Science is Art

Although my basic education has a hole the size of Alaska, I do know the occasional painting by name, and a few artists, too. And it strikes me how akin science and arts are. Both disciplines need people with a creative force that is pushing itself out, no matter how tired or overworked we are. Normal working hours are a conundrum to us, there are days where nothing happens (sadly), and then there are weeks and months when we drudge along as if there is no tomorrow

Artists and scientists successful in their jobs seem to have a thing or two in common: They are excellent not simply because of talent or intelligence (it helps, though). They are good because they love what they do, they know that nothing simply falls into their laps, and they know that only lots of discipline and hard work will get them forward. The outcome in both arts and science is a composition of knowledge, craft, and imagination. That's what keeps artists and scientists alive.

Your carzy blogger on the bridge of the dutch research vessel RV Pelagia at windforce ten.

These days, scientists are expected to communicate their findings to a broader audience and this pressure is mounting, causing an outcry among older (harumpf, including me) scientists.We are expected to be able to sell ourselves and our work better. In the good old days, they let us pipett peacefully, we could autistically rummage around in our labs. And suddenly we ought to have communication skills? That knocks out even the toughest scientist.

But one thing is very clear: If no one would have bothered informing the public about climate change, the bird flu, cancer, radioactivity (the list is LONG), there would be absolutely no benefit in doing research.
Period.

What no one wants to know: Mass Extinction & Climate Change

This morning at 7:30 on the highway to Leipzig: Me and my little CNG car at 140km/h (thats 90mph I think). As every day, several cars dash by at god knows what speed and my car gives a very noticible jerk. The apperent wasteful use of fossil fuel makes me think about climate change. In my car! I'm not taking my bike nor the train to work, so you see, I'm just as bad as you. Only that I fancy myself as being just a little bit more ecofriendly.

Then, at only 120km/h with hundreds of fellow humans doing exactly the same, just a lot faster, I start wondering whether anyone would change a system that feels rather comfortable and upon which one depends (answer: no one?).

Beautiful from afar: The blue planet. (credits: NASA)

In my head, humankind's CO2 emissions sky rocket. That seems to be in everyone's brain or newspaper or TV set right now anyways. First, the report of the Club of Rome (here), warning us how ugly Earth may look in 2052 if we don't step on the breaks. And then the dinosaur farts and burps, heating up the atmosphere millions of years ago (here). The dinos didn't care much, much like humans. How they got extinct, everyone knows (things went boom).

There can be worse things than climate warming and its self-accellerating effects. For example mass extinctions. The extinction of the dinosaurs was the fifth mass extincion on Earth (if paleontologists counted correctly). But did you know that we are most likely in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? Probably not. Statistically, the hand full of scientists who know that, are totally insignificant compared to the 7 billion people on Earth. The latter being the driving force of the sixth mass extinction (including scientists).

An international group of scientists around David Hooper just published a paper in NATURE (here), that shows that the loss of biodiversity (the extiction of species) is one of the major driving forces in ecosystem change.

Hooper and colleagues compared effects of biodiversity loss with effects of other environmentally relevant factors, such as CO2 emission, acidification, ozon, and pollution with nutrients. They used data of 192 peer reviewed scientific studies to model the future outcome of even greater species loss.

From: Hooper et al., A global synthesis reveals biodiversity loss as a major driver of ecosystem change. NATURE, Mai 2012. With permission of the Nature Publishing Group

The thick red line (gray underlay) shows that the primary productivity (what all plants on this planet produce) decreases with increasing species loss. The fine horizontal dotted lines show the comparably weaker effects of ozon, acidification, and drought on the productivity.

Why does plant growth decrease with decreasing plant diversity? A simple example: Decrease of plant biodiversity results in decrease of the pollinator diversity. When bees and bumblebees are gone, who's going to pollinate the plants? Humans? With a tiny brush?

Temperate rain forest, Vancouver Island, Canada.

Why should a decreasing plant productivity bother us? More simple examples: grain (bread, rice, corn flakes), fruits (apple, pear, goose berries and all these yummy jams), veggies (yes, that includes french fries and ketchup too), milk and meat (cows feed on grass). Uh! And that reminds me on photosynthesis, the cool process that turns light and CO2 into oxygen.

 A similar dark scenario has been painted by Barovski et al. (here) in an earlier NATURE paper. If you look at the IUCN Red List of threatened species (here), you'll find that 20,000 (in words: twenty thousand) animal and plant species are highly threatened. Combining that with the knowledge that only a high biodiversity can sustain life on Earth, should give us sleepless nights.

Central Lake, Vancouver Island, Canada

What does that have to do with microorganisms? The thing with biodiversity loss is, that we can only notice a loss of a species we know of. One that we have already discovered. The smaller organisms are, the better they can hide. For example insect: We have no idea how many species are really extinct or threatened, as we don't know all insect species. And microbes? 

Depending on each other: Microbes growing on Bryonia

Well... The vast majority of microbes in nature are undescribed. What complicates the picture is the fact that all of us run around with a complex composition of species-specific microbes in our guts that help us to digest our food (about 2kg gut microbes per person). And all other animals, too! The loss of microbial diversity with each loss of one animal species is something that can hardly be calculated.

The Leipzig Daily Newspaper has a ScienceBlog!

The MicroBlog for the LVZ is now online!
Here

Microbes? What's that good for???

Translated from my german science blog ‘MicroBlog ‘ for the Leipzig Daily Newspaper (here):

Hui! You clicked the MicroBlog button! You probably just wanted to take a very quick look? You thought ‘What the heck is that? Microbes? What do I need that for? Huh?’

‚For brewing beer, you dufus!’ I could say now, but I don’t. I’m a serious scientist and should behave.

Now what’s that science blog about? Since it isn’t about beer brewing? Well, for example, it’s about how it is to be on a research vessel in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, for weeks on end (rather effective weight loss program @ wind force 8 and no way to get off that damn ship). Or about microbes having invented the wheel (global uproar among engineers) to propel themselves forwards. Or about the fascinating field of environmental microbiology and the surprises awaiting us almost every time we look into newly collected samples.

You probably wonder who these people are, these microbiologists? ‘Hum…’ I would say then. Because we are quite a complex bunch. On first sight, we may appear quiet and serious with our white lab coats and latex gloves. 

Serious microbiologist. Picture: André Künzelmann. Postprocessing: Magnus Wendeberg

But we aren’t running around like that the whole day! It’s boiling underneath that quiet surface! Among us you can find lots of people with brains, ideas, and curiousity! You probably read the stories about James Cameron and how he and his sea cucumber (sorry, I meant submarine) dove down to Earth’s deepest point? Adventurous you thought? Yeah! But we environmental microbiologists were already doing that for years! Going out onto the rough sea, to the Antarctic, or diving deep down to hot vents at the ocean’s floor. And returning with lots of valuable samples after weeks of very little sleep, lots of works, and practically no private time (as it is rather cuddly on a research vessel – lots of scientists and sailors and limited space). But we usually don’t have a camera team breathing down our necks. But our name is not James Cameron. Luckily.

The ones among us that are not studying the oceans aren’t boring, either! Here at the UFZ a lot of research is dedicated to contaminated ecosystems, places where people accidentally or intentionally spill toxic substances. For example Leuna (Germany): During WW II a refinery has been bombed and ten thousand tons of oil were spilled into the ground. Most of that is gone by now. Either taken away during remediation efforts or eaten by microorganisms, who find oil to be very delicious for lunch (and dinner, and supper, and breakfast). Investigating these microbes, who they are, what they do, and with whom they cooperate, is very interesting!

Leuna, not as pretty as the oceans. Foto: Magnus Wendeberg

Why would that be interesting, you think? Simply because we want to know what happens to a contaminated ecosystem, how its future will look like and whether it is able to heal itself. And because a contamination has several extreme effects: The combination of microbial activity and large amounts of contaminants leads to consumption of oxygen until anoxia is reached. The ecosystem basically suffocates. The microbes adapt quickly to the new situation. Instead of using oxygen to breathe, they use sulfate, nitrate, or iron for example.

Happy oil-eating microbes in Leuna. Foto: Torsten Jeske

 

Now imagine the following situation: Clean groundwater slowly flows through contaminated soil. Groundwater gets enriched with contaminants and transports them further downstream. Microbes growing on small sand particles (about 10.000.000 to 1.000.000.000 microbes per gram of soil) eat the contaminants. Depending on the amount of toxic substances, the number of microbes present, and the time available for microbial contaminant degradation, a complete restoration of a contaminated ecosystem by microbial activity is possible without human interference. But when villages or cities, rivers, streams, or lakes lay downstream of the contaminant source, microbes will not be fast enough to degrade toxic substances before they are transported to far. This is when remediation actions are taken. For example with pump-and-treat facilities that pump up all contaminated groundwater, clean it, and release it further downstream back into the aquifer. Sometimes, the contamination source is dug up and disposed in toxic waste dumps. This can be done quite fast, but it’s also very expensive. Microbes neutralize our toxic waste for free, but may be too slow under certain circumstances. When microbiologists, hydrogeologists, and engineers join forces, individual solutions for the clean-up of various ecosystems can be found.

The stupid thing about contaminated soil ecosystems though is, that they often go unnoticed and most people are not aware of the threats contaminated soils pose. Contaminants in soil will be washed into aquifers (this is where groundwater flows). First of all, groundwater is our most important drinking water resource. Second, groundwater always flows from A to B, and most of the time there is something between A and B. Such as villages, water works, cities, lakes, wet lands, nature preserves. 

Water flow in the underground - groundwater (blue), feeding into my pond.

Some idiot spilled oil onto the grass! (black blob)

And now it's raining!

The rain mobilizes the oil and washes it deeper into the ground

Now the groundwater, flowing from left to right, transports the oil further. My house and my drinking water well are rather close.

The oil reached my well and my pond, it smells like gas station everywhere! (Several billion microbial voices from the off: Yepee! Yummy oil, lets party!)

 Maybe you are wondering how many contaminated sites exist in Europe?

According to the report of the European Environmental Agency from September 2007, there are 250,000 contaminated sites in the EU member states requiring remediation. In the last 30 years 80,000 sites have been cleaned up, but it will take decades to solve the legacy of contamination.

Now you are quite happy about microbes eating away our toxic waste, aren’t you?