilot countries that there were in the saga project and Here's a list of the countries where? We undertook the project the photograph is our workshop in Haiti In each pilot country an inter institutional committee work together Linking all the most relevant ministries in the country usually it could be education higher education Science R&D women Every country organizes itself differently But we tried to capture all of those along with the national statistics institution if there was a national science Foundation and if there were such things as a national University of course in a Larger more developed countries where the university systems are not linked to the government You have to decide which are the most important actors you want to include in the saga planning committee because you couldn't have Everybody every institution involved. It would be unwieldy One thing we learned is that you really need to have a dedicated person Overseeing this committee somebody needs to be seconded out of a ministry and put on this job full-time Otherwise it will always be the second thing they do and you'll be years behind in your implementation So every country that was a pilot and going forward now any country that wants to implement saga on their own Should come up with a final country assessment or if it's a regional workshop or Countries working together than to do a regional profile that will Help them to oversee where the gaps are in what they have right now in terms of their science policies And where they need to be making modifications if they do the drivers and barriers survey Then it would also show them in in their country. Where are the key bottlenecks for women's career pathways? every committee is Has to make a promise that they're going to embed monitoring and evaluations so that after the final report is Produced that you will go back on an annual basis and assess the promises that you made to yourself You're going to change the national legislation on something. Did you do it? Yes or no? And why not so? We've talked about earlier this week about how important evaluation is and so we wanted to make sure that when our funding ran out It didn't mean that everybody everywhere would stop doing things so Just one example here is what was happening in the Gambia The head of the the Committee for Saga was the Ministry of Higher Education Research Science and Technology They undertook both the surveys They were particularly interested in in Saga because they want to see Innovation become something important to develop the economy in their country But they have very few policies right now about STI at all let alone to have something to encourage women and to and girls to participate in it they saw Saga as an advocacy mechanism within the government to push these things forward and the things that Resulted from it even in the short time since it The project was there is they created a gender unit within the Ministry of Higher Education Research Science and Technology The existing such units within higher education institutions in the country were all strengthened They Reviewed their existing national policy and considered how saga recommendations can change that in the future They included a gender component of about STI in the new national STI law and This ministry is now having working relations with what in their country is called the Women's Bureau So even though STI is at a fairly low level in the country They're poised to go forward in a better direction than they were otherwise One of the tools we have That it makes it easy to compare different countries is a simple thing called a gender objective footprint You just have the seven objectives Around the outside and you count how many policies there are in the country that relate to these the further out from the center You go the more policies there are in that area So here we take five different countries that were saga pilots And you don't really need to know what the details are but the shapes are different So what I can tell you about these is that for Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti They had way more policies related to higher education and career development than they did for other things Whereas in Quebec in the Gambia They had a lot of policies about addressing stereotypes and the Gambia had a lot of policies about primary and secondary education There are also other footprints related to other components of the project and the countries found these very useful Some of the trends that we observed in the pilot countries if you look at the seven gender objectives every country agreed that social aspects in the view of women and science Is really an important barrier, but not all that many countries had specific policies or Tools to address that primary and secondary Education was not a top priority in any of the pilots even though I said that The Gambia found it to be important. They had other things that were more important The second highest number of policies was related to university education by far the highest number of policies related to Career progression That makes sense because there there often are policies about setting salaries setting benefits at national institutions or national universities The least cited objective was gender as a component of the research agenda itself but Some countries once with more advanced STI policy systems Considered that this was an incipient area that they want to address in the future and For the sixth one on STI policies all countries said that they need to do more in their national policies to Ensure that gender equality is embedded when it comes to innovation just like with this project It was five six and seven that had the least policies. We found the smallest number of policies for innovation There is one project that was working with us, which was at the Inter-American Development Bank where they were actually studying Gender and innovation together looking at how many patents there were and things like that So there's a chapter in the fifth working paper looking at the outcomes from that project as well So in the fifth working paper We gave examples not only from our pilot countries But from the reading we had done on what are some best practices or things that Countries put forward as what we are doing to address any particular goal here We look at the second gender objective, which is related to primary and secondary education And you can see that we revised textbooks The capacity of teachers to understand how how to treat girls and boys in the classroom And how to better teach STEM because if STEM education itself is more interesting than all children They're going to be more interested in it that includes things like doing hands-on real experiments in the classroom and Enabling girls to meet role models people who are higher up in the chain of science than they are Then this this sounds a little strange But just saying it's a good thing to get a high score on your school leaving exam in itself is seen to be a way of enforcing the strength of science in a country and then there were some New things like this side girl 7 project that was created in the US that was being used in Quebec Which is one of the Quebec province Canada was one of the saga pilots They thought that was a very effective way of reaching girls there so if you want to see examples for all the other gender objectives you go to the fifth working paper and What are some of the numbers? From from what saga has done. This is from our final meeting. We had almost exactly one year ago 150 experts trained from 90 national institutions 20 international institutions collaborated with us more than 300 policymakers were trained as three-quarters of whom were women and Seven countries at that point in time had finished their National report on the status of women in science and the gaps in the policy instruments available in their country as of This summer the methodology has been downloaded more than 10,000 times We hope that means that there are countries or institutions actually using these tools that never even told us that they're doing it So some of the policy impacts that we know that we've had in Countries are that in the Gambia Argentina Uruguay and the province of Quebec They've included gender equality in STI in their national strategies and plans and other countries such as Haiti and Sudan are In the process of drafting policies laws or programs to address this in Quebec the position of councillor for equality diversity and inclusion was created at the fund of research to Quebec To implement actions focused on gender equality in STEM 7 several policy instruments have already been revised with input from the project to include a gender equality component and As I mentioned earlier the recommendations on science and scientific researchers was influenced by the saga project as was the International international declaration at the 8th world science forum on science for peace back in 2017 The science as the saga database has been revised this year This is just a screenshot of what it looks like and you can now search for policies and instruments Not only by country or by region but by STI gender objective and There is information not only for the countries that have finished the saga report But for other countries that have done the UNESCO global observatory of science and technology and innovation Policy instruments is included in there as well. So for example, you can do a search and say I want to look at policy instruments in Africa from all kinds of institutions that address Science policy you type that in and you get this list I can't honestly remember if my screenshot was just the first part and it goes on for pages or if there was only three examples What we have is Rwanda Gambia in South Africa. I suspect that there is a lot more than that in Africa So since the project ended at the end of 2017 with funding from Sweden things have still been going on even without any funding the Institute Pasteur called me in to talk right after I retired and They did that because they were looking at their own faculty Handbook they were considering changing their rules and they did decide to change them after this half-day colloquia that they had organized So that women will now be on all committees because they noticed that Sometimes they would hold events and there would be no women at all Invited as speakers and they realized that it was because there hadn't been any women on the committee Organizing the conference in the first place and nobody thought of it. So now that should be addressed The the invitation actually came from their postdoc and graduate student union So it's good to see younger generation helping their institution to move forward Then I got another invitation from the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris and as I'm a member of 500 women scientists They 500 women scientists said well we can videotape it and we can broadcast it live so that happened that was February this year and I just noticed last week that the video is actually on the UNESCO Division for Gender Equality website you can link it there and you can see Alessandro Betelow and me talking about Saga But you also see some good things that are being done in those two institutions Then there are supposed to be sub-regional workshops coming up in New Delhi in Namibia and in Panama and I mentioned Ghostbin the Global Observatory of Science Policy in Instruments it now has Saga embedded as a component any country that comes to UNESCO and says we would like you to help us review our science policy And all the components thereof in our country. They have the option to say oh and we'd also like to work on Ungender equality then they will do that the difference between Ghostbin and Saga is Saga asked the country Countries prepare their own reports at Ghostbin. It's UNESCO that prepares the reports And I actually had to review many of them from a gender focus in the past So there's always been some iterations towards more influence more impact of gender equality in the reports over time anyway so that's another way Saga has been embedded into UNESCO's work and just Oops, I guess I don't have it up there in Kenya the National Commission for UNESCO started the Saga project just this past May and It's being Organized by the Ministry of Education with the Ministry of Public Service youth and gender affairs It's including research centers and universities I'm looking forward to seeing what they will come up with because it was at the very first International Day of women and girls in science where I talked about Saga that the Kenyan delegation Actually came up right after said we want to be a pilot country But it took two years for it to happen and by then Saga was almost over So they're kind of doing it on their own But that's good because the pilot was supposed to help vet the tools to make sure that they were as useful as Possible we we learned from the feedback we got so I hope that that will go forward and At the Commission on status of women this year there was a UNESCO round table What drives a gender gap in science technology and innovation and how do we close it? Alessandro Bello talked about Saga Roseanne Diab who's here with us from gender insight spoke for her organization There was an international Rising talent from the UNESCO L'Oreal program and the ambassador And representative from Finland to the UN talking at that particular session I had been at the Commission on status of women at the 60th session and presented Saga there for the first time at that point and and Chile Had voted national funds by the Senate to undertake Saga Two years ago, and they started the project just before Everything started to break down in the country But I think it probably will go forward even if there is a slight delay in exactly when it's going to start Here we see Mariana Kraus the president of Connissi the Commission national the investigation scientific and technological and She highlighted that in order to eliminate gender gaps. Hopefully in the near future Relevant data is needed data we can trust and that's what the second saga methodology provides So her commission the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality and the UNESCO Montevideo office are Organizing the work in that country. I imagine it'll take about two years and Now we're at my sunset photo So the end of the talk I took this picture of this installation called suspended together I saw it at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and what it is is a Representation of the travel restrictions of women in Saudi Arabia because each dove has a postmark of a letter That's been written by a male guardian to allow someone to travel a woman to travel outside the country So ready for questions


What's the greatest work of poetry ever written in the English language? You can tell I'm a college professor because this is a multiple choice question There's only one answer. What's the greatest poem ever written? Excellent choice wasn't written in English originally though. I've got it here It's within old English. That's right. I've got the correct answer here though. It's Milton's Paradise Lost The other possibility is Spencer's Fairy Queen But Milton's Paradise Lost this is it's one of my Loveliest possessions, I suppose it's a miniature edition of Paradise Lost And this is the edition that a young naturalist Carried with him when he circumnavigated the globe in the 1830s So Darwin apparently had a field jacket Cut for his The Voyage on the Beagle and he had a special pocket sewn into it that would into which he could slip these miniature editions He loved Paradise Lost and he committed large chunks of the poem to to memory and there's a vein of scholarship that actually suggests that the Some of the patterns in Paradise Lost are actually replicated in Darwin's On the Origin of Species published in 1859 There is a miniature edition and Darwin's eyes were much better Than than mine are now so I'll take my glasses off and I'm just gonna read you a few lines from the poem Need a microscope for this part of the talk actually In this pleasant soil His far more pleasant garden God ordained Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow all trees of noblest kind for sight smell taste and all amid them stood the tree of life High eminent blooming ambrosial fruit of vegetable gold and next to life our death The tree of knowledge grew fast by I Love this particular line And all amid them stood the tree of life and that's really a Metaphor that I used throughout the book the amoeba in the room If we think about Eden it's easy, I think to revel in the idea of an Eden when we're in a tropical rainforest or when we're When we're where snorkeling over a coral reef Less so when we're just going about our daily business in a city But yet this this theme and all amid them stood the tree of life is actually true It's true of us right now, and it's true of you As you sit and me as I stand So rather than talking about a tropical rainforest, I'm going to introduce to you a Little garden pond my garden pond in Ohio. I live close to Cincinnati and You know a PowerPoint will be useless here. You can picture just a little pond Six fish swim around the ripples from a little pump that circulates the water Frogs visit from time to time and are attacked by my cats This doesn't seem like a place of teeming biological diversity But when we look more closely it becomes clear that the little pond is a place of quite mind-blowing biological riches The water contains Trillions of bacteria ten times more viruses and the diversity of eukaryotes is incredible eukaryotes being Organisms like us our cells We have 23 pairs of chromosomes that are packaged in a nucleus in each of our cells and Other eukaryotes then also have a nucleus as the house where the chromosomes are stuffed and I'll talk a little bit about these these unicellular or microbial eukaryotes shortly, but looked out from a broad perspective We discovered that every kind of living thing really is represented in this pond And all amid them stood the tree of life. We don't have to go to a rainforest There are for example in the pond multiple amoeba zones Cryptomonad algae diatoms and water molds dino flagellates gorgeous Shell to me be called riserians colonies of sparkling green algae and an apple green Alga called the uglenoid that glides through the water if you look at these these organisms You take a little bit of time as I have done to look at them under the microscope. They are absolutely Beautiful this is one of life's great experiences at this time of year before the leaves are out in my part of the country my pond turns this this bright apple green and it's it's because of the Billions and billions of these uglenoid algae that bloom under these conditions of a quite highlight intensity and looked at under the microscope each one of these cells is like a Valentine's Box of candy at their heart-shaped and they they they move they they they sway to and fro and as they swim They they rotate and then they also swim through this wider guy. They're absolutely beautiful The dino flagellates in the pond have got little eyes called eye spots and they use these structures to find the optimal position in the water column For their photosynthetic activity The there is a dino flagella. Unfortunately, it doesn't grow in my pond, but you could find it in the In the ocean here in California. In fact, that's where it's been Studded it's a it's a particular dino flagella. It's a single cell. It's a single eukaryote cell But it has an eye sticking out from one side. It's a modified eye spot and absolutely beautiful cell and It really is an eye. We don't really know what it does, but it is an eye. It has a crystalline lens It's got a photoreactive cup and some beautiful work at Scripps Oceanographic Institute in the 1960s was done by this sort of micro Ophthalmologists where the scientists actually flicked out these eyes from these individual cells and and did some Probably is it this one or this one? He figured out that it had a 30 degree field of view and that this single cell could actually perceive Oncoming predators at a distance of a few centimeters or something like a copepod Rather than a sperm whale, I suppose and and and could swim out of the way of the predator This is a single cell and it's got this structure That looks like an eye and is an eye. Although we don't really know everything about what it does In addition to the figs to the figs to the fish and the frogs in my pond There are microscopic animals including nematode worms water bears and rotophers and when biologists carve up organisms into big Slices referred to as supergroups. So these are much larger groups than kingdoms of organisms We find in fact that the animals are united with the fungi in a single supergroup called the epistocons The the animal relatives in my pond then these fungi actually swim around with undocumented Abundance, we know very very little about the biology of these these organisms and these are these are fungi that have have cilia They're rather like human sperm cells and they swim around in the water There's far more genetic diversity in the pond in in the form of bacteria and archaea that are Like bacteria in that they lack nuclei. This is a separate supergrouping of organisms and then that genetic diversity again is eclipsed by the viruses because for every cell in the pond There are at least 10 to 100 viruses that prey upon that cell Tremendous genetic diversity in the pond and here's something that that's surprising After centuries of taxonomic inquiry and using the latest molecular genetic methods So these are referred to as as metagenomic methods We're still unable to document all of the life in my pond Which is why it should gain National park status soon, but we could say the same probably about I'm sure we could find a pond around here pretty quickly And all amid them stood the tree of life. It's interesting with these metagenomic methods that I write about these methods in the book trying to boil things down to some sort of Straightforward descriptions the cost of these methods is as plunged. It's absolutely an astonishing technological Achievement business achievement, too About 10 years ago. It cost 95 million dollars to sequence a human-sized genome Today we can sequence we I can do this Scientists can sequence a human-sized genome for less than $6,000 So I thought about this a bit and I thought if we could apply the same economies to the automobile industry I could go out and purchase a brand new Rolls Royce for less than the cost of a of a Thanksgiving turkey Unfortunately, I don't drive a Rolls Royce Hasn't happened yet So we'll all be having our genome sequence pretty soon But even with this technology the the the the genetic variation the abundance of organisms in the pond over a trillion cells It's just it's impossible We could keep sequencing and I don't think we'd ever ever get to the bottom of of it Earth air and sea let me just talk a little bit about The spectacular numbers and diversity of microorganisms in different locations each pinch of soil teams with tens of millions of bacteria And hundreds of millions of viruses and is permeated with networks of fungal filaments These organisms control soil fertility and support the growth of plants while other microorganisms coat the surface of plants and Also colonize their internal tissues So when we look at an individual plant arose In fact, we're looking at a rich biological community. We're not just looking at one organism And the same is true of us trillions of bacteria I'm sure you're aware trillions of bacteria live in our guts and they affect every aspect of our well-being and I'll come back To the human microbiome in a couple of minutes Our air supply is microbial to Spores of fungi float into our lungs with every breath and there are plenty of them to go around with an estimated 50 Million tons of spores ejected into the atmosphere every year and that's just that's not just a guess There are reasons why we could talk about this as you beautiful science That actually allows us to come up with this admittedly ballpark estimate But 50 million tall tons of spores 50 megatons of spores Flung into the atmosphere every year. These particles are the bane of the asthmatics existence They affect the chemistry of the air and They even influence patterns of rainfall I've got a graduate student doctoral student in Ohio That's actually looking at this some of the chemistry involved in that extraordinary claim that claim that micro organisms can affect can affect Rainfall patterns seawater seawater is a soup of microbes Most of us left document documentaries about killer whales sharks are of course always a reliable draw on television And it's easy to ignore the fact that microbes run the show For the animals a cup of seawater contains a hundred million bacteria Trillions of four excuse me billions of predatory viruses. There's a single kind of photosynthetic bacterium That absorbs more carbon dioxide than all of the world's rainforests a Single kind of cyanobacterium it grows flourishes in the open ocean It's a greater refrigerant than all of the world's Tropical rainforests diatoms actually marine diatoms that the beautiful cells Circular centric diatoms they form these glass boxes beautiful things to look at in the microscope But they're responsible for about the same amount of photosynthesis as the cyanobacteria So together if we look at the diatoms and the cyanobacteria They're doing more to control the climate than all of the green Plants on land microbes get more air play in extreme environments where nothing else lives There are these are care that I mentioned earlier there There are separate grouping of organisms from the bacteria. This was recognized very controversial at the time It was recognized by a scientist called Karl woes in the 1970s But the Archaea were a separate group of organisms that lacked nuclei They they're actually They're prolific there. They're almost everywhere, too But we tend to associate them with extreme environments. So there's an Archaea that lives Is capable of Continuing of capable of cell division at 121 degrees C Celsius Which is interesting because 121 degrees is the temperature that we use in a lab or hospital autoclave to sterilize Instruments so this organism it's called pyrolobus. Actually, it's a strain called strain 121 because it divides it 121 degrees C and in the paper that first described this it was Great witticism for for a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It said that it's chilled below 90 degrees because it quits dividing So it has to work between 90 and 121 degrees Cold environments. There's a there's another Another Archaea that divides only once a month at the bottom of an Antarctic lake Methanogenium I think it's frigidum is its Latin name The most acid-tolerant thing there's an Archaea that can grow at pH 0.06. That's more acidic than battery acid How is this possible? radioactive Resistance there's a bacterium called dinococcus that survives 15,000 grays of ionizing Radiation humans a toast of five grays, you know total absorbance So this thing can survive and actually the reason we know that is is tragic, but interesting, but it's from studies of the Very careful studies of the first responders to the Chernobyl disaster in the 1980s You know exactly what kind of dose we know exactly what dose they have radioactivity they received and we can look at the Consequences to that to their health We don't have to go to such extreme places to find extreme or interesting environments are our own homes our bathrooms and our Laundry rooms are Places where we find incredible microbial diversity We think about a bathroom and a hot water faucet. I mean there are lots and lots of microorganisms including fungi There are very hot places then in a bathroom there are very Alkaline conditions that we find in a laundry room laundry detergents Very very alkaline conditions and you'll find incredible diversity of microbes in these places a dishwasher is a place of extraordinary diversity Yet to be accorded national park status These organisms make extraterrestrial life seem plausible And the current interest is in Jupiter's moon Europa Saturn's moon Titan and all of these Goldilocks planets that are discovered With what every week we hear of new Goldilocks planets So how have we learned all this? Microbes are everywhere But invisible or they were so before the invention of the microscope in the 17th century The revelation that there was more to life than the immediately observable was a discovery of immense significance and Yet this was sidelined by a continuing What? narcissism self-obsession with our own specialness and Linnaeus and other or Linnaeus and other natural historians of the 18th century Cataloged plants and animals and just ignored the microscopic majority Linnaeus was particularly upset with the fungi he had no Interest in them. What did he call them? I think he called them. He gave them a name at one one edition of the system and naturally The 18th century called it said we'll just call them all one thing fungus I do forget Chaos fun fun gorem all of the fungi chaos fun gorem. We're just going to ignore them When microbiological inquiry was restimulated by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century It became the science of germs and infectious disease The point was not to glory in the diversity of microbes, but to exterminate them And so even in the 19th century most of life was disregarded and We still teach biology most of us most biology teachers K through 12 and in college to Teach biology from a very macro biological perspective that elevates humanity and so the situates us as the triumph of a three and a half billion year old evolutionary process It's interesting if you look at You can you know Google image this or go into a school classroom and look at look at trees of life And it's it's amazing and in still in many many textbooks, too That you've got it's mostly animals and most of the real genetic diversity and metabolic diversity of life Is hidden under a an amoeba or a hairy bacterium at the base of the tree? This is still the way that we we look at a biology Plenty plenty the The elder was it the elder plenty the elder died in 8079 for Suvious he was so interested in seeing the volcano anyway got too close and He perished but plenty the elder published the Historia naturalis and you can buy this in the lobe classics edition It's like I twelve volumes. I think and in this book plenty had this very modest goal of Documenting everything in the world And he got to thirteen volumes twelve thirteen volumes and he perished at the Suvious didn't quite get there and It's actually a fascinating read or parts of it are he describes all these strange animals that are based on descriptions from Travelers at the time, you know many-headed monsters and Snakes that could destroy you by looking at you or make you pregnant or amazing things fascinating book So it's obviously futile Plenty ask to to to to engage in this this this idea of just documenting everything Thinking that we could know everything but the thing is I think we're still doing this and If I give this talk in Boston, I have to be very careful what I say because The deity that is EO Wilson is the Harvard professor there, but EO Wilson put his name behind and a brilliant brilliant biologist and Specialist the EO Wilson put his name behind the tree of the encyclopedia of life projects some years ago it's really really interesting and this is this this exists on online and Scientists can upload descriptions of different organisms and in the original sort of mission statement It reads just like plenty we're going to describe Everything we're going to put a lot of resources into this and we're going to figure out what's on earth Figure out all the species name them on if you go on there What you find is that most of the time it's new species of crabs and lobsters big things that have been described There's a few microorganisms there But it's mostly animals There are some really big names in in biology in Europe to Lord May of the Royal Society. He had a paper in Paper in science. I think it was last year But there have been a number of these sort of calls to action where we need to the argument is that we need to document all of the species on earth and that we need to put What would be hundreds of millions of dollars into this activity global activity to name everything? There are so many problems with that enterprise that I'm only going to tell you about two of them One of the problems is that it's impossible We among the microorganisms for most most of life. We really don't know what a species is. There's no species concept It's philosophically unsound We can't possibly document species when we really don't have a proper definition of what a species is Most of life doesn't operate like us So that's the first thing it's futile on those ground. The other thing is why would we do this? Why would we take funding from other areas and engage in this this this this Pliny ask cataloging of biological diversity? What before it all goes extinct What's what's the rationale for doing this? And actually that one of the one of the papers actually says that it's only by knowing how many species are out there that We can properly document rates of extension extinction. This seems to me to be Perhaps even morally reprehensible. We're trying to create sort of some stone tablets or E tablets That that was that the aliens can come and find them Some years from now and say boy. Look at what a mess they made they managed to Kill 10 million species in a short space of time anyway Medicine more positive news each of us carries a microbiome of 100 trillion actually probably one quadrillions the number that's going to be published. I'm going to be discussed More frequently in the future about one quadrillion bacteria in our guts Kilogram or so of pure bacteria in us right now Along with a smaller number of Archaea there are Archaea then our guts that are responsible for methane production and Lots of single celled eukaryotes to including fungi and we don't know what most of them do What do the ones that we what do the known knowns do? So when we eat plant carbohydrates complicated Sugar-based molecules the human genome actually lacks the instructions for breaking down those materials We're very very good. We're actually better than the other great apes surviving great apes at breaking down starch But when it comes to the other large polysaccharides, we can't break them down We don't produce the enzymes necessary to break those materials down those materials are actually the the enzymes to break them down are released by bacteria in the gut and These bacteria then release short chain fatty acids little molecules that we could look fuel our metabolism We can burn those things errant populations of bacteria Are linked to all kinds of autoimmune autoimmune diseases there may be a relationship between asthma and disturbance to the Infant microbiome so these organisms are important for our digestive activities, but also for our health and well-being More surprising still Are the results of experiments on mice which suggest the aspects of our behavior? Particularly levels of anxiety may be modulated by organisms in the gut. These are absolutely beautiful experiments where in There are these facilities. They're not a biotic noto biotic Lines of mice rats also that lack bacteria in the guts and they have to be given a special diet So that they can absorb enough calories to keep keep going But what they found in these experiments or with observing these animals is the ones without the bacteria in their guts are Less anxious they do all kinds of weird things that mice wouldn't normally do So if you put them in a maze They say okay. We'll just they do they say what to one another We're just gonna wander around here, but we're not going to get stressed out and they they don't seem to be worried by dark places and They're just not doing a lot of twitching of their whiskers and So there you go these bacteria in the mouse gut seem to modulate the Behavior of the mice and what goes for mice surely goes For man or likely so when you eat slice of toast in the morning full of complex plant carbohydrates in the wheat Perhaps if you look out of the window and you feel happy who's sending the signals Because the calories in that toast are not going to be released So you're going to get the sugar burst from the starch But most of the calories in that toast are not going to be released for hours after you Swallow it last point philosophy I um My job part of my job then I'm in a part of my job is administrative that I run this undergraduate program and it's The Western program and it's an interdisciplinary program. It's exposes me to Lots and lots of different subject areas our students study Certainly some of them study scientific subjects, but others are studying all kinds of other things and I so I have to become Quite adept at bluffing my way through different Meetings with faculty so that they don't know that I have no clue about their own areas of specialization that I'm a science and so a scientist and So I have to come up with different Phrases that I can use that seem to suggest that I'm learning in their areas and So for for anybody that's a theologist I use always use the word ecumenical because nobody knows what it means. I Don't know what it means for philosophers. It's some Cartesian Yeah, that would be Cartesian wouldn't it? so it gets a Cartesian way of looking you can apply that to Changing the oil in your car. I think it's great. I've got a car. I should that should be the next book or come up with You know phrases for bluffing your way out of Faculty meetings, but anyway speaking of philosophy Vast knowledge in this area We are as I've described in the last few minutes mobile ecosystems in the 17th century Descartes said I think therefore I am But this faith in the integrity of the individual seems a bit naive in light of all that the new biology is teaching us So I'm just going to read a brief excerpt here and then open this to questions Surveying the solar system for its natural resources the perceptive Extraterrestrial would report that our planet is swarming with viral and bacterial genes The visitor might comment that a few of these genes have been strung together into large assemblies capable of running around and branching toward the sunlight It's time I believe For us to embrace this kind of objectivity and recognize that the macro biological bias that drives our Exploration and teaching of biology is no more sensible than trying to evaluate English literature by reading nothing but a harry potter book The science of biology would benefit from a philosophical reboot And I do thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to Come and listen to me talk about microbes for half an hour. So thank you


Good morning, John. I'm here in Buffalo, New York, getting ready to do some stand-up comedy, which I scheduled previously, and now I'm like, this doesn't feel like a very fun time to be funny, but we'll do it anyway. I feel like I ended up writing a 70-minute-long stand-up show about cancer for a couple of reasons. First, while I was getting chemotherapy, I thought I was gonna wanna watch long-form things that would really capture and hold my attention, which would be great if they had captured and held my attention, but I was so physically uncomfortable and my brain was so foggy that I couldn't enjoy things. I had no attention span. Basically, like two forms of content worked for me. Sit-coms with a really large number of laughs per minute where you're not supposed to care about anything that happens. Like, Seinfeld was perfect. And stand-up was great. Like, you can start it and stop it. You're always captivated. It is always distracting. I watched so much stand-up comedy during chemo. I ended up going pretty deep like I'd bring up that I'm doing comedy. People are like, who's your favorite comedian? And I'd say a name and they'd be like, I haven't heard of them. What about this person? I'm like, yeah, I get it. You have Netflix. I don't wanna be like that. Of course, it's just a thing that happened, you know? I became a little snobby about comedy. So that's the first thing. Like, I just watched a lot of stand-up. The second thing is that like, I broke. I like got some new issues. I think that for the most part, to be a successful comedian, you have to be two things. First, you have to be very, very, very funny. Second though, equally important, you have to have some serious issues of some kind. Like I didn't realize how much work it would be to do stand-up because of course, part of the work is to make it look like it's not work.  So I think I'm like pretty funny and I'm funnier when I get like a chance to write it down first. But until I got cancer, I was only broken in like normal little ways. Having cancer though has given me some new issues and maybe some of those issues are healing now or they're just being buried again. I don't know, but I was broken enough and enamored enough of all of the stand-up that I was watching and I was like, I can do that. And also I will and I'm gonna work really hard at it and get a coach and have people help me. So thanks to Sarah Aswell and Ben Acker for all of their help with my comedy. I should say that on the stage but it's not very funny, so I don't. I needed something that was very complicated but very simple, like making people laugh about cancer. So this would usually be the video where I talk about why I decided to do stand-up comedy where I then say, and here are my tour dates and come see me because I think that it's pretty good. I would like people to see it. It's like 70 minutes of a cohesive stand-up storytelling time that people seem to be having a really good time experiencing. And I think I've felt a fair number of tickets but I don't think I'm gonna do that. There's a couple of problems. First, my doctor said that I should avoid stress if possible because it can increase the chances of relapse. That was a big deal to me. And while doing comedy, very fun, at least while I'm on the stage, not relaxing. Second, as I have healed, it has become like less compelling to me. Like, I don't know, a month ago I was like, oh my God, it would be amazing to go on tour and do like a full month of nights. Now that sounds bad. I wanna be home with my family. The way I did this is I had a standing engagement where every Monday in my town, I did a show for a couple of months. And it was really great. And I sort of worked up from doing like 15 minutes to doing more than 70, which is honestly too much. And I've learned so much from doing it. Not just about doing stand-up, but about myself and about my relationship with my disease and with disease in general. It is a really remarkable art form and one that I think is not considered to be or treated as art by people who think about art, but it obviously is and is maybe one of the most important forms of art. It's the only form of art that we evolved a special noise to appreciate. Like we do humor and people go, ha ha ha ha ha ha, that's very weird. Humans are unique in that we laugh and we cry. Other animals do not do either of those things, which is very, I don't know, that's the thing. We have special specific physiological reactions for those two things, which, yeah, I think that means something. But I am doing a two-stop tour while I'm in upstate New York. I was already out here to do a thing at Rochester Institute of Technology. And of course, almost no one will be able to actually come out and see one of them, but hopefully I will get it filmed and release it somehow. Because I do like it and I do think that it's worth people's time. John, a quick second part to this video. During the Project for Awesome, we have a perk called the Nerdfighter Arc perk and it raises a lot of money every year. The way that it works is that people make stuff, they have to make at least 20 of whatever thing they are making. And then people buy the perk and then you get something made by another member of this community. You don't know what it's gonna be, but it's gonna be lovely. It is fun and it is good. And if you would like to create art for the Nerdfighter Arc perk, there is an application in the description down below. You're up to apply before October 27th and you have to be able to send us the art before January 15th. We're looking for stuff that is not terribly difficult to ship, so not stuff that's fragile or large, basically. You can find out more about all of this stuff at the application below. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


a look at judge since August in 35 games courtesy of Heineken a 301 average 15 homers 23 runs batted in and you just wonder does that swing kind of help team up for what's ahead over the next four days leading into ALDS game one. Yeah I mentioned this all the time I mean players want to go into the post season feeling good about their mechanics about their at bats and if you're Aaron judge right now and the numbers that we just saw he's locked and loaded and I think if you're the Yankees you're gonna feed off of you're gonna feed off of judge maybe Gardner hits third so those are the guys that you feel really good about there are a few in the lineup who are kind of limping to the finish line DD Gregorius is one of those guys Luke Voight what's his position on this team going to be but right now Aaron judge has proved he can do it in the postseason he finished up the year exactly the way he wanted to he's one of the guys that I look offensively to be a leader of this team and I thought he handled himself very well while he wasn't performing well guys there was a portion of the season where he was about one for his last 22 and he kept saying it's baseball you make adjustments and you counter what they're trying to do to you and I think that's exactly what judge did he was hitting too many balls on the ground and that's not where he's going to make his money he has to get the ball in the air line drive slide balls I thought even though he doesn't like to talk about it he raised his hands a little bit in his stance and I think that helped launch the ball elevate that swing a little bit more and John you could I couldn't say it better just how great he feels heading into the postseason the Yankees should feel similarly and we've seen him do well in the postseason with his at bats I kind of relate it back to Tanaka you've seen it before so you trust it that's the way it is with Aaron judge a lot of guys in this line up Stanton is probably the number one guy he finished off swinging the bat well didn't have a ton of at bats but what is he going to do in the postseason that's a big question mark well now that the regular season is in the rearview mirror the Yankees are off to the postseason where yes we'll be with you every step of the way we'll have coverage before and after every playoff game and the journey begins Friday when they open their American League division series against Minnesota to get ready for the playoffs stay tuned after our recap of today's game finishes up for our Yankees postseason preview we will discuss all the key story lines for the team heading into October plus we'll hear what Michael and Buck think we'll have interviews between Meredith and several players including John Carlos Stanton