This TED Talk features chemist Carolyn Bertosi, recorded live at TEDx Stanford 2016.

This is a talk about sugar and cancer. And I became interested in sugar when I was in college, not this kind of sugar. It was the sugar that our biology professors taught us about

in the context of the coding of your cells.

And maybe you didn't know that your cells are coated with sugar.

And I didn't know that either until I took these courses in college.

But back then, and this was in, let's just call it, the 1980s, people didn't

know much about why our cells are coated with sugar. And when I dug through my notes, what I

noticed I had written down is that the sugar coating on ourselves is like the sugar coating

on a peanut M&M. And people thought the sugar coating on our cells is like the sugar coating on a peanut M&M.

And people thought the sugar coating on our cells

was like a protective coating that somehow made ourselves stronger or tougher.

But we now know, many decades later, that it's much more complicated than that,

and that the sugars on our cells are actually

very complex and if you could shrink yourself down to a little miniature airplane and fly right

along the surface of your cells it might look something like this, with geographical features. And now the complex

sugars are these trees and bushes, weeping willows that are swaying in the wind and moving

with the waves. And when I started thinking about all these complex sugars that are like

this foliage on ourselves, it became one of the most interesting problems that I encountered as a biologist and also as a chemist.

And so now we tend to think about the sugars that are populating the surface of ourselves as a language.

They have a lot of information stored in their complex structures.

But what are they trying to tell us?

I can tell you that we do know some information that comes from these sugars,

...