# Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado: To solve old problems, study new species

Nature is wonderfully abundant, diverse and mysterious — but biological research today tends to focus on only seven species, including rats, chickens, fruit flies and us. We're studying an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, says biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, and hoping it'll be enough to solve the oldest, most challenging problems in science, like cancer. In this visually captivating talk, Alvarado calls on us to interrogate the unknown and shows us the remarkable discoveries that surface when we do.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2017
- Runtime: 12 min
- By: TED.com
- Genres: Education, Science, Nature
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/AlejandroAlvarado_2016X)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/AlejandroAlvarado_2016X?play=1)