MIT Media Lab Researcher’s TED Talk Is Removed

Tony Luong

A TED Talk by a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caleb Harper, was removed from the media organization’s website on Monday and replaced with a message saying the presentation did not meet TED’s science standards. The removal came two months after The Chronicle and other news organizations reported that employees of Harper’s lab believed that he had exaggerated explanations of his work. Since those stories were published, MIT has “halted” his initiative, “pending completion of ongoing assessments.”

Harper’s 2015 TED Talk, titled “This Computer Will Grow Your Food in the Future,” was about the “food computers” that he was developing at MIT’s Media Lab. Food computers are containers of varying sizes that grow plants hydroponically using LED lights and other controls. He said they could collect data about the plants growing inside and use that information to create food recipes, or formulas that could recreate optimal environmental conditions for different plants. The TED Talk was viewed 1.8 million times by September.

But former researchers at the MIT lab told The Chronicle that the description of the food computers in the TED Talk, to journalists, and to Media Lab funders was overblown. Some of the researchers described putting store-bought plants inside the food computers before demonstrations. Another said he had raised concerns about whether the food computers really were climate-controlled in the way that Harper had claimed.

In its message on Monday, the TED Talks website noted those concerns as well as a subsequent report, by ProPublica and the Boston public radio station WBUR, that said the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection was asking questions of the lab because it was dumping wastewater with excessive levels of nitrogen at its facility in a Boston suburb.

Last month MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, “halted” activities at Harper’s lab, though “some documentation and design work” was still “permitted to take place on campus,” according to a Media Lab spokeswoman. The spokeswoman did not reply to a request for comment in time for publication on Monday. Harper did not reply either.

A TED spokeswoman said in an email that “removing a TED Talk is rare, but our team reviewed the information and this talk does not meet TED’s science guidelines and content guidelines.”

During the talk, Harper asked the audience, “What if you could take this apple, digitize it somehow, send it through particles in the air and reconstitute it on the other side?”

In an interview in August, he said it was important to share his vision about where his field is going. Some people, he said, misinterpret his discussion of vision as reality.

“Can you email a tomato to someone today? No,” he said. “Did I say that in my TED talk? Yes. Did I say it was today? No. I said, you will be able to email a tomato.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.