Geetha Paul Jacob

My Research

Biodiversity is the story of the human quest to discover the world around him. He realised that there are different fruits, edible and toxic; there are different animals around him with and without legs, with and withound wings in different colours and sizes.

He then realised that they all sync with the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, seasons and fertilisers. That is when he started to count them, label and name them, relate the relations seasons have with the stars in the sky.

This quest of mankind is continuing, and it is not clear how long we may have to pursue to have a good picture of what we are, where we are and how much we relate to everything else.

The human genome project anticipated that it would identify at least 100,000 genes in the human body. However, it ended up discovering a quarter of it and the realisation that life is more complex than what genes alone can decide.

We beleive that around 3 million genes in our gut microbiota contribute at least a good share of what we are and the quality of life we live. I am one of the many who are on this path, searching in the dark to connect the diferent parts of the elephant and make sense of it.