803: Conducting Research on Complex Marine Microbial Communities - Dr. Ed DeLong
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Hey everyone, welcome to episode 803 of People Behind the Science. Today we are rebroadcasting our conversation with Dr. Edward DeLong. Research in Ed's lab brings together a variety of disciplines to study microbial communities in the ocean. He's interested in their ecology and

evolution, biochemistry, genomics, and also their impacts on marine systems. In particular, Ed is curious about the microscopic organisms that are the primary producers of oxygen and serve as food for other organisms and marine food chains.

In our interview, Ed shares more about his life, his career, and his research. And I hope you enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Listeners, today I am excited to introduce you all to Dr. Edward DeLong. So, Ed, welcome to our show today. How are you? I'm great, and it's great to be here. Great way to start the new year. Excellent. Well, Ed, we are excited to have you join us today, and I'm excited to introduce you to our listeners. So, listeners, Ed is a professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Ed,

as well as a visiting professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. He received his bachelor's degree in bacteriology from the University of California, Davis, and his PhD in marine biology from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

Afterwards, Ed conducted postdoctoral research at Indiana University. Now he has worked as a research scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and also a faculty member at MIT before accepting his current position in Hawaii. Ed's honors and achievements include the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the DuPont Young Faculty Award, the Apple Bioinformatics Cluster Award, the

The Vladimir Ivanovich Verdansky Medal of European Geosciences Union, the Procter & Gamble Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the American Society for Microbiology DC White Research and Mentorship Award, the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award, the A.G. Huntsman Medal for Excellence in Marine Science, and the Moore Foundation Marine Microbiology Investigator Award. Ed is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences,

the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He's also been elected as an associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization and is the vice president and president-elect of the International Society of Microbial Ecology. In addition, Ed currently serves as the co-director of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology, or SCOPE, and Ed joined us today for a conversation about his experiences in life and science.

So Ed, we want to know you today both as a scientist but also as a person. So can you start by telling us how you like to spend your time when you're not doing science?

Well, this is going to sound somewhat nerd-like, but I like to do things that are very similar when I'm not doing science to what I'm doing when I'm doing science. Let me tell you what I mean by that. I love to be in nature, and the nature of the work I do lets me do that, be in nature. But I love to do that in my spare time and recreationally and with my family as well.

So if I'm not on a ship or in the lab or an office, usually these days, it's more in offices for me at work. But outside of that, I like to be outside. So I love to be in or on the ocean. Kayaking or snorkeling is how I spend a lot of my time. I'm blessed to be in a really beautiful place where there are coral reefs very close to where I live. And I like to be in the ocean. I also like to hike. So I'll be on hiking trails a lot.

The balance in having these days I have an office job is also sort of maintaining your physical health. So I do that largely with these sorts of outdoor recreational activities. And I do a bit of yoga as well to try and keep limber. I just turned 60 or I'm going to turn 60 tomorrow. So

The health issue becomes even more front and center. So I don't know. That's a little bit of detail. I like it. Well, happy early birthday, Ed. Thank you. And I think all of us who are stuck in the kind of the snow and the cold are jealous of you right now being in Hawaii. Not to love it in. Of course, of course. A beautiful place to be outside. Well, great to hear about life outside of science. But let's chat a little bit about your research next. So can you tell us for listeners out there who might not be familiar with oceanography or the kind of work that you do, how do you describe it?

That's a great question. And that's a very broad venue, obviously, to talk about oceanography writ large. But it's an interesting thing because there's many people in the world who haven't even seen the ocean or perhaps don't have even folks that live near the ocean have much of a feel for how the ocean, at least in terms of its biology, too, really is different in some ways from the terrestrial settings that we're used to.

So that's a difference that I like to describe to people. One example is, of course, on land, we're very familiar with food chains starting with primary producers like trees and plants. So these are the organisms that can capture sunlight and convert that energy to make new biomass to produce.

Take CO2 from the atmosphere and make organic carbon that creates new plants and then that feeds into the food chain so that the what are called heterotrophs, the things that eat organic matter like we do, rely on that primary productivity from photosynthesis.

And on land, it's things we can see, big plants and so on. In the ocean, the forests of the sea are microbial. And that means they're invisible. They're smaller than the human eye can see. So even though 50% of the primary productivity, which not only produces the food we eat, but also the oxygen that we breathe,

50% of that comes from the ocean, but it's not from big plants and large organisms that we recognize, but small ones that are a little bit more mysterious to us in general because we can't see them.

So one of the interesting things is how the oceans are different biologically in that way, with lots of sort of invisible processes driven by small organisms, microorganisms. Of course, microorganisms are super prevalent in terrestrial systems too, but with respects to primary productivity and photosynthesis, that's a real big difference between land and sea. And of course, the ocean is very different in terms of its seasonality.

seascape as opposed to landscape and very mysterious. It's been said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do the bottom of the ocean. And to some extent, that's true.

So the ocean still has a lot of discoveries to be made in it, mysteries that she hides, if you will. So what I do is to try and study the ocean in that regard, and particularly the invisible or microbial life that we can't see in a variety of different habitats.

We could talk for an hour if you let me do that about these things. But what I would say is that the ocean is super important. It covers a large portion of the surface area of Earth. And yet we don't understand it quite as well. We understand the surface a little better, but deeper, even less than we do a lot of terrestrial systems. And from a biological perspective, that's what we study. And I'll just finish up with one point.

Oceanography is an interesting discipline because you almost are required to incorporate lots of other disciplines to understand the biology of the ocean. You have to understand the physics and the chemistry of the ocean.

So when we try and understand life on its own turf in the sea, we have to try and understand the physics of the water that's moving those organisms around, the chemistry, which varies as a function of depth or proximity to coastline, as well as the biology. So an interesting thing about oceanographers, the people that study the ocean, is that

classically, they're trained in all these sort of different disciplines in science, the physics of the ocean, the chemistry of the ocean, and its biology. And of course, these days, now we have to understand all the emerging paradigms coming out of molecular biology and putting that in the context of the ocean too. And that's the sort of thing that we do.

Certainly. Well, I love that you highlighted this interdisciplinary nature of oceanography, and I'm excited to chat more about these ocean microbes because I'm sure they don't often get the recognition that they deserve. But before we dive into the details of the research, Ed, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what motivates you. And do you have a particular saying or a quote or a force that keeps you going in every day?

I do have a particular quote for sure, and it comes from one of my mentors, a fellow named Norman Pace. And it's very simple. It's four words. One of the reasons I like it is that it applies to people and scientists too, and what we study. And I think it applies to social interactions. You could apply to any sort of human activity. Here's the saying, symbiosis gets more done

I like it. I'll just leave it at that because I think that many of the listeners even could take that and apply it to almost any part of their life. And it's incredibly instructive. It's a little bit along the lines of, dare I say, a Hillary Clinton quote or a title of one of her books, which is It Takes a Village. Same concept.

Absolutely. Now, you mentioned this quote came from one of your mentors, and I love talking about mentors on this program. So are there particular people who come to your mind when you think about the mentors, the role models, the people you've looked up to in your career?

Certainly, one of the things that I've recognized recently as I've thought about this a bit is that mentors come in many flavors, if you will, and they're there at different times in a way when you're ready for them. Like one of these Eastern sayings, when the student is ready, the teacher will come. I think the same is true of mentors.

So personally, I've had mentors who just sparked the desire and enthusiasm and possibility of what one can do in the world. And as a kid, believe it or not, I consider Jacques Cousteau one of my mentors. Or the way I joke about it is that I had an overdose of Jacques Cousteau as a kid.

I've always loved the ocean, but just being exposed to that in the media at that time it was television really made me understand in a way that people go out in the world and study these things, the nature around us, the things that inspire us or give us awe as just beings interacting in the world and the sort of approach there and also the human aspect of that exploration. That was really a show about exploration more than anything else.

So that's one form of mentorship. But then over the course of my career, what really made me realize that I could make a career, a professional career in science.

One of my first mentors was a fellow named Paul Bauman, Professor Paul Bauman at UC Davis, where I got my bachelor's degree. And I worked with him for several years in his laboratory. And that inspired me. I got a lot of perspective on how professors work at a university, but also the rigor that's required in doing science and the care and

attention that's required doing that sort of science. That was biochemistry at that time for me. Isn't for everybody, but for some folks that are detailed, oriented and kind of abstract things and then reconnect them so you can study nature and

by deconstructing it, doing biochemistry. But that requires a continuity of thought and the ability to abstract, which is different than, say, actually being out there in nature and counting certain sorts of organisms, insects or trees or whatever. So there's lots of different kinds of science. And I just got to see one type and also the sort of care and rigor that's required. I was inspirational from one of my first mentors, Paul,

I won't go through a litany, but over the course of years, I've seen the human side of science, which is super important. Again, symbiosis gets more done. No scientific work is done in a vacuum. And it requires people working together in ways where the human values of what you're doing are recognized alongside of the rigor that you have to apply or the competitiveness once you get later in your career, which sometimes is tough.

Working in a highly rigorous field that's also very competitive with respect to climbing that sort of professional career ladder or competing for research funds, it's not easy. So learning how to work with people and value the human part of those activities is really important. I learned that from a number of people, but my PhD mentor, Art Llanos, was somebody who I think I really learned that lesson from because...

he was, I would say, exquisitely tuned to caring for people around him in and out of the context of the science we were trying to do. So lots of different mentors like that. And

My postdoctoral mentor, Norman Pace, was a brilliant person who I always said his thinking process was about 100 times faster than most of the people around him. And that was like another sort of inspiration, just the brilliance of some people to think on many planes scientifically.

Another person that mentored me and taught me how to do blue water diving for research was Alice Aldrich. And she was another one of these people who really brought humanity into the science that she did and was also just technically brilliant in the sort of ecology that she did. So I guess the point of all this is that.

There are many mentors out there. And in a way, what I've tried to do now that I've done a lot of mentoring myself is sort of to emulate that and pass it forward, if you will. So those lessons, if you're lucky, accumulate in yourself and you can pass them on.

So I feel like my mentors are still mentoring my own students, even though they haven't met them. Certainly. Well, I really love that you highlighted this human side of science. That's one of the things we love to talk about on our program. And I had to smile when you mentioned Jacques Cousteau because he was one of the people that really sparked my own curiosity in science. So can you tell us about some of these early memories about when your curiosity was first sparked in science, whether it was from Jacques or from other sources?

Well, for me, there was just this connection to the sea. I grew up in Northern California in, well, the wine country, really Sonoma, but that's pretty close to the Sonoma coastline. And we used to go to the coast on occasion with my family. And I had this incredible attraction to water for reasons I can't describe to you. I had to be saved on several occasions as a two-year-old when I crawled over into the deep end and sank to the bottom. And I

Just because I loved water. And it was the same thing when we went to the coast. And there's just this sort of visceral attraction for me. And then I learned about the ocean. And that show, of course, was inspirational in terms of the excitement and the discovery.

And then I got this obsession to be a scuba diver when I was like seven. It didn't happen until I was 17, but it was just a drive. So that was a real formative time, I think, that I had that dream at such an early age. And later on in life, lots of different things happen and you sort of morph that dream to get incorporated into whatever your life circumstances happen to be. And I did that actually when I was at UC Davis because I

I got my bachelor's degree in microbiology, but I learned that, wow, you could combine microbiology with the study of the ocean. So when I graduated, I went to do graduate studies at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. And I had the incredible fortune of being able to do that, meld and combine this discipline of microbiology with the discipline of study in the ocean, oceanography.

That's how that winding path went for me a little bit. Certainly. And now you are there at the University of Hawaii Manoa. And I know you've got so much going on in the lab and lots of exciting projects. Is there one in particular, Ed, that you want to give us a little bit more detail about today? Sure. Those are always hard questions because I get excited about a lot of things, maybe too easily. But my career path has really been to try and take some fundamental molecular biology and

and understand how the molecules of life in microorganisms are actually evolving in the context of how the oceans work.

So we're learning some things now that are actually giving us sort of a direct line that way at very fundamental levels. So DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, of course, is the blueprint for life. All cellular organisms on the planet use DNA as that blueprint. So there's this fundamental commonality amongst all life on Earth.

And yet there's subtle variations in that DNA from organism to organism. And one of those is just the chemical composition.

And without going into too much detail, what we've been learning by basically sequencing the DNA of the collective communities of organisms that live in the surface of the ocean out here north of Hawaii, but not just at the surface, through the photic zone, that is where light penetrates. And the waters out here are clear, so light can penetrate all the way to about

120 meters or so. And then organisms change physiologically in terms of the types of organisms there as light gets less and less as you go deeper and deeper. And then, of course, you get into sort of the abyssal zone. It's called this area where there's no light and organisms down there depend on the rain of organic material from the surface.

So there's this interesting vertical gradient. And what we're finding, to put this in a nutshell, is that across the whole community, from organism to organism, even in really vastly different organisms, they're all sort of fine-tuning their DNA in the same way. And one of the drivers for that is what nutrients are available. So it turns out that both DNA and protein have to have nitrogen in them.

And that nitrogen is limiting the surface because there's such competition for it there. So all the organisms at the surface have sort of

fine-tune their DNA so they don't require as much nitrogen either in their DNA or the proteins. And then as you start to get deeper and deeper where there's a lot more nitrogen, it's more relaxed, like more of a smorgasbord. And all the organisms, even though they're vastly different, have to fine-tune their DNA in fairly similar ways so that they're able to incorporate more of these nutrients. So

Here's the exciting part about that is we're starting to see how the ecology of the nutrients that are available because of ocean circulation patterns and mixing and biological processes, how the ecology of that nutrient availability is actually driving how

how the genomes of organisms across these entire communities are evolving. And that's kind of exciting because it's going from the molecular details to the ecology and they're not separate. In science, we separate disciplines. So there's...

In biology, there's sub-disciplines like ecology and evolution. But in reality, ecology and evolution are happening simultaneously and in tandem. They're not separate things. And these studies that allow us to go all the way from the molecular details from DNA sequences

to the ecology of what's happening across whole communities is happening because of new technologies largely. And that's super exciting. We're really starting to see this interplay between the ecology of molecules and the ecology of large habitats. And that's an exciting thing for us. Absolutely. Well, Ed, this is a phenomenal project. I know

As we were chatting about it, you kind of hinted at the elements of complexity, a lot of different fields coming together and a lot of different things going on out there in the ocean. And I think the complexity can make it a lot of fun to study, but also somewhat challenging to study. Well, challenging to even describe. I'm describing to you things that are invisible, almost even conceptually to us, because they're not things we experience and see at the same time.

One of the ways I've described what we do or what we're trying to do is like, here's another role model for me is David Attenborough. So David Attenborough, who does these nature shows, which are so wonderful.

And they have all these great new technologies now with these super high zoom cameras that you put it on a helicopter and you can follow the gazelles running across the Serengeti. Actually see what they're doing on a day to day basis and look at predator prey interactions in detail that we haven't seen before because of these technologies.

abilities to look at it. So that's nature we understand because we can see it. We can understand the lioness hunting this game and the cat mouth sort of chase and what's happening out in nature in that way.

What we're really trying to do is just the very same thing, except that our Serengeti is very small, on the order of millimeters. We're trying to understand the same sorts of biological interactions with these invisible organisms on a vastly different scale, a much smaller scale. So the technical aspects are difficult, but also just the ways to think about them.

So even the statement that the forest of the seas are microbial, you have to stop and think about that for a second. What does that mean?

But it's a way to describe it because we kind of understand forests and photosynthesis and how important that is. And yet, conceptually, it's a very different thing out in the ocean. And we don't have an instinctual reference point for thinking about microbes. Since we're large organisms ourselves and we eat things we can see, we can pick an apple off a tree or we're familiar with hunting. We could be predators, too. We have a visceral feeling for what being a predator is, right?

On a microbial scale, we don't have that sort of intuition. So yeah, it's complex and it's also challenging just from a really fundamental conceptual standpoint. So it's really exciting because we know it's important. The technologies we've developed to study microbes in the ocean are now being applied in this area called the human microbiome, the organisms we carry with us.

Here we go again. Symbiosis gets more done. We're not alone. There's more microbial cells associated with the human body than there is human cells. So we are an ecosystem ourselves. So understanding that microbial world and how it works in tandem with us.

is really important. And yet it's that intuition thing that we still have to get beyond. So it's an exciting time for microbiology because the technical innovations are there that allow us to look in more detail at the ecology of these organisms, which we couldn't really do very well before.

And that then allows us to connect the ecology that we can do with things we see, macroecology, if you will, with the ecology of those small organisms that have been so hard to even count or identify in the past. And now that we can do that, we can connect their ecology to sort of the ecology of bigger stuff, if you will. Certainly. And I think you brought up some really important challenges in your field, but we don't just want to talk about the difficult aspects, Ed.

I'd love you to share next one of these stories of successes of your own. I know you have many to choose from, but do you have a favorite that could either be a big win or even just a small victory that really meant a lot to you?

I've been incredibly lucky over the course of the years. I think because of the wonderful students that I've gotten to work with and people, and also because of the wonderful time that it is for our field, one of the big aspects has been the ability to combine molecular biology and genomics together.

with ecology. And I think one of the exciting things that happened to me scientifically with a postdoc in the lab, his name's Oded Beja, and he's now a professor at the Technion in Haifa, Israel.

And we were studying how we might understand microbes out in the ocean by sequencing their genomes. And this was in sort of, I'll call it the old days. It was all of 18 years ago, where the genomic technologies weren't quite there yet for sequencing very large genomes. But we had figured out ways to get large genomic fragments from microbes out in the ocean, ones that we can't grow. They're just out there wild.

and then look at all the genes associated with these large genome fragments from these microbes out in the sea. And nobody knew what we might discover doing that or if we would discover anything.

but one of the second sorts of genomes that we looked at. So we hadn't surveyed very much before we ran into this really interesting discovery that changed the way we think about how microbes survive and thrive and perhaps feed into the food chain and surface waters of the ocean. What we found was a gene, and now we know it's present in greater than 50% of all the bacteria in the surface waters of the ocean. And that gene is a rhodopsin.

And rhodopsins are interesting molecules because they can capture light. And in fact, we have rhodopsins in our eyes that allow us to capture different wavelengths of light and distinguish color. And that's one kind of opsin. That's called the sensory opsin. So those are used by organisms to see and distinguish different kinds of light, move towards it, move away from it, and so on.

But this new kind of opsin, so opsins had never been seen in bacteria before. So we just start to look by taking this random genomic approach. And lo and behold, we find this rhodopsin. And it's a different kind of rhodopsin that actually allows organisms to make energy from white. They're very simple systems. I won't get into the details.

But the bottom line is this opsin is a protein. And this protein is in the outer shell or the membrane of these microorganisms. It can capture a photon, capture light.

and it allows the cell to make energy from that light. You can think of it as a different kind of photosynthesis. So what we had discovered, we thought we were really lucky initially, but we actually weren't because 50% of all the organisms have this protein that wasn't even recognized before. And what this protein can do is allow any of those organisms to make biochemical energy from light.

So what that means is a lot of the organisms out there that we thought were just getting their energy from eating organic molecules are actually almost like hybrid cars in a way because they can use light energy. The analogy is electrical energy in a hybrid car. They can use light energy and they can use energy from fuel or organic molecules.

And that's a very, very different concept than we had previously, where we thought that most of those organisms were just getting by on the organic molecules that chlorophyll-based photosynthesizers were making. So the title of our paper that described this was a proteorhodops, and that's what we named this new protein molecule, evidence for a new kind of phototrophy in the sea or a new kind of photosynthesis, if you will.

So in the application of this genomic technology and the discovery of these new genes, we were able to see a new process in the ocean that potentially, and people think it really is, very important ecologically in terms of how the whole food web works.

So that was unexpected. It was a discovery and we could actually combine genomics and biochemistry because we proved the function of how this protein worked and then connect it back to the ocean. And then what's been subsequently found is that this wasn't a rare thing or a chance thing. It's most of the organisms in the ocean have this protein. Anyhow, that was very exciting. And it was also helped to lend support that this sort of approach

is worthwhile. That is looking at the genomes of organisms in the wild can actually teach you something about how they work in the wild.

And that was very early days, believe it or not, 18 years ago, where some folks kind of discounted that that was going to be a very useful approach at all. And of course, now it's one of the central approaches that people use, for instance, to study the microbiome in humans, in the ocean or wherever. Well, this is so cool, Ed. And I love this description of what seemed like a relatively serendipitous discovery that just happened to be more widespread than anyone ever imagined.

Yeah, it was a surprise to us as well. So we were also lucky and serendipity is absolutely a part of this sort of science. There's no doubt about that. And here's another quote, since you asked for a quote, but it's not a good one from Louis Pasteur. It goes something like this. Chance favors the prepared mind.

So you can get lucky, but if you don't do something with that, then that sort of luck doesn't go very far, but you get the idea. Absolutely. Well, we chatted a little bit about life in the lab, and I'm going to dive outside of science for a moment here to talk to you about books. I'm always trying to incorporate more time to read in my own life and always getting book recommendations from everyone that I talk to. So Ed, do you have a favorite book, whether it's a science book or a non-science book that you want to recommend to me and our listeners today?

I do. And it's such a popular book, I think, in some ways, or maybe not, I don't know, or well known that won't be new maybe to a lot of your readers. But I really liked it in the sense it has to do a little bit with this multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary way of thinking about things.

It's Omnimore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, because I just think that that's a brilliant book. It's about us. It's about society. It's about how culture and society have driven food choices in the past and now how technology is driving that and how food choices are tied into all sorts of things.

now even more driven by technology and availability and economics and society, culture as well, but how the choices that we have are sort of critical and becoming more critical in what we is now referred to by scientists as the Anthropocene. That is this time period where what's happening on our planet is

is as much influenced by the activities of humankind as it is by natural processes. And this is something that's visceral. In On the Wars Dilemma, I mean, we all eat. We can all relate to the central topic of this book, but the details of it, some of the science, for instance,

The fact that most of the foodstuffs in this country are corn, and it turns out that corn has a different isotopic or molecular composition, if you will. We actually all have. If you take somebody's hair in the United States, you could tell the difference of that hair from some other country just because of the amount of corn that's in our diets and how that changes our atomic composition at some level.

So I found the book inspirational because of its multidimensional take, both in human culture and history, technological culture and history, and the choices we face in the future with what are the smartest choices on how we make food and what to eat. And you can go back and forth on opinions about that. But anyway, I think it's a brilliant book.

Well, excellent recommendation, Ed. We will put it out on our website for our listeners to find if they are looking for their next book. And one of the topics we haven't yet touched on in much detail, Ed, are some of the opportunities you get to travel as a scientist. So is there a place that you've been for science, whether it was for research or for a conference or other reasons, that really was your favorite travel memory?

That's an easy one for me because it's hands down Antarctica. This was in the 90s. I was starting out as an assistant professor.

at UC Santa Barbara, and I had gotten one of my very first grants funded to go to Antarctica. And my very first two graduate students who I was mentoring and training at the time came out with me. And where we went was a U.S. Antarctic station called Palmer Station, which is on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is due south of South America. So we deployed on our ship from

Puntarinas, Chile. And then it's pretty much a straight line south across Drake Passage to get to Antarctica. And there's a long story about how we eventually got there because it took a couple twists and turns. It's not easy to get down there, it turns out. Yeah. Well, if you go in late winter, you can run into some ice, it turns out. And that's the story. But I won't tell that right now. But what I will say, it was this... For me, it's a quasi-religious experience to be in a place that is so untouched by man. And

And that is so raw in terms of its natural beauty that it was remarkable. And the science we were doing was crazy because we were doing oceanography. But because there was two meters of ice on the ocean at that time near the coast, the way we did our science was to get cross-country skis out.

ski out on the sea ice with sleds that we had these big bottles that we put our seawater in. And we would ski out to a likely place to sample a little bit offshore on sea ice. And then you would drill a hole through those meters of sea ice. And then I had rigged up some bilge pumps with some batteries from a boat to help us pump the water so that we could start to study the microbes that are living underneath that sea ice.

And we'd fill up our bottles and put them in the back of these sleds. There's also a funny social aspect. My first two grad students were hauling sleds across the ice, which is, I didn't talk to human resources if that was okay or not, but... Should have had a physical test to get into your lab, right? Yeah, right. We loved it. And so we'd fill these sleds with 50 liters of seawater, and then we'd haul them back, cross-country skiing to the Palmer Station Laboratory and do our studies there. And

It reminded me of those old Jacques Cousteau shows that I watched in terms of the adventure and discovery aspect of doing that kind of research in this environment that is still so relatively untouched by man. Although, of course, not in a way as the water warms and the glaciers calve and our reach is far. But that was the most remarkable place I've ever been. And it is still truly a remarkable place.

Well, Ed, it sounds like a phenomenal experience. And you mentioned here some of the social elements and throughout our conversation, we've touched on this human side of science. And that's something I also love to chat about because I think people have a lot of stereotypes about what scientists are like and what life as a scientist is like. So I love to break those by sharing some of these fun and funny stories that scientists have on the job. So do you have one of your own that you'd like to share with us today or even a quirky tradition in a lab that you worked in?

There are a lot of quirky traditions. You're awfully right about that in different laboratories. I'm kind of mainstream when it comes to that, which is odd because in some ways I'm not, some ways I am. But funny story, I can connect it to that Antarctica story I just told you about because we didn't quite get to Antarctica directly on our first try.

So it turns out late winter in Antarctica, there's a lot of sea ice and the sea ice kind of grows outward into the sea pretty far as the waters are cold in the austral winter. And then in the summertime, it recedes as the waters warm up a little bit. But so to get down there in late winter, you're in an icebreaker type of a ship that actually has to break through the ice. But we were on a vessel called the Polar Duke.

And we were trying to get to Antarctica. And this was in August, which is late winter down there. And we were trying to break through the ice, but it was really thick. We were close to the Antarctic Peninsula, but not quite there. And then the winds changed and blew the ice around behind us. And we were stuck. Oh, no. The nautical term for that is beset. Oh.

I liken it to being like a nut in a vice. That ship is wedged in huge amounts of ice, tons and tons and tons of it. And you're not going anyplace. This was in the 90s. And so Internet connections weren't so great. We had maybe a 15 minute window from satellite communications to email in or out. And this was my very first research project. And I hadn't factored in the fact that we might get stuck.

And of course, my students didn't know what to do. So, I mean, it's interesting that one of your focuses is on the social interactions. But one of the most interesting things for me is what a bunch of people on board a ship actually end up doing for 14 days.

When they're stuck in the ice. So what did you do? Well, one thing I did, I was pretty uptight as an assistant professor because it's really competitive and you're under a lot of pressure to produce papers and succeed and all this stuff. It was my first time out and we were stuck. So I was stressing a little bit.

And I would go down and in the bottom hold of the ship, they had an exercise bicycle. So my joke is I biked 500 miles to Antarctica because I would go down every day and two hours on that exercise bike just working off my anxiety. Yeah. Yeah. But we did other things, too. I mean, people were great. We had a pretty eclectic mix of folk who had some people from New Zealand. We had one fellow, Art DeVries, who'd been going down Antarctica since the 60s. And he was like this seasoned veteran. Yeah.

The ship was Norwegian, so we had the crew there. And it was funny because to keep up morale, one of the Kiwis, we call them, the folks from New Zealand,

She wrote a daily newspaper and she would interview each of the crew. And I actually anonymously wrote an advice column. So we would cook up all these people writing in with romance problems or whatever it was and make all these stories. We called it the Dookie News because it was the Polar Duke. So every day in the mess hall before people went to dinner,

They could pick up this sheet of the daily news and it kept everybody occupied. Everybody kind of started getting into it, including myself, which is funny. I told you I was all stressed, but actually it was kind of an Ann Lander-esque sort of advice column that I was writing, which I never had planned on, by the way, when I wrote my research grant. But that kept everybody on even keel. And it was really interesting to watch their social dynamics, which I won't get into, but

are also interesting. And then how we got out of the ice was random. Basically, the winds changed and about 3 a.m. in the morning, the ice broke up around us and that allowed us to sort of get into an open patch of water, which is called a polynea.

At that point in time, we had burnt down so much fuel that we couldn't even try to get to the coast of Antarctica, the peninsula. So we had to turn around and go back across Drake Passage to get back to South America and refuel.

And we actually ended up getting to Antarctica about a month later than we'd originally planned because of that turnaround, refuel, and then setting back out. So I learned a lot when you're out doing research like that. At the end of the day, Mother Nature calls the shots. And you got to work with her because that's just how it works. So there's a lot of funny stories associated with that trip that I won't get into, but it was super...

super interesting. And I learned how to be a little bit more flexible with my expectations when you're working out in nature like that. Definitely. Well, Ed, this is a fantastic story. And I love this human side of science that you touched on within it. And we chatted about some of the great projects you're working on in the lab. And one thing that I love to ask all of our guests is if you could answer any research question, regardless of the funding, the staff, the technology, the feasibility required, why

What is the one question you would want to tackle? So I'm going to challenge you today to answer it. That's a super hard question. And the reason is there's never any single question. I mean, a part of me wants to get into a whole different field that I know nothing about. But the problem with that is I can't answer that question because I'm not that kind of a scientist. I'd love to know how the human brain works.

That's a big, very general and big question. I'm not the person to answer that. There's a lot of people working on elements of that. And there are lots of sub questions associated with even the question of what is consciousness. Now I'm wondering, because this is sort of like blue sky in it. What are some important questions out there? I think that's a huge one. We

If we understood how we worked and how we thought about stuff, we might make better decisions as a collective society, maybe. But for me, in terms of the microbes, I go back to the sort of Attenborough-esque sort of approach to things where we still don't know on a fundamental level, and this could be in our own microbiome associated with people and us or out in the ocean,

how the communities of microorganisms coordinate with one another from species to species. And there's all sorts of things going on. They're exchanging genes. They're exchanging metabolites and energy. They're communicating with one another. And it's happening in these complex communities that are composed of thousands of species in a very small area of space, if you will.

So what I'd love to do, given no constraints, is to understand sort of the ground rules of how microbes really interact and coordinate with one another to move energy and matter day to day and over longer courses of time. And one of the points I didn't make about microbes in the ocean or anywhere else is that even though they're very small, they have a huge impact

on our planet, all the way from climate to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to the sort of pH and redox state, which is relative amounts of oxygen in different places. The microbes are actually driving that or have been for about 3.5 billion years.

And now mankind has come along and started to perturb those cycles a little bit. For instance, with the amounts of CO2 we put in the atmosphere. Before, it was largely microbial process controlling CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So maybe the large question I'd love to answer is this.

how human activities in the Anthropocene today are interacting with microbial activities and how is that going to change the trajectory of where the sort of general state of this planet is headed in terms of global temperature, in terms of oxygen in the atmosphere, in terms of other gases in the atmosphere, in terms of ecological interactions both on the land and the sea.

So I'd like to better understand how our activities in concert with the cumulative 3.6 billion years of activities of microbes are interacting right now to influence the trajectory of what our planet's going to be like 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years. So that's what I would try and address if I had the opportunity to do so. Absolutely. Well, Ed, you've given us some great questions to ponder today. And

The next thing I'd like to ask you to give us is a piece of advice. I think this can be so helpful for myself and our listeners on our own journeys. So do you have a piece you'd like to share today?

Well, I always am hesitant to give advice, but this is something that I tell actually when prospective graduate students are considering what university should I go to and who should I study with and what should I do? I have this general piece of advice to them is just to follow your passion. If you can identify what it is that really gets you up in the morning,

and will do so day after day because it excites you so much and is fueled by your own passion. If you can stick close to that, then you'll be happy and likely do well because you will create the sort of environment around which success can occur. And so it sounds a bit trite. And those of us who've been lucky enough to do that, that is...

combine our passion, if you will, with our career and follow that trajectory. It's great. And I think that works at different career levels, too, because there's a lot of competitiveness in science. And that causes a bit of angst and stress. And one of the areas of competitiveness is just getting research funding. People think about that a lot in terms of how we're going to support the next science project we're going to do.

And that's fine. We have to do that. It's a practical component. But you don't want to lose sight of what the major drivers are, which is to do that science and the stuff that you're passionate about. It's not to get the funds. But I think that sometimes people transition the goal to being getting the funds instead of what the original drivers were. And so my suggestion that I like to give folks is if you can, if there's any way to do it, skip.

Stick to the stuff that gets you up in the morning and that you're passionate about and that you believe is important for whatever reasons those are. And that could be anything. It really can be. Take any human activity. There are reasons to get excited about it if it's done well and deliberately with thought and compassion. And anyhow, like I said, I'm not one to be giving advice. Thanks.

Well, I think you did a great job, Ed. Thanks so much for your advice today. Now, can you tell our listeners if they want to learn more about you and your work, where should they go or how should they get in touch?

Probably the easiest way you can actually Google my name and come up with, there's a wiki page out there that you can find. Google Scholar has a lot of our different publications and work. You'll find my website that describes some of what I do at the University of Hawaii Manoa. And then if you want to contact me, my email's there too. It's just edelongathawaii.edu. These days are so interesting that everything is at our fingertips now.

on the internet. So shouldn't be too hard to do that and feel free to contact me.

Perfect. Well, Ed, thank you so much for joining us on our program today to share a piece of your story. It's delightful. Thank you for doing this program. I would just say one thing in the name of all scientists, don't forget, scientists are people too. That's right. I love it. Wonderful note to end on. Listeners, thank you for joining us today. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.

Your voyage to explore the lives of today's exceptional scientists has just begun. You can find everything we talked about today, including our guest's favorite books, biographies, photos, and more, when you visit us at www.peoplebehindthescience.com. I look forward to chatting with you next time on People Behind the Science. ♪