welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website for our program  good evening i'm yvonne stapp and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovation and tonight we learn about the importance of microbes and why scientists know so little about them despite the fact they are literally everywhere  prospects at the time and eventually he became famous anyway this is an inspiring immigrant tale much appreciated in a nation of immigrants and he'll tell us more about it later this evening but first d describes the universe of bike robes and why about ninety nine percent of them remain unknown by what's called microbial dark matter he explains why relatively few microbes can be grown in the lab a serious concern at this time because of the urgent need for new bacterial candidates for the development of new antibiotics dr epstein and his colleagues at northeastern dr kim lewis are famous for an innovation called the i chip which solved the problem of obtaining new microbe candidates for antibiotics and for the development of breakthrough antibiotic they called tech so backed  for this work doctors epstein and louis received numerous honors they were listed in the top ten discoveries in two thousand and fifteen by the united press international the top five most important medical developments of twenty fifteen by the b b c the top one hundred discoveries of twenty fifteen by discover magazine dr epstein and dr lewis were also in the top one hundred global thinkers foreign policy magazine it is a very great honor to introduce dr slava epstein welcome sir thank you very much alone for this introduction it's a great pleasure to be here in the tour and if you we can start out with just getting a little background about the microbial world i think it's not will understood there may be all around us but we don't hear a lot about it through the media and so on so why aren't they well pretty big mystery very intellectually teasing one it's one of the little of their talk of by my mind and minds of many people all the time i confess i don't know the exact o k well i can't resist asking because you have pointed this out yes it's known in microbiology these are dense communities they're not they don't just stick with their own kind one variety doesn't just stick with it's own kind but you're talking about like an ecological system in these microbial commune does that have anything to do with it do you see what it's possible ok the dependency or for microorganisms wh microorganisms three animals they basically either compete with each other or eat each other and that's about it the diversity of the interactions limited to if you interactions that another soul nothing is wasted it's used by a neighbor and the waste products of the neighbor feeds another microorganisms and yet another microorganism can be coming back to the first making a loop you know which everything is cycle compare it with this super organism and it acts like that doesn't it that it's also completely interdependent just like the organs in our bodies and so on they don't operate on their own oh so that seems like a possibility and some can be isolated more readily than in these it is a possibility i'm however it has to be qualified a little bit   well that's the other i do so again you have a lot of work to do i guess in this field it's very very rich now why are microbes important then i mean it is  so we can't get them we can't identify them you say this is dark matter you don't even know what to call them wouldn't if you can find them why aren't most microbes so important work of microbes i understand geology also is that true have rocks everything everything on the planet needs it so that in a sense it is the planet is alive whether we are are not it is i thing and it wouldn't function with the micro i think it's a very fair statement yeah that's amazing isn't and they don't know anything about them i mean is it changing today or are people in this field that one of the things i guess that has driven the search for microbes has been into bioethics and we have a crisis could you give us a little background all that like to talk about the  country alone probably around fifty thousand between north america and europe a year and countless more are named more worldwide and it's going through the roof yes there's a lot of concern because  so contagious and so on are coming back for roche asli the ask about antibiotics that you have all these types of microbes but is it relatively few the number that can be cultivated for antibiotics it is relatively few that produce   what what are the features of the microbe that would say you know that would be good i don't know i don't know we don't know it's really don't know a lot about antibiotics that's either right that's a that's amazing because they've been at it for a very long time and i guess it came up sort of by accident and still isn't going away it is basically brute force approach  you see any change coming down the line for that is there any possibility that you will with some of the techniques you yourself have been developed they will be able to sort this out a little there and this is how you came up with  they the bacteria develop resistance very quickly but there was something special about this one that prevented that is that a rare quality among so rare to find one i mean you didn't just go out in the backyard and find that understand i would like to turn also you've done this work and you know at the moment there's a lot of concern about development in the developing effective antibiotics but especially since we have overused so much the ones that we have that they're no longer effective so good luck on that but another area that you were interested in with this dark matter i suppose is that you could a dent to five microbe oh go on are present on like in mars and i wonder if you tell growth when it happens otherwise it's still it's empty so the poor are very small microorganisms can get in only nutrients and other growth factors c curiosity drop it off here and there or something or other on mars you would say you don't you would not have to have a microbiologist right there you could transmit data back so you need to deposit the produced by life as we know and it's a very indirect way it's the best way we have but it's a rather indirect way of detecting detect can live in it's based on significant number of assumptions yet the method inspired and i hope people coming into this country in the future will be by this very moving story so you were originally in the soviet union but go back to where we will didn't speak english right which is true i didn't have any means which is true and no prospects which is not true well i mean prospects like yes i was going to offer you a work hard that's all but back take us back to the soviet union time we just need to remind people about the collapse what happened leading up to that i think that you tha started out in physics and you were told forget it because this is true while i did like biology since that time i remember myself my heart for a period of time and to not even think about it because because of the quarter on jews yes ok so it's important that people understand this there was a severe quota for the civil rights but in case they don't are not aware of we'll i'm forced to something where there was a little bit the situation was a little more relaxed in that regard the biology my order was not seen at the time as something that it anything to do with  when a lot of jews from russia were able to come here and this is very different from world war two after world war two and so it has some resonance even today that you know this  that change could other things change as well in any case you came over here and since you had no language skills or you couldn't do what you were trained to do what did you do and this is a heroic thing actually listening to the news imperfect is going to sting was at the time it was already there with no particular effort just like a child yams now you've got some language after  while this is just a huge thing for adults particularly coming in too especially professional people where you need a high level of language and so you came you did and has never left right and then the rest was history or are they missing everything now as and thank you for all the contributions in your new country that you had made i hope that your you will be contributing to the bars discoveries