But all that time, we thought, well wouldn't it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn't work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn't think it would, because we thought the ship's vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them, one cell at a time, in real time, and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year, before we realized that it wasn't really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus.
那时候我在想，如果我们我们可以拿着这样的设备到船上去，就把海水通过它来检验，来观察各种各样的浮游植物的样子，会不会很得劲？所以我设法搞到一个我称之为大平台的流血细胞计数器，一个大型的、强大的激光发生器，并获得厂商的保证，如果在船上不能用，就退货。一位当时和我一起工作的年轻科学家 Rob Olson 可以把这家伙带上船，安装在一起，一起出海。它运转起来太棒了。我们根本没有想到，因为我们觉得船的震动会阻碍到激光，但是它真的运转得很棒。然后，我们就绘制了海洋浮游植物分布图。这是真正的第一次看到一个细胞，看看正在发生什么，这真是太激动人心了。但是有一天，Rob注意到一些来自仪器以外的模糊信号，而这个信号一年前以来我们以为是可能电子噪声而被忽略了，然而这时意识到它并不像噪声。它又一些规则行图案。长话短说，这是一种极其微小的含有叶绿素的细胞，它比人类的头发宽度的百分之一还小。那就是绿原球藻。
So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn't know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry."
有谁还记得这页我刚刚展示过的幻灯片吗？如果你用蓝光照射那两个样本，这就是你看到的：两点微小的发着红光的细胞。这些就是绿原球藻。他们是地球上最小的，又是量最大的，叶绿素细胞。一开始，我们不知道它是什么，就用“小绿”来称呼它。这是一个非常亲切的名字。后来，我们对它了解足够多了，就命名它叫“绿原球藻”，意思是“远古的绿色浆果”。
And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They've given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here.
也差不多在这个时候，我被这些小细胞迷得神魂颠倒，以至于我重新调整了整个实验室的研究方向，来专心研究他们，当然我对他们的忠诚回报也是很大的。他们给予我的非常多，包括我来到这里。
(Applause)（鼓掌）
So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they're very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They're particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they're not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That's three octillion, if you care to convert.
经过多年，我和其他，非常多的其他人遍及各个海域研究绿原球藻，发现他们非常非常广泛地分布在开放海域生态系统，尤其是在开放海洋环流中。这些有时候会被称为海洋荒漠，但是他们根本就不是荒漠。在深海里也充满着每升水一亿的绿原球藻。如果你把他们像我们培养群那样聚集起来，你可以看到美丽的绿色叶绿素。那些试管里的一根就有10亿个原绿球藻，就像我前面提到过的，地球上有300亿亿亿原绿球藻，那是3乘10的27次方，如果你想转换的话。
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