Do you know about biodiversity?
Where in the world is the most biodiverse?
Biodiversity and human health
What does it matter?
A certain microorganism in the deep sea goes extinct
Will it affect drug development?
......
Please try it, ask yourself,
I'm afraid most people can only shake their heads and smile
Biodiversity refers to the rich variation of life on Earth, including genes, species, populations and ecosystems. Human degradation of land, freshwater and oceans has led to a rapid decline in diversity. The situation will worsen if humanity continues its current unsustainable patterns of use of natural resources. Activities such as greenhouse gas emissions have cost the global environment dearly, sometimes even disaster, but the loss of biodiversity is the only environmental degradation that is truly unrestricted. When a gene, a species, a population, or an ecosystem disappears, it will never exist.
Species loss is the most commonly used indicator of biodiversity loss. However, the definition of biodiversity loss is broader and more complex, as diversity exists at other levels. For example, genetic diversity exists among individual species, and even if a species does not become extinct, it can lose part of its genetic diversity due to the loss of local populations. Diversity also exists at a higher level than species, such as in the boundaries, phylums, orders, families, genera, and ecological communities and ecosystems to which a species belongs. The loss of diversity or functionality at each level may be independent. For example, an ecosystem may shrink significantly if all constituent species survive and lose many of its functions.
What makes Life Extension – Biodiversity and Human Health unique is its focus on biodiversity and human health, a lesser-spoken theme. On the one hand, it disseminates fresh and timely biodiversity knowledge that can replace the old textbooks. For example, "Why shouldn't bears have diabetes?" "Can shark cartilage really fight cancer?" "How was artemisinin discovered?" "What other biotoxins besides snake venom can be medicated?" ...... The scientific knowledge corresponding to these interesting questions makes people deeply aware that biodiversity loss will cost us valuable opportunities for biopharmaceutical development; on the other hand, the authors of "Continuing Life: Biodiversity and Human Health" are critical and do not simply affirm and deny issues such as food safety and organic agriculture, but put forward multiple views through various cases.
The editor-in-chief said so
Edward Wilson once said of ants: "We need them to survive, but they don't need us at all." In fact, the same is true of countless other insects, bacteria, fungi, plants, plankton, and other organisms. However, many people hardly see this basic fact. On the contrary, what we humans usually do is to act as if we were completely independent of nature, as if we could act without the many creatures of nature and the life-giving services they provide, as if the natural world were designed for our own use only as a "source" of endless products and services and an "sink" of endless garbage.
For example, in the last 50 years or so, our activities have resulted in about 1/5 of surface soils, 1/5 of arable land, almost 90 percent of large marine commodity fisheries and 1/3 of forests lost, and we need these resources now more than ever – as our population has grown almost threefold (from 2.5 billion to 6.5 billion) during this period, we have discharged millions of tons of chemicals into soil, freshwater, oceans and air. Little is known about the effects these chemicals have on other species (and, indeed, ourselves). We've changed the composition of the atmosphere — thinning the ozone layer, which filters ultraviolet rays and poisons that are harmful to all organisms in land and surface waters, and increasing atmospheric CO2 levels to levels that have never been seen on Earth in more than 600,000 years. These are largely because CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are accelerating land and ocean warming, as well as increasing the threat of global climate change to our health and the survival of other species. At the same time, we are currently consuming, wasting or diverting almost 1/2 of the net biological productivity on land (which will eventually be produced by photosynthesis) and more than 1/2 of the renewable fresh water on Earth.
We are destroying the habitats of other species to the point that they are heading for extinction – the real irreversible consequence of our destruction of the environment – hundreds of thousands of times faster than the natural background level. As a result, some biologists conclude that we have entered the so-called "sixth mass extinction event" — the fifth occurred 65 million years ago, and it wiped out the dinosaurs and many other organisms. That event was most likely the result of a giant asteroid hitting Earth, and this time we caused it.
As a result of the combination of many actions, the most disturbing thing is that we are destroying the "ecosystem services", that is, the various forms of interaction between different organisms and between them and the environment in which they live, which are the functions that sustain the survival of all life on this planet, including humans.
We've done these things. We, the species, humans, are one of about 10 million species on Earth (perhaps many times more), and we act as if these changes happen somewhere other than we live, as if they have no effect on us.
Many factors contribute to the unquenchable degradation of the planet, but it is important that we cannot take seriously what rapid population growth and unsustainable depletion of resources mean, mainly by people in developed countries, but also in developing countries. In the end, our actions are the result of a fundamental error of understanding—we cannot recognize that human beings are an integral part of nature, and we cannot wreak havoc on nature without hitting ourselves.
"Extending Life – Biodiversity and Human Health" was first identified at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At the time, more than ever, world leaders and tens of thousands of policymakers, scientists, environmentalists and others focused on the topic gathered to set ambitious targets to control global climate change and protect the world's biodiversity. What we were aware of then and evident everywhere today is that there was a great deal of concern about the potential impact of global climate change on human health (a theme that runs through the chapters of all major international reports), in contrast to the issue of species loss and ecosystem destruction.
We believe that the widespread neglect of the relationship between biodiversity and human health is a very serious problem, not only because we are not informed of the full range of human impacts of biodiversity loss in policy formulation, but also because the general public, who lacks an understanding of the health risks involved, can neither understand the extent of the biodiversity crisis nor create a sense of urgency to address it. Sadly, aesthetic, ethical, religious, and even economic arguments are not enough to convince people of these.
To meet this need, the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School has proposed, with the support of the United Nations, to compile knowledge on the contribution of other species to human health through the coordination of international scientific forces and to complete a thematic synthesis report. It was gratifying that the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations Development Programme and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed to jointly fund the project, which was subsequently supported by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The result was Life Extension : Biodiversity and Human Health.
In Continuing Life: Biodiversity and Human Health, we focus more on the loss of seven major categories of organisms and extend to the significance of countless other organisms for human health. We are particularly concerned about amphibians, which are the most threatened of all biological groups on the planet — almost 1/3 of its 6,000 known species are at risk of extinction, and more than 120 species have been thought to have gone extinct over the past few decades. There is no fossil record evidence of amphibians with such a high rate of extinction, and they have lived on Earth for more than 350 million years in the past, so people think it is a new phenomenon caused by humans.
Continuing Life – Biodiversity and Human Health cites many examples of amphibians' contributions to human medicine – from the extremely important chemical components they contain that allow the development of novel painkillers and medicines to treat hypertension, to their central role in biomedical research and will continue to play. For example, amphibians can help us find ways to prevent bacteria from becoming resistant to our antibiotic treatments. This drug resistance is a gradual escalation that can cause great panic among doctors who have been fighting to stay one step ahead of their patients' infections. Here, we give another example to help readers understand how much we lose after the loss of amphibians – gastric brood frogs [Rheobatrachus vitellinus and R. silus] are the only amphibians known to have grown in their mother's stomach in the 1980s in the uninterrupted Australian rainforest. The female frog swallows her fertilized eggs and places them in the stomach. When the eggs in the stomach fully develop into tadpoles, they are spat out by the mother, "sent" to the outside world, and continue to develop into frogs.
The stomachs of all vertebrates, including frogs, contain secreted acids and enzymes (such as pepsin) to initiate the process of digesting food. There are also some ingredients that can stimulate gastric emptying so that the stomach contents are discharged into the small intestine and further digested in the small intestine. The digestive process of food triggers the release of these ingredients. Preliminary studies of gastric frogs have shown that they secrete a substance or class of substances that inhibit the secretion of pepsin and prevent gastric emptying so that they (eggs) cannot be digested by their mothers. However, these studies may provide important new ideas for the treatment of human stomach ulcer disease, which affects more than 25 million people in the United States alone. If both species of gastric frogs go extinct, research will be unsustainable.
Experienced scientists in such a wide range of disciplines – from both developed and developing countries – have co-authored The Continuation of Life – Biodiversity and Human Health. We do so because we are convinced that it helps people understand that human beings are an integral part of nature and that our health ultimately depends on the health and functioning of the species and ecosystems in nature; we do so because we all hope that our efforts will help guide policymakers to come up with innovative and equitable policies that have a solid scientific foundation that will effectively conserve biodiversity and promote the health of future generations of humanity; We do this because we all believe that life on Earth is awesome and that we must not give up on our efforts to protect them. We do this because we all share the belief that once people recognize that there is a big stake in their health and the lives of their children, they will do whatever it takes to protect the global environment.
Eric Chivin
Aaron Bernstein
The Rheobatrachus silus tadpole is being spat out of its stomach by its mother. （© Michael J. Tyler）
Biodiversity and biomedical research
Biomedical research has always relied on other species (animals, plants, and microbes) to help us understand human physiology and treat human diseases. From Escherichiacoli, a bacterium that is only one percent thick in human hair, to male polar bears that weigh 11ft tall and weigh 1300 lbs, to Drosophila melanogater, which has only a few weeks of lifespan, to chimpanzees that can live for decades like us, they have brought medicine, along with many species, into the modern era of antibiotics, vaccines, cancer treatment, organ transplantation and open-heart surgery.
Scanning electron microscopy photographs of Drosophila black-bellied flies. This photo is colored. (©Dennis Kunkel,Microscopy,Inc.)
“
Some species have easy-to-study anatomy that is particularly useful as an experiment subject — such as the squid's massive axons that transmit electrical impulses from nerve cells to other cells; Xenopus laevis has unusually large eggs. Other species, such as bears or white-spotted sharks (Squalus acanthias), have developed unique physiological processes that provide us with yet-to-be-discovered clues to the mechanisms by which human health works or disease treatments. Other species have become the masters of biomedical experiments because they are easy to preserve in the laboratory, reproduce quickly, are large in number, and can produce unique strains that are genetically consistent with individuals. We can never repay what is owed to these species—incalculable mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, rabbits, zebrafish, and fruit flies— and countless dogs, cats, monkeys, sheep, pigs, frogs, and horses—all of which have allowed us to expand our knowledge of human health and disease.
Evolution has created significant differences between humans and other life forms, such as the ability to think abstractly (as far as we know). But nature's astonishing consistency at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, and organ system levels allows us to take advantage of a wide variety of other organisms to better understand ourselves.
When we compare ourselves to the genetic makeup of other organisms, the basis for this consistency becomes clear.
Almost half of our approximately 25,000 genes are shared with Drosophila melanogastis and Caenorhabditis elegans, and more with mus musculus, which is common in the lab or at home.
We even have more than 1,000 genes with yeast, which is a single-celled organism like a human cell with a nucleus. Bacteria share hundreds of genes with us, but they don't have nuclei. This core of hundreds of genomes is thought to be ubiquitous in living organisms, encoding the information needed for basic life functions, including DNA replication, protein production from RNA, energy metabolism, and the synthesis of compounds called nucleotide triphosphate (such as adenosine triphosphate or ATP synthesis, which is the energy currency of all life on the planet).
The universality of these genes provides evidence that all organisms evolved from a common ancestor that most likely had the core of the gene about 3 billion years ago.
This is very important for medical research because about 2/3 of human gene mutations (they are associated with certain types of cancer and developmental abnormalities, and some cardiovascular diseases, endocrine, immune system disorders, and diseases such as diabetes) have corresponding genes in Drosophila. The proportion of genes in mammals ( such as mice ) is even greater. As a result, we can study the biochemical and physiological processes controlled by these shared genes in such organisms, and we can gain insight into human health and disease problems that would otherwise be difficult or in most cases impossible to understand.
Most of the species used in biomedical research are abundant in nature and do not belong to endangered taxa. We cover these species in this chapter to show the invaluable information they contain that can be used in human medicine, and to point out that we must do everything in our power to protect all species on the planet (most of which have not even been identified) because they may be a treasure trove of medical knowledge. Other species used for biomedical research come from endangered taxa, such as non-human primates, amphibians, sharks, bears, horseshoe crabs, gymnosperms and snails. We will cover this species in Chapter 6, many of which are endangered or critically endangered. When a species disappears, it also takes away (perhaps exclusively) structural, physiological, biochemical, and behavioral lessons that are the result of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years of evolutionary experiments.
Without the knowledge gained from the study of other organisms, today's medicine is still in the dark ages of obscurity. The current crisis of biodiversity loss is therefore nothing less than a huge threat to biomedical research, the scale of which we can only speculate.
Biodiversity and food production
Humans are originally children of nature and are a representative of the many species that share the terrestrial environment. The gradual increase in the number of humans and the gradual expansion of human activity and scope have led us to now dominate the entire terrestrial and even marine biomes (biomes) of the world, and have revolutionized them (biomes are the world's major biomes, defined by the types of vegetation that dominate them, such as forests, deserts and grasslands). As a result, many other species have become endangered or even extinct as a result of human deprivation of their natural habitats.
Soil biology. The cross-section of temperate soils exhibits enormous biodiversity, which makes the soil fertile and food production on land possible. (From Peter H. Raven and Linda R. Bert (editors), Environment, 3rd ed.© 2001, arcourt, Inc., reprinted with ermission from John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Recent calculations show that the current rate of species extinction is 100 to 1000 times higher than before humans did not dominate the earth. For some well-documented taxa, the rate of extinction is even faster. Unless controlled, the continued rise in population size and the overuse of the environment for short-term benefits are likely to have serious consequences for human health. Humanity aspires to control nature and change it, but is now more dependent on nature than ever before, especially on diversity and the intrinsic interdependence of all life forms– fundamental properties of nature.
In a world where terrestrial and aquatic resources have been severely degraded or depleted, a vital task is to ensure adequate food production and supplies for a population of more than 6 billion people, whose numbers are still rising. Despite low fertility programs in some populations and an increased risk of death in some populations, the world's population is expected to rise from about 6.5 billion today to around 8.9 billion by 2050 (8.9 billion is only the mid-range estimate of the "best guess" made by the United Nations Population Fund in 2004). The addition of an average of 77 million people per year poses many extremely difficult challenges for humanity, especially in producing enough food.
The current average population density in the world is about 50 people/km2, which will rise to 70 people/km2 in 2050. By then, only 10% of the land remains available for farming (i.e. for agriculture), and the population density per unit of arable land is actually about 10 times higher than these data. Given the poverty and famine in some areas, as well as the expected changes in the Earth's climate(which is inherently unstable in its normal state), the question of whether and how humans can provide for their own living needs while avoiding irreversible damage to natural ecosystems and their biodiversity is an unresolved question. Raising awareness of the issue and developing new ways of protecting and managing food-producing ecosystems on land and in the sea offer hope for progress in this daunting task. However, the commitments implicit in such approaches are bound by an understanding of the potential problems and harms they cause.
This article is excerpted from the preface, chapters 1, 5 and 8 of Zhao Jiayuan's "Continuing Life: Biodiversity and Human Health", edited by Solton Qiao Qin Zhang Gymnastics Zang Jingze Jin Yan Gu Zhuoya, Zhao Jiayuan's "Continuing Life: Biodiversity and Human Health", chapters 1, 5 and 8.
Extending Life: Biodiversity and Human Health
[United States] E. Chivin A. Bernstein, editor-in-chief
Solton Qiao Qin Zhang Gymnastics Zang Jingze Jin Yan Gu Zhuoya translated
Zhao Jiayuan School
Beijing: Science Press, 2017.03
ISBN 978-7-03-051973-3
Life Extension: Biodiversity and Human Health is led by the Center for Health and global environment at Harvard Medical School, with the participation of multinational scientists, and is jointly funded by the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations Development Programme, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The book introduces the relationship between biodiversity and human health with informative information and vivid cases, including: What is biodiversity? How do human activities threaten biodiversity? Ecosystem services; medicines from nature; biodiversity and biomedical research; threatened taxa of medicinal value; ecosystem imbalances, biodiversity loss and human infectious diseases; biodiversity and food production; genetically modified foods and organic agriculture; what we can do for biodiversity conservation.
(Editor: Quiet)
Read science together!
Science Press│ WeChat ID: sciencepress-cspm
Professional quality Academic value
Original and easy to read scientific taste