So suppose you are having an exam in
microbiology to take tomorrow and you
open your textbook - of course you have a
textbook - and you find that 99% of words
or 99.9 percent of words disappeared. So all you have in your textbook is a
couple of randomly distributed words on
each page. What's the probability of you
passing the exam?
It's obviously virtually nil. Our
understanding of microbial biosphere is
pretty much what that imaginary textbook
contains, which is very little. The
microbial dark matter is those missing
words, those species that are missing
from our culture collection, missing from
our understanding of who they are, what
they are doing, how important or unimportant
they may be as players. It's just a dark
spot occupied by a lone species that can
comprise 99% or 99.9% of all the microbial
diversity and we know virtually nothing
about them. That's the microbial
dark matter. What we want to do in the
lab is: a) to discover ways to sample that
microbial matter; and, number two, find a
way to use a newly discovered, newly
cultivated species for the purposes of
discovering biotech. So these are two
actives. One is more academic - how to
access in novel species. Number two - how to utilize them. Over the years, over past
decade, maybe 15 years, my lab came up - and it's a collective effort, there are very many people
involved - my lab has been fortunate
enough to develop several techniques to
cultivate microorganisms that appear to
be uncultivable by any standard
conventional approaches. Well, these are
the organisms from that microbial
dark matter. On the basis of this development, a colleague of mine - Kim Lewis - and myself
founded a company. It's called NovoBiotic  Pharmaceuticals. The mission of the
company is to use this patented by now
technologies to do precisely what I say, said:
cultivate as many novel species
as possible and explore them, all the
ability to discover antibiotics. So today the work basically falls into-- my work
falls into two parts. One is continuous
improvement of those methods in my
academic lab, and utilization of those
methods in biotech setting at NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals.
We have technologies
that work really well, established at the
end of 19th century. They worked very,
very, very well, they keep working well.
This is the convention. With this
convention we were able to sample some
of microbial diversity and that was
tremendously important. It appears that
to sample the rest requires departure
from convention. Now I believe it was
Albert Einstein who said - at least he is
widely credited for that - who said
that in his view, the definition of
insanity is to keep doing the very same
thing over and over expecting new results.
I don't think it's fair to say that JGI
is pushing or advancing the frontier 
because JGI is the frontier. It's
not pushing it, it's it's already there. 
It's others who may be following up
trying to push it even further. JGI is
simply the leader. That's that's my
view of the role of JGI.
