The Leap: A Scientist’s Quest To See Every Organism On Earth

Manu Prakash wants to map the whole tree of life, with the help of everyone on this planet.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:52Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  We're ready to go.

• 1:15Flora Lichtman?

  Strap on this life vest. We're going out in a boat.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, OK. So I think it's better to just stabilize yourself. So we're going to now feel the wind.

• 1:30Flora Lichtman?

  We're with scientist Manu Prakash, speeding into Buzzard's Bay off of Cape Cod. It's early in the morning, and Manu is up late in the lab. But it doesn't seem to get to him.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  That's it, that's the coffee. Now we're all up. That's all we needed.

• 1:46Flora Lichtman?

  We're going fishing for the ocean's tiniest inhabitants.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  All right, nets in, Bill.

• 1:51Flora Lichtman?

  Which is something Manu does all over the globe.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  You see the little shine? Those are diatoms, the floating diatoms. On this last trip, we saw this really beautiful diatom. It's Nychia. And it crawls on another diatom, this Cytosaurus, on its whiskers. So it's like this diatom has mustaches, very long mustaches, and it'll just crawl back and forth in it. Like, I've seen both of them in isolation 1,000 times in the field. First time I see what they do together. And the Nychia is hitching a ride. That's the joy of this job. You could spend a lifetime on a boat looking at stuff, and you're still looking at new stuff every single day. You don't run out of work.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  This can't run out of work. Yeah.

• 2:44Flora Lichtman?

  You can't run out of work when your goal is to see every single creature on Earth.

• 2:52Flora Lichtman?

  This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their reputations, their careers, and even their lives to discover something new.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  If I have an intuition, I will follow it, no matter what. No matter what people say, no matter what I read. If I have an intuition, I'll follow it.

• 3:19Flora Lichtman?

  Manu Prakash is not easy to sum up. He's a MacArthur Genius Award winner and a bioengineering professor at Stanford. But that doesn't really capture his work. In practice, he's a physicist, a biologist, an oceanographer, a toolmaker, an explorer, a field researcher. And he's putting all of these disciplines together in service of one fantastically grand quest: to map the entire tree of life with the help of everyone on Earth.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  The bigger puzzle is really how the life is organized on this planet. And then the quest really becomes, can you see the whole of it? Like, can in my lifetime, I can see every organism that has ever been described? Maybe 1 millimeter and below.

• 4:06Flora Lichtman?

  That's an insane goal.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  I think it would be awesome to see every single thing and spend time with it. Like, you know, I think it can be done.

• 4:18Flora Lichtman?

  How did he get to this big idea? Manu grew up in India and he loved science ever since he was a kid and he did well. He got accepted into one of the IITs, the Indian Institute of Technology. It's super competitive.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Like, people introduce each other not by their names, but the ranking they got in the national score. Like, what the hell?

• 4:43Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, like, give me an example. Play it out.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  I'll just call a friend Chavani. Chavani in Hindi means 25. 25 is his rank in the total ranking system of like a million people that applied for this exam. So you can see how much pressure there is.

• 5:02Flora Lichtman?

  Now, some people thrive in these ultra-competitive environments. Like, it lights a fire in them. That was not Manu.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Like, you know, I won't say my grades on audio, but I had pretty low grades. Like, the fact that I ever made to grad school is insane. Like, I've never gotten an-- other than my first semester, I never got an A. Like, forget about, like, it's Bs, Cs, and Ds.

• 5:32Flora Lichtman?

  But Manu wasn't slacking off. It's just that while his classmates were like, you know, jockeying for front row seats, clamoring to get called on, Manu wasn't even in the room.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Like, my undergrad, I spent in a children's school, second and first graders, and I was watching how they draw. And I was writing a computer program from their drawings to be able to draw like a child.

• 5:59Flora Lichtman?

  That's amazing that you wanted to do that as an undergrad, to create a program that draws like a child.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's not that I wasn't working. I was working hard on all these other things and other ideas. That took so much more time. Like, you'll kind of find it funny now, like, since we're opening up. My first patent is a patent in India where--

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Built this robotic katputli. Katputli means a puppet. We have these very traditional puppet shows. It's a very famous thing in India. We do this in Rajasthan and other places. So basically, a completely automated system that you don't need a puppet master at the back. You just program the whole damn thing from a computer sitting over. And I did a show for that. So, I mean, it took time, right? When you do that type of stuff, you're clearly not attending classes. But, you know, I think it's, it was important. It was actually very formative. It taught me that I can create my own boundary around what I think is important, what is successful.

• 7:05Flora Lichtman?

  So you created this internal barometer for success. Did you have to develop it?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I think, I would say, it is survival. It's not, you develop this because you know that there is no other way out. Because I would have, like, died of boredom. So what I mean by survival was like, oh, I need to find ways to pursue creative things. Otherwise, the other option doesn't look very good. And then the hope is that others would value it. So like, when you go down the deep end, you go to the far deep end. I think that's really maybe what I'm trying to say.

• 7:44Flora Lichtman?

  You do.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think I'm just, I'm just saying that you don't want to do where everybody else is already looking.

• 7:55Flora Lichtman?

  This approach worked for Manu. Even though he wasn't the best student on paper, people at this university saw something in him and vouched for him. He got into MIT for grad school. And again, he paddled away from the crowds. He got to work on a bubble computer, a computer that uses bubbles as bits. And if that's hard to wrap your mind around, it's not just you. It was out there even for MIT.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  I arrived, I was in an applied physics lab. All my friends around me, they were all working on quantum computing. It was the most important thing at that time. Our lab had shown. That we can divide 15 with like a $20 million of equipment.

• 8:38Flora Lichtman?

  With a quantum computer.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  With a quantum computer.

• 8:39Flora Lichtman?

  You've got a quantum computer to do like a very simple calculation.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  That's correct. They were doing that and it was like the biggest thing of the time. And I just was like, nah, you know, it's just, it's, uh, and I was thinking about bubbles at that time. And I was walking in this corridor and I had the other friend, who's a good friend of mine. He was in charge of the intel at that time at MIT. Had this amazing strange germanium, like a $20 million equipment. And he was in charge. And he would tell me all these things about like, oh, how important that was. And then he would turn around and was like, what are you working on? And I was very hesitant to tell him that I'm thinking about bubbles and like,

• 9:26Speaker 03

  making a computer out of a bubble. And like, so I would avoid him whenever we would walk down the corridor.

• 9:32Flora Lichtman?

  Like you were afraid that he was gonna look down on it? That it like he would laugh, it'd be sort of like a quirky thing?

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, like you get laughed out of rooms all the time. I think that's true. People really have opinions, you know? Especially about what others should do.

• 9:55Flora Lichtman?

  That bubble computer work? It made it to the journal Science, by the way. So Manu's an expert now in bubble computers and AI programs that mimic how children draw. How do you get from there to mapping the entire tree of life? Well, it was partly thanks to a roadblock Manu hit after he graduated and landed a job.

• 10:17Flora Lichtman?

  In 2011, Manu got offered a professor position at Stanford. And you might think like, oh, Manu has made it. He can relax. But actually, the pressure was just ramping up. The tenure clock had started. He had to hire students, get funding, do science, publish. And immediately, Manu hits a speed bump.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  I had arrived on campus to learn that my lab won't be ready in like nine months or a year.

• 10:45Flora Lichtman?

  The building was under construction.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  It was a big down moment. It's like, holy [BLEEP], I can't even start my lab. I can't recruit anybody.

• 10:53Flora Lichtman?

  So Manu decides to go to the field. He wants to apply his physics expertise to real world problems, problems he saw growing up in India.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Of course, you see pain in the world and you ask yourself a question, what am I doing about it? And I think when I started the lab, I'd already decided that I was going to spend 50% of my time pursuing what I deeply just care about, like the analogy to how to draw like a child. But on the other hand, the other half was about there is so much inequality in this world. How do we positively contribute?

• 11:33Flora Lichtman?

  So Manu decides to focus on malaria. So he rounds up some students and he takes them to Thailand. And it was a rough trip.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  We're like, we're going to go to the most mosquito infected places. And, you know, I took my students and one of them quit on the trip. So we were in like leech infested rainforest and I wanted to see them. And like, he's like, leeches are my boundary.

• 11:58Flora Lichtman?

  So Manu has no lab. He's losing students to leech sensitivities. But this important thing happens. Manu visits this remote venom clinic and it has this fancy fluorescent microscope. It's really expensive. People are intimidated by it because it costs so much money and it is locked away.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  It didn't feel right. Like it felt this super expensive thing sitting in the middle of nowhere in a rainforest with pouring rain and nobody's there.

• 12:30Flora Lichtman?

  And this experience kind of dovetails in Manu's mind with another microscope run-in he had in India.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  There's a place in India where there's a Gandhi ashram. Like, this is where Gandhi used to, Mahatma Gandhi, used to spend his time. And there's this photograph that actually stuck there that I hadn't seen before, although I grew up in India. It's kind of funny. It's Gandhi looking through a microscope. And there was this irony in this photograph, like, he was not wearing any clothes.

• 12:58Flora Lichtman?

  He's wearing a white cloth around his waist.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Because this was the non-cooperative movement, so they were burning pants, quite literally.

• 13:06Flora Lichtman?

  But at the same time, he's using this European-made microscope.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  It's just this sense of, oh, like, science can truly bridge and can bring a certain... It was a very iconic kind of a thing that stuck with me for a long time.

• 13:21Flora Lichtman?

  So Manu came back with this clarity, this sense of purpose, that microscopes were this powerful tool, they could bridge cultures, but they're constructed to be these precious objects. Their finely tuned lenses and mirrors make them delicate and expensive and therefore locked away. So Manu wondered, what if you could change all that?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  I came back, and the first grant I wrote now, this is laughed-out-of-the-room moment. I had visited a matchstick factory before, and I knew that you could make a billion matchsticks in a day. Like, I just saw this massive machinery churning out matchsticks. And I was like, OK, we're gonna take a manufacturing technology that already works, and we're gonna, instead of turning matchsticks, why can't I churn microscopes?

• 14:09Flora Lichtman?

  Could he mass-produce cheap microscopes? He had a design, and it was unusual. It used a fireworks chemical reaction to illuminate the sample.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Like, I actually submitted a grant to somebody where there was fire and there was microscopes.

• 14:27Flora Lichtman?

  He didn't get it, but the seed of the idea was planted. And soon after, Manu met a student who also saw the potential of this project.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  We had a very clear vision of the type of people that we wanted to serve.

• 14:41Flora Lichtman?

  This is Jim Sobolski. He was a grad student in Manu's lab, and he took on this microscope project.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Manu and I both started, you know, not exactly, I don't know if I would say poor, but, you know, on the poorer side, not in rich families, and so... It's just fun to think, oh, if I would have had this, I could have done that.

• 15:01Flora Lichtman?

  So they set out to design a low-cost microscope.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  And like in three weeks, we actually had what became version one of a fold scope.

• 15:13Flora Lichtman?

  The Foldscope was born. A paper microscope that comes together like origami, with different pieces of cardboard folding on top of each other. Inside is a single-ball lens, which was one of the key innovations. You can hold the Foldscope to your eye or snap it onto your cellphone. With it, you can see single-celled organisms, even bacteria. It's sturdy enough to survive a drop from a third-story building, and it fits in your pocket. And the cost of materials: a dollar. So they started submitting the design to journals.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  And like, you know, you have this moment when you share your thing with someone and say, how are they going to react? It's like your, you know, your baby's ugly kind of a moment. And, and I remember that across with many people. Even when it was fully functional, it had like the same kind of specs that it exists now. It just, people couldn't fathom the idea that we're going to make something that's supposedly so delicate and so precious out of something that's like art and craft.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  There was this underlying tone of people questioning the approach that we were taking. You know, if people spent a lot of time in their career doing microscopy, and then you claim, oh, we get comparable performance for a dollar, that is bound to raise eyebrows.

• 16:35Flora Lichtman?

  Because it somehow challenges the idea that you have to, that to do good science, you have to do it on fancy microscopes at a fancy institution.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, our goal is to break the model. A lot of people don't want to break the model.

• 16:51Flora Lichtman?

  Despite the skepticism, Foldscope got through the peer review gauntlet, and Manu and Jim published the paper in 2014. And at this point, Manu, a young professor at a very competitive institution, racing against the tenure clock, could have very easily just taken the publication win and moved on. He'd proved the idea was possible, leave it to someone else to get it into people's hands. After all, public outreach is not the kind of work that typically gets you tenure or advances your scientific career. But Manu wasn't calculating that way. He had an intuition. And again, he followed it.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  I walked in into a lab and really, almost on a whim, I just declared to Jim, "We're going to ship 10,000 Foldscopes." And he kind of looked at me. And he knows me. And so he sort of smiled to a certain... He was confused. And we had no money.

• 17:51Flora Lichtman?

  Foldscope is cheap, but international shipping is not.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  I think I had at that time around $100, $150,000 left in my bank for the lab. And I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. And it was telling me it was going to cost around $250,000 to just ship microscopes around the world. When I said "world," I meant everybody. It didn't matter which country. If we were going to get a request from Congo, we're going to ship to Congo. But I just was adamant.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  I think it's one of these scenarios where you have to believe you can do it, and you have to start on the path, and then hope that something will present itself that will enable you to proceed.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  It was insane. Like, this room that was filled with scissors and supplies.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  So a lot of cutting. A lot of cutting.

• 18:42Flora Lichtman?

  All done in the lab.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Graduate students, yeah.

• 18:49Flora Lichtman?

  Manu was out on a limb. And it's not just because he was sinking his startup money. Distributing microscopes to any kid or adult who wants one, anywhere in the world, that's not a traditional research project. It wasn't about making a discovery that was going to land him in a big journal. And so some colleagues were skeptical.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  You know, as a young professor, you're always told, oh, you know, you need to do what fits in the framework of a profession. And I just, I absolutely hate that. I know somebody from the grapevine heard about what I was doing. And, you know, senior mentors around me, they reached out. It's like, oh, you know, so what is your plan? What are you trying to do? And I just, you know, all I said is I just want to see what people do with this in the world. No questions asked, nothing in return. Let them figure out what's best for them, you know, not for us. We don't need anything other than just people to play and explore.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  And the risk there was just trusting others. And I've built that very deeply in a lot of things that we do. I start with a position of trust.

• 20:03Speaker 06

  You guys! Oh, my God, look at that! Oh, there's all kinds of sillies. I cannot believe how good that is.

• 20:09Ira Flatow?

  We can barely get our microscope to see those.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Human mind is so curious. Once you share sets of capabilities, they will explore.

• 20:21Flora Lichtman?

  Manu and Jim started a company for Foldscope. Jim's the president. They've distributed almost 2 million foldscopes to people in over 160 countries.

• 20:36Flora Lichtman?

  They created a website where people can upload videos they took with their foldscope attached to their phone.

• 20:45Flora Lichtman?

  And you can hear and see people all over the globe scooping out teaspoons of pond scum, grabbing the hairs of their dogs, taking droplets of their own blood, and making discoveries.

• 20:57Speaker 07

  That is amazing. Oh, look at that.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Literally, anybody walking around can make profound discoveries on this planet just by observing, putting those pieces together.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  And you have to enable that. You have to enable that by making sure that scientific tools are just part and parcel of our life and our culture.

• 21:30Flora Lichtman?

  Manu has enabled that joy of discovery for millions of people. That is a profound contribution. But for Manu, this isn't just about lighting up people's curiosity or letting them in on this secret, invisible world. This is also about real science, about Manu's grand quest to map the Tree of Life.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  If we truly want to understand this ship that we are on, we must take an approach that is driven by millions of people walking around and observing. When we do that at a planet's scale, like, the rate of discovery would be astronomical. And it does require, sometimes, to meet these characters, you have to go to their homes. They don't come to you. And that's a... That does require you to be dangling off of trees or going out at sea. And it just... I think I feel like, at least, if I have a good, true, personal acquaintance

• 22:37Speaker 03

  with a significant portion of the Tree of Life, that would make me happy. Yeah. A real, true, personal acquaintance.

• 22:45Flora Lichtman?

  Why do you think that getting acquainted with the Tree of Life, why is that your thing?

• 22:50Speaker 03

  I think the why is very simple. Every organism is an idea.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  And every one of them is a new idea. It's not just about the classical way people have thought about evolution. Oh, there was a niche. This must be the optimal way. No, some organisms are just absolutely, profoundly, for the lack of a better word...

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Strangely dumb. Like, it's like, what the hell? That's not how you should do it. And that's still an idea.

• 23:20Flora Lichtman?

  There are a lot of dumb ideas.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say. I don't want to put every one of them on a pedestal of just this, oh, what a beautiful puzzle it's solved. It's like, and then you see once in a while just this brilliant thing that an organism does that we've never just thought about. It's like, oh, I'm gonna steal photosynthetic organels from another animal and don't have to eat ever again. Such, I mean...

• 23:47Flora Lichtman?

  Or I'm gonna ride your whiskers.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  I'm gonna ride your whiskers. That's correct, yeah. Like, what the... That's a brilliant idea.

• 23:58Flora Lichtman?

  With every new idea, we understand our world a little better. There are now over 1,400 scientific papers referencing Foldscope, discoveries in diagnostics and public health and agriculture. People have even discovered new species using Foldscope, adding new twigs to the tree of life, just as Manu trusted they would.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Oh, this is an incredible one. Hold it, hold it, and so...

• 24:29Speaker 07

  Oh, my god.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Do you see your hair?

• 24:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  You see the big line? So you have to pass this one around to everybody.

• 24:35Speaker 07

  I have black hair.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  I'm not saying this is easy. I'm not saying I'm good at it or something. But it's just you have to strip science away from what other people think. It really is what you think. Sometimes I think about people that I want to reach that I haven't reached, and that's like, I judge myself on that. Or like, sometimes some place in the tree of life is taunting me, like, ah, you know, you'll never understand me. I'll judge myself on that. But I think these are all internal. Like, having an internal parameter, using that as an anchor to say whether you're successful, that's far more interesting.

• 25:39Flora Lichtman?

  The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. Manu has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a scout for his bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. You can learn more about this recognition and volunteer role on the website. This show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist. Editing by Devon Taylor, Pejao Van Ghe, and David Sanford. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Additional production help from Ruth Lichtman. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Special thanks to Christine Kurihara, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and to all the Fullscope users all over the world who shared their observations online. And thanks to you for listening.

• 26:35Flora Lichtman?

  We're back tomorrow with a conversation about bedbugs. Turns out, we've been sleeping with them since before there were beds.

• 26:42Speaker 08

  I'm not going to lie, they give me the ick. However, from a genetic lens, these are a really interesting and unique species.

• 26:53Flora Lichtman?

  Can you learn to love the bedbug? We'll find out.