>> Most people don't know this,
but we've lost 25 to 40 percent of the world's corals.
And if you wonder
if that'll make a difference or not,
you should ask yourself: Do you like to breathe?
Land plants only produce about
one-third the oxygen we breathe.
The rest comes from the ocean.
[David Vaughan 
Program manager, MOTE TROPICAL RESEARCH CENTER]
I'm Dr. Dave Vaughan and I'm the program manager
for coral restoration
at the Mote Tropical Research Center
in the Florida Keys.
I actually grow coral
for planting back out on the reef.
It's been coined as
my eureka moment or eureka mistake,
where I broke a coral into tiny pieces
and I thought it was gonna die
and be very stressed.
And instead, it grew like the dickens.
Each of these, in just a few months,
grow to the size that would have taken
a few years.
It was after that accident that I knew
that we could restore reefs,
and it was really a new lease on life,
and a new brightness of
what this whole career in coral research could do.
This is what I like to call
the ocean simulator.
So we can actually simulate
what the water will be like 100 years from now
so we can try to forecast
which of these corals are still gonna be winners
and utilize the ones that you know will be
better adapted in the future to those conditions.
The other thing to remember is that
we know that your skin, if it grows very fast,
is called cancer or tumors.
So if we can understand what turns
on fast growth of tissue in a coral
or what slows down tissue,
we might be able to have remedies
for tumors or cancer.
These are the people that really do
the heavy lifting and the real work here.
I could not do this myself.
>> When we can include student scientists
[Christopher Page, Mote Biologist]
as well as the older generation
you get a lot of transfer of experience and data
so that we're not committing the same mistakes.
>> I always wondered how long it would be
that I'd still be able to dive.
Now I know you can dive as long as you want.
You're never too old to dive.
>> Dr. Vaughan gets in the water
like everyone else.
[Lindsay Arick, Lab Intern]
And he, if anybody, has seen the decline
even more than any of us have.
You know, he saw it when it was beautiful.
How I may see it when I'm Dr. Vaughan's age
may be the way he saw it when he was my age.
So we're gonna switch the generations
and I can finally see,
maybe, what the reef looked like
60 years ago versus now.
>> I'm not gonna retire
until I hit a million corals
planted back on the reef.
With the right conditions, we can do it
in the next three to five years.
>> People think that
we've ruined this planet by technology.
But with technology, we can bring it back.
[#DisruptAging
Real Possibilities from AARP]
