Welcome to Spotlight Advanced. I'm Bruce Gulland and I'm Megan Noolette. Spotlight uses
a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand no
matter where in the world they live. A small woman stands on the edge
of a beach. It is on a coast in the United Kingdom. The
air smells of salt and mud, and the beach is full of rocks and
small pools of water. The woman wades through these pools. She is looking
for a small red plant called lava. It is a kind of seaweed.
Seaweed, like lava, grows in many countries. One species is very important
in Japan. There people make food out of it. They call it nori.
But the seaweed is mysterious. No one knows how it grows. This
woman's name is Kathleen Drew Baker. She has made it her goal to understand
this kind of seaweed. She is not being paid for studying seaweed. She
is doing it because she is interested. Most people would not care about her
work, but by studying seaweed, Kathleen Drew Baker will save a whole industry.
Today's Spotlight is on Kathleen Drew Baker. Kathleen Drew Baker was a scientist
and researcher from the United Kingdom. She was born in nineteen oh one.
She became a scientist when she was very young, and she was one of
the first women to teach at her university. But Drew Baker's life in science
was not easy. Although she was smart, it was hard for her to
lead in a science field. Susan hand Chetterly is a science writer. She
wrote about Drew Baker in her book The Seaweed Chronicles. She lived in a
time when women in science were not taken seriously if they chose to marry.
When she married, she was let go from her job. In time,
she returned to the university as a research assistant, but in the years between
she worked out of her own laboratory. Her husband, also a scientist,
built her the laboratory at their home. Drew Baker's university believed that she would
only be a mother and a wife, but she continued her studies even after
having two children. Drew Baker achieved many things in her life, but most
people know her for her work with nori. Nori is a very important crop
in Japan. The Japanese people have used it in food for over a thousand
years. They use it to flavor dishes. They create a paper from it
to make sushi and rice balls. But for a long time, no one
knew where nori came from. Nori did not have seeds like some plants.
Instead, farmers created nets that they would put in the water. The nori
would grow on the nets. In some years, the harvest was good.
In others, the harvest was bad. There was no way to control how
much nori farmers would get. Then, in the nineteen forties there was a
very bad harvest. Any More bad harvests followed several typhoons, A kind of
strong storm hit Japan. It killed a lot of the nori. Pollution killed
even more. Soon there was almost no norri at all. It had disappeared.
Kathleen drew Baker did not know this when she started studying seaweed. She
had never been to Japan. She did not even know the word nori.
She called the seaweed lever. Drew Baker was very interested in lava. She
noticed that it only seemed to grow during winter. It sent out spores in
order to grow more, but nothing would grow for a whole year. Where
did the spores go? And why could no one grow lava? After drew
baker experiment died with the seaweed. She gathered the plants from the shore.
Then she planted them in a big tank. She tried to discover what made
them grow, but she could never do it. She worked with labor for
almost nine years. One day, Drew Baker had an idea. She threw
some shells into the tank. The seaweed behaved as it normally did, but
soon she saw something grow on the shells. It was a red slime.
Drew Baker was disappointed. She believed that this was a different kind of plant
growing. She feared that her experiment was ruined. But she soon learned that
she was wrong. The red slime was labor. It was just a different
part of its life stage. During the summer, the labor grew as the
red slime on shells. It needed them to grow. They also protected the
plant from heat and rough seas. During the winter, labor would leave the
shells. It would grow high up so that it could reach the sun.
Drew Baker had finally discovered labor's secrets. This discovery was very important to Drew
Baker, but it was even more important than she knew at first. Shokichi
Segawa was a Japanese biologist. He studied underwater plant life, and he was
worried about nori disappearing. Then he heard about Drew Baker's discovery. He knew
that nori was very similar to lava, maybe it would grow in the same
way too. He filled a tank with nori and shells. Soon the same
red slime began to grow. Then the seaweed followed. Segua finally understood what
had happened to the norri. The strong storms had disturbed shells that the norri
grew on. Pollution made it hard for them to grow back. Was not
just the norri that had disappeared, it was the shellfish too. Soon others
began to grow norriy in tanks, and they took better care of shellfish in
growing areas. It took a long time, but the norri crop began to
recover. Farmers could control how much they grew, so more and more people
could eat norri. To day, the norri industry is very large. People
eat it all over the world, and the people who grow it still use
Kathleen Drew Baker's methods, but Drew Baker did not live to see her work
success. She made her discovery in nineteen forty nine and she died in nineteen
fifty seven. Her life was not an easy one. People did not accept
her. They dismissed her because she was a married woman. But she continued
doing what she loved and because of it, Kathleen Drew Baker saved an industry
today. Nori Farmer's honor Drew Baker's memory. In nineteen sixty three, they
made a statue for her in Uto City, Japan, and every April fourteenth
there is a celebration in her name. It is called the Mother of the
Sea Festival. Doctor John Rendall is one of Drew Baker's children. He visited
Japan and he spoke at the festival honoring his mother. My mother never knew
what an important change her work would bring about. She studied seaweed just to
know more about it. But without her work, the whole industry would be
gone. I do not know what my mother would think about it now.
She would be surprised what she did back then turned into a multi billion dollar
industry. But I do not think she would like sushi she was not very
adventurous when it came to food. Kathleen Drew Baker saw creation as an ordered
place for careful study. Confidence in her work allowed her to discover the secret
of Laver's growth. Her discovery allowed Japan to recover seaweed farming and benefit the
world of sushi. Have you ever eaten sushi? Do you enjoy the flavor
of sushi? We want to hear your thoughts. You can leave a comment
on our website at www dot Spotlight English dot com. You can also find
us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The writer of this
program was Dan Chrisman. The producer was Megio Ozaki. The voices you heard
were from the United Kingdom and the United States. All quotes were adapted for
this program and voiced by Spotlight. This program is called The Woman Who Saved
Sushi. Visit our website to download our free official app for Android and Apple
devices. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye,