(66 min)
In the talk
Jonathan Rosenberg is pleased to host a tech talk featuring Drs. Paul Hebert and Dan Janzen, who will discuss their transformative (and very Googley) International Barcode of Life project (www.dnabarcoding.org) we hope you can find the time to attend. (For those of you not in MV, we'll send info out after the video has been posted on Moma.) If we generate sufficient Googler interest, we may follow up this talk by taking a group of the most interested and qualified Googlers on a trip to the Costa Rican rain forest for a weekend of field research, education, and development. We will share more details on the 26th.
iBOL's goal is to capture, using a handheld device, the unique "DNA barcode" of each and every species on earth, and organize that information to be accessible and useful for everyone (sound familiar?). A DNA barcode is a gene sequence that uniquely identifies any species, and iBOL has already barcoded 35,000 of them. There are approximately 10M species on the planet (half of which have yet to be discovered), so there's a long way to go, but the components for success are in place.
During my recent family vacation to Costa Rica I hiked the rain forest, and by the end of the trip could easily identify a toucan, eyelash viper, and three types of monkeys (howling, spider, and Rosenberg offspring). Pretty impressive, right? Then Dr. Janzen showed me a photo of that same rain forest and told me that there were approximately 400 species of animals and plants in that picture, and not a toucan or monkey among them. So it turns out that I'm just as bio-illiterate as everyone else, but Google can do something about this. When we talk about organizing all the world's information, a blueprint of the world's natural biodiversity should be part of it.
