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43Rd Annual Killian Award Lecture—Sallie Chisholm

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MIT 150 | 43rd Annual Killian Award Lecture—Sallie Chisholm PRESENTER: Good afternoon, and welcome to the 43rd Annual James R Kilian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. Before we begin, I have a couple requests. First of all, I'd ask that you silence your cell phones and any other electronic devices. And second, you can see that we're already quite full, and we expect others to arrive, so if you're near an aisle and there are seats in the middle, I'd ask that you please move to the middle of your row. The James R Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award was established in the spring of 1971 as a permanent tribute to Dr. James R Killian Jr., president of MIT from 1948 to 1959 and chair of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971. The purpose of the Killian Award is to recognize extraordinary professional achievement by MIT faculty members and to communicate their accomplishments to members of the Institute community. The title of Killian Lecture is the highest honor that the MIT faculty can bestow on a colleague. It is our privilege today to be addressed by Penny Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies. Having served as an MIT faculty member for more than 30 years, Professor Chisholm has held joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Biology since 1993. As noted by her colleagues on the Killian award committee, Professor Chisholm is a groundbreaking scientist, whose research team made a critical discovery about photosynthetic organisms in the ocean. For many years, scientists studied the oceans as a key source of photosynthesis. But prior to Professor Chisholm's breakthrough, they were unaware of the existence of a microscopic marine bacterium called prochlorococcus. This tiny bacterium has been revealed as one of the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on Earth, responsible for producing a sizable fraction of the Earth's oxygen every year. A cross-disciplinary collaborator and thinker, Professor Chisholm has been associate chair of the MIT faculty, has served as a founding director of the MIT Earth Systems Initiative, has written more than 200 articles on her research, and has coauthored three children's books that explain ecological principles. She has taught introductory biology to our undergraduates for more than 20 years. Today, the MIT faculty is proud to recognize our colleague Penny Chisholm with the James R Kilian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. There's a certificate that goes with it. I'd like to read from it. It says, "To Sally Chisholm, in recognition of achievements in marine ecology and environmental science, decades of interdisciplinary leadership and service, and the inspirational vision she has shared with her students and colleagues at MIT." Congratulations. PENNY Thank you. Phew. Pressure's on. CHISHOLM: As this day approached, I kept realizing more and more how significant an honor this is and how terrifying it is to address this group of incredible people, students and colleagues. So first, before I start my lecture, I want to thank people, because I don't want to run out of time and forget to thank them. So first, I want to thank the committee that selected me and all of whoever was behind all that-- it remains a mystery-- all of the collaborators over the years that have contributed to this work. I'd like to thank my husband Don, who has to compete with prochlorococcus every day for my attention, and the organizers of this event. Also I'd like to think the funding that I've been lucky enough to get. And so many agencies and families need to be recognized. These are the people that funded the chairs that I've enjoyed, that have allowed me to do basic research, get to just follow your instincts, and the foundation research that I've gotten, which has been wonderful, government research. And, of course, MIT and Woods Hole have been the foundation of everything that we've been able to do. But, most importantly, it's the students and the post-docs and the staff that are behind this work that I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm going to steal a line from Simon Levin, a colleague where I heard him once say, when I say I, I mean we. And when I say we, I mean they. And they know that that is absolutely true. My students and post-docs have taught me just about everything that I'm going to share with you today. They've come from many different disciplines over the years. And it's just been a great joy for me to watch them work together. We work in teams, because to attack this problem-- as you'll see, we work from the level of genomics all the way up to the level of the biosphere. And no one person-- let alone me-- can possibly be an expert at all those levels. So it's through their collaborative spirit that we've been able to do this work. And as I've told them many times, it just gives me great joy to see them working together on these problems. I'd also like to thank everybody in the Parsons Lab, which is this building here on the corner of Vassar and Main Street that most of you probably never notice. Or if you walked by, you'd probably say, wonder what that's doing here. I call it the hot dog stand in the middle of Manhattan. And we endure floods. In fact, I was just reminded today during the party to celebrate when I got the National Medal of Science, a huge main broke and water poured right into the middle of the party, which I thought was beautiful. Our motto is ideas trump facilities. So as I was preparing this talk, I started going down memory lane. And I found this picture, which is the Parsons Lab, across from Building 20, a lot of you students don't even remember that era. But some of the oldsters in here with me do. There's my parking place. I could park right next to the building. It was a very exciting time back then. Now, I found this picture, 1978. I came here in 1976-- I will get to the science. I promise. I came in 1976. And find me in this picture. There I am. And if you could see the bubble coming out of my head, it was, "What am I doing here?" And in fact, if you could see a bubble now, it would be saying the same thing. I am a biologist by training and oceanographer in the Department of Civil-- it wasn't even civil and environmental engineering then. It was civil engineering. But they hired me. And thank you very much for that. And it's been an incredible journey. So I decided to do sort of a historic thread for this, to follow the path from that time how we ended up making this discovery of prochlorococcus and what it's taught us. And at the end, I'll try to conclude with what it has taught me about how to think about the life sciences. So first of all, I always start my lectures with this slide, which is my abridged version of life on Earth, which is the reaction, photosynthesis, where sunlight, energy, carbon dioxide, and water is split, and biomass is created, and oxygen is evolved. And this is the foundation of all of life on Earth. And if you Google it in our course catalog-- photosynthesis-- you won't find it, which is something that I've been working on for years. And the reverse of that-- so this is done by all plant and phytoplankton. And the reverse of that is done by everything, because you have to break this organic matter apart by oxidizing it with oxygen to get the energy out. And CO2 and water are released. And that's where we get the energy to be alive. And, of course, microbes are incredibly important for regenerating all the other essential nutrients for life in this. And the way I think about this, we know the saying, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It really should be gases to gases, dust to dust. The Harvard Smithsonian did a study about education. And photosynthesis was one module. And they actually filmed MIT and Harvard students at graduation. And they said, here's a seed. Here's a log. Where does the weight of that log come from? None of them could answer that. They danced around it-- the water, the soil. And then they said, if I told you it came from the air, one of the students said, I'd have to think about that. So it's just this fundamental feature of life on Earth, that all of this biomass, all of life comes from the air. And because we forget that and we don't think about that, our perspective of life on Earth is dramatically slanted. So to overcome that, I written two children's books on photosynthesis. This one on land. And that one in the oceans, available on Amazon. And they're children. But there are also for people of all ages. They cover the basics. So half of the photosynthesis on Earth, roughly, is done by the phytoplankton in the oceans. Photosynthesis and then respiration draws CO2 in. Respiration draws it back. And the same on land. And even though the mass of the phytoplankton is a tiny fraction of the land plants, they do just about as much photosynthesis.
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