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These are images of microorganisms.
The tiny form of life that we can't see with our naked eye
viruses, bacteria and archea.
They are the most abundant and diverse organisms on Earth
and they cover every nook and cranny of our body
our buildings and our cities.
Most of you when you think about microbes,
probably think about the bad ones. Like MRSA, or *** or ANTRAX.
But, the majority of microbes are good for us.
Our bodies, just like any ecosystem, rely on our microbes to survive.
Our microbes protect us from germs and pathogenes,
they allow us to get nutrients from our food
and they also boost our inmune system.
And recent evidence suggests that they even influence our moods,
our levels of stress and anxiety and depression.
So, if you are feeling fantastic today, like I am, you might wanna thank your microbes.
And you might wanna thank you mother as well, because we get our --
the majority of our microbes comes from our mother when we are born
and we also get our microbes from the food that we eat
and from the people that we spend time with, our friends
and people on subways if you are hi-fiving them
on the way down on the escalator -- and we also get our microbes
from our primary habitat which is buildings.
All of us are gonna spend at least 90% of our lives indoors
and while we are indoors, we frequently -- continuosly come into contact
with microbes that we breathe in and that we touch on surfaces.
Something that I've been interested in,
given how important microbes are to our well-being,
is how we manage microbes in our buildings where we spend so much of our time.
And to explain what I've learnt in recent years I'm gonna make an analogy of a garden.
A microbial garden that is -- indoors!
So, our techniques for gardening microbes indoors today,
loosely follow 4 basic rules.
The first rule is that you want to keep all microbes out of your building,
you want to quarantine the building.
And we have modern buildings today that are hermetically sealed,
and examples of this, of the ways buildings have changed, is --
we now have operable windows
that are replaced with elaborate air-conditioning systems
and filtration systems that are designed to keep out
native microbes that are outdoors,
the ones that commonly grow on plants,
and live in the dirt, and live in our water ways
and we don't want them getting inside of our buildings.
And, the second rule, or principle, is that we put doors on our buildings
and allow people to come inside buildings
and plant in our gardens, what I'm refering to as invasive microbes.
And these are microbes that live on our bodies, they are on our skin, they are in our mouth.
Every human being that walks into a building, in one hour,
they contribute 37 million bacteria to the air.
That's as many bacteria as the number of people
that are currently living in the state of California.
And we contribute microbes to the air by shedding directly from our own body
and we also kick up microbes from surfaces
that were left behind by other people that were in the building.
Our third basic rule is to keep a static environment for our garden.
So we keep a very narrow band of temperature and relative humidity,
we don't allow for daily environmental changes or seasonal changes indoors,
and we maintain this thermal comfort zone for us,
because we want to be able to hang out in our underwear
even if it's snowing outside, indoors.
But think about this from the perspective of a microbe!
What we're doing is creating an environment
that selects for what I think of as an urban type of microbe
that really thrives living in this homogeneous environment.
And the forth rule that we follow indoors,
is that we regularly wanna kill everything in the garden.
And we do this indoors by relentlessly using anti-microbial cleaning products
and sterilizing surfaces indoors.
And when you think about this, this is really a form of microbial genocide
because what we are doing is killing the good microbes along with the bad.
So, if we'd had a vegetable garden outside,
we would never kill all the plants
because we wanted to get rid of one weed.
And that's effectively what we are doing indoors
and when you clear out a bunch of organisms from an ecosystem,
what you do is you make space for weedy and fast growing organisms
to come and colonize those spaces,
because there's nothing there to compete with them.
What are the consequences of this way that we manage microbes indoors?
We don't know yet, people are just starting to learn about this
but I'm willing to speculate on what I think is happening.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years
but this era of modern buildings that are hermetically sealed,
environmentally constant, cleaned on a very regular basis
this has been around only for about 60 years.
And I believe what we are breeding indoors
are growing as a microbial monoculture.
And when you think about our bodies, we probably haven't evolved
to be able to function very well in this type of microbial environment.
And there's a lot of evidence that has been published recently,
that suggests that many of the ways of modern living may be affiliated
with the rise of antibiotic resistence and the rise of auto-inmune disorders
that we all face in the developed world, like asthma and allergies.
I've recently been collaborating with both biologists and architects,
including Brandon Bohanan and Charlie Brown at the University of Oregon
to understand how building design impacts types of microbes that grow indoors.
And we've recently conducted a study
at the Lillis Business Complex of the University of Oregon --
this is how Lillis looks like from the perspective of a human.
And this is, what it probably looks like,
from the perspective of a microbe flying around the atmosphere.
This is an infrared image that shows differences
in heat on the building and microbes are known to be very sensitive to heat.
And this is what Lillis looks like from the perspective of an architect.
So what we did on this building, is --
we were very interested in Lilis because this is a silver LEED certified building
and we wanted to know,
"Does green building design influence microbes in a positive or negative way?"
So, what we did was, on the first floor of this building
we ran and operated the building as it was designed.
And, what that meant was
we let outdoor air enter the building through louvers.
And on the second floor of the building we manipulated the way that it was operated,
and we forced air to go through mechanical ventilation systems
before they reached the classroom --
or, all the classrooms that we've studied.
So these are the results, these are hot off the press,
this is data that has never been shown before
we've just got these results back last week.
What you are looking at is the first and second floor of Lillis Business Complex
and you'll see that there's an indicator scale on this diagram
where the pink denotes air samples that we took
that had microbial DNA that looks very similar to what's found in and on humans.
And the blue indicates air samples with microbial DNA that looks very similar
to what you might find out outside, for example in dirt.
And what you'll see is that on the first floor of the building which is operated
according to these lead standards where air was coming in directly from outside
that air looks more like the outside
and on the second floor of the building, the air looked very human-like.
So, these scientific results are intuitive
but they clearly show that we do have some control
over the types of microbes that we are growing indoors.
What does all this mean?
Today we have landscape architects that design outdoor spaces
and grounds keepers whose job is to maintain
these outdoor spaces over long periods of time.
And the uncharted territory here is thinking about microbes
in a new way and understanding how to grow
the types of good microbes that we want indoors,
so that we can train a new type of architect, an interior landscape architect
who can design healthy indoor gardens
and we're also gonna need a new flavour of building managers
that I am thinking of as interior grounds keepers
that can help maintain healthy buildings and healthy people.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)