Lecture by Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino Research Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard, presents the annual John M. Prather Lecture in Biology
Global biodiversity is richer than thought even 20 years ago, but it and the ecosystems supporting it are disappearing at an accelerating rate–to the great and enduring loss to future humanity. Science is not well prepared to handle this issue. We live on a poorly explored planet: only a tiny fraction, probably fewer than ten percent, of species are known to science, when microorganisms are included; and of these, only a minute fraction have been studied at any depth. There are remedies to this ignorance, and when they are applied, a major new front of biology will open, equal and complementary to molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.
Organized by the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology & Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard.
