TED | 新蝴蝶效应
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新蝴蝶效应
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Jaap de Roode
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社会 技能 医学 TED 演讲
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就像我们一样，帝王蝶有时也会因为讨厌的寄生虫而生病。但是生物学家Jaap de Roode注意到他正在研究的蝴蝶有一些有趣的地方——受感染的雌性蝴蝶会选择在一种特定的植物上产卵，这种植物可以帮助它们的后代避免生病。他们怎么知道选择这种植物?把它想象成“另一种蝴蝶效应”——它可以教我们找到治疗人类疾病的新药物。
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00:00
说到传染病，传染病仍然是全球人类，生病和死亡的主因。每年，数以万计的人们死于，肺结核、疟疾、以及艾滋病，甚至在美国，每年都有成千上万的人因流感致命。
00:17
人类不是很有创意吗？我们想出不少办法保护自己，用药物和疫苗抵抗传染病。我们十分谨慎地总结经验，得出创新的解决办法。我们以为只有人类才懂医学，但是其实不然，许多其他动物也有类似的机制，最典型的是大猩猩，和人类差不多，它们会利用植物清理肠道寄生虫，几十年的研究发现很多动物都会保护自己，大象、豪猪、绵羊、山羊…数不胜数，更有趣的是，最近的研究发现，昆虫和其他小型生物也懂得医疗。
00:59
我们都知道传染病的病原体，不断演化。我们过去开发的一些药物，正在逐渐失效，因此我们更需要不断开发新药物，来应对不断变化的病原体。
01:14
现在我们来研究一下这些动物，看看从它们身上哪些是值得借鉴的，作为生物学家，我研究了十年帝王斑蝶，帝王斑蝶以它们壮观的迁徙而闻名，每年不计其数的帝王斑蝶来到一起，从美国和加拿大迁徙到墨西哥，但这并非我研究它们的原因，我研究它们是因为它们会生病，就像在座的你我，我认为我们可以从它们身上得到启发，来开发适用于人类的药物。
01:45
帝王斑蝶身上的寄生虫叫做，ophryocystis，elektroscirrha，这些寄生虫在蝶身上，引起大量的孢子，可以从鳞片夹缝中看见这些细小的斑点，它们威胁着帝王斑蝶的健康，缩短了它们的寿命，影响它们的飞行能力，甚至导致它们还没成年就死亡。这种寄生虫非常致命。
02:09
我工作时经常需要在温室里种植植物，因为帝王斑蝶十分挑食，它们只吃乳草的幼草，幸好我找到了几种它们食用的乳草。这些乳草中含有卡烯內酯，是一种具有毒性的物质，奇怪的是它对帝王斑蝶无害，帝王斑蝶吸收了这种毒素，携带这种毒素在体内，用于对付诸如鸟类的天敌，它们用身上鲜豔的黄黑白斑纹，来广告自己的毒性。一种自然警告标志。
02:42
当我在温室善尽己责，种植不同乳草时，某些毒性很高，像是热带乳草，有大量的強心甾，(cardenolides)，某些却没有毒素。在我喂食帝王斑蝶时，某些斑蝶没有染病，很健康。某些斑蝶则生着病，我发现某些乳草有药效，有效减低帝王斑蝶的症状，只要它们食用这些药草，就可以延长自己的性命。
03:13
当我发现的时候，我有了一很多人觉得很疯狂的想法，我想，如果帝王斑蝶可以应用呢？如果它们可以把这些乳草当作药物呢？如果它们可以为自己开药房呢？
03:26
我们的团队开始实验，在第一类实验里，我们给幼虫两种选择：有药性的乳草和没有药性的乳草。然后测量它们一生各自吃了多少。就像大部分的科学研究结果一样，答案很无聊：有药性和没有药性的各半。这些幼虫没有为自己做出有利的选择。
03:50
于是我们转为研究成蝶。我们想，母蝶会对自己的幼虫用药吗？它们会把卵产在有药的乳草上，减轻幼虫的症状？我们复制这个实验多年，得到一样的结果。我们把帝王斑蝶放进大笼子里，一边的乳草是有药性的，一边没有，然后测量它们在两种乳草上的产卵数，获得的结果是一致的。我们发现帝王斑蝶偏好药性乳草。换句话说，雌蝶把，68％，的卵产在药性乳草上。事实上，在它们产卵的时候，也不可避免的，传播了寄生虫。它们不能治疗自己。但这个实验告诉我们，帝王斑蝶把卵产在有药性的乳草上，减轻幼虫的病况。
04:51
这个发现很重要。不只是因为它显示了大自然的奥妙，更提醒我们应该如何开发药物。这些动物都很小，我们曾经觉得它们构造单纯，它们的大脑很小，但它们却懂得利用自然药草。直至今日，我们从自然中提取药物，包括植物，在一些原始文化中，传统疗法时常借镜动物来找新药方。大象教我们如何治疗肠胃不适，刺猬教我们如何处理腹泻。我想，最重要的是，除了那些大脑发达的哺乳类动物外，我们也应该更加注重，那些构造简单的动物、昆虫。发现这些动物懂得用药，让我们进入全新领域。也许有一天，我们会用蝴蝶找到的药物来治疗人类，我想这个机会是值得把握的。
05:56
谢谢各位。
The End
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00:00
So infectious diseases, right? Infectious diseases are still the main cause of human suffering and death around the world. Every year, millions of people die of diseases such as T.B., malaria, HIV, around the world and even in the United States. Every year, thousands of Americans die of seasonal flu.
00:17
Now of course, humans, we are creative. Right? We have come up with ways to protect ourselves against these diseases. We have drugs and vaccines. And we're conscious -- we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. We used to think we're alone in this, but now we know we're not. We're not the only medical doctors. Now we know that there's a lot of animals out there that can do it too. Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. But the last few decades have shown us that other animals can do it too: elephants, porcupines, sheep, goats, you name it. And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too.
00:59
The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. And therefore, there is this great need to find new ways to discover drugs that we can use against our diseases.
01:14
Now, I think that we should look at these animals, and we can learn from them how to treat our own diseases. As a biologist, I have been studying monarch butterflies for the last 10 years. Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. I study monarchs because they get sick. They get sick like you. They get sick like me. And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans.
01:45
Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha -- a mouthful. What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. And this is really detrimental to the monarch. It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. Very detrimental parasite.
02:09
As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. They only eat milkweed as larvae. Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. These are chemicals that are toxic. They're toxic to most animals, but not to monarchs. In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white.
02:42
So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. And some were not toxic. And then I fed them to monarchs. Some of the monarchs were healthy. They had no disease. But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants.
03:13
And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought, what if monarchs can use this? What if they can use these plants as their own form of medicine? What if they can act as medical doctors?
03:26
So my team and I started doing experiments. In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. And then we measured how much they ate of each species over their lifetime. And the result, as so often in science, was boring: Fifty percent of their food was medicinal. Fifty percent was not. These caterpillars didn't do anything for their own welfare.
03:50
So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. What we do is we put a monarch in a big cage, a medicinal plant on one side, a non-medicinal plant on the other side, and then we measure the number of eggs that the monarchs lay on each plant. And what we find when we do that is always the same. What we find is that the monarchs strongly prefer the medicinal milkweed. In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. They cannot prevent this. They can also not medicate themselves. But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick.
04:51
Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. In this way, elephants have told us how to treat stomach upset, and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. What I think is important, though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing.
05:56
Thank you so much.
The End
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