The Complex Puzzles of Life Sciences Experimentation in Space and their Impacts w/ Stefanie Countryman #38

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes in which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into what we call ages. And you have just lived through an amazing experience of this information age. It's been an amazing ride. Now consider that you might now be living through another transformational age, the age of infinite.

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We were looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a Moon Hut, h u t. We were actually named by NASA, Project Moon Hut, through the accelerated development of an earth and space space ecosystem. Then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations, and to turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring another amazing topic. We've had so many amazing guests on this series.

The topic is the complex puzzles of life science experimentations in space and their impacts. And today we have with us Stephanie Countryman. How are you, Stephanie? I'm good. Thanks, David. Well, fantastic to have you. Stephanie is the director of BioServe Space Technologies and a research associate at the Anne and H. J. Smith Aerospace Engineering and Science Department of the University of Colorado in Boulder.

How we how I met Stephanie was I had been looking for life science individual, and I reached out and several people felt they were not as qualified. And the name that came back was this individual who we have today, Stephanie. And they said that this is the individual that should be on the program. So it took several series. Many guests take multiple steps to get there. Stephanie is one of them. And so I personally am very excited to learn today.

So, Stephanie, you have an outline for me today, I'm assuming. I do. Okay. How many points do we have just so I know in advance? I have 4 bullet points. Okay. What's number 1? There is no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. Experiment. Okay. Next. Making an unnatural environment, Experiment. Okay. Next. Making an unnatural environment natural. Next. The art of achieving a successful space life science experiment. Science experiment. And next.

And the broad impacts of these experiments. Of these experiments. Fantastic. So let's start with the first one. There's no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. Alright. Well, I wanted to start with this because, you know, David, we work with a lot of, scientists to support their experiments on space station. And typically, we start out with a conversation on the phone talking about what type of experiment they're wanting to focus on and how they conduct it in their lab.

And if I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, well, it's really a simple experiment because all we have to do is just do this. And we always stop them right there and say, okay, the first thing we're gonna have to do in this process is cross out the word just from your vocabulary and never say that ever again.

Because there's one thing I found in this business is that just there's nothing just about trying to translate a space like space life science experiment or a life science experiment into a space flight one. So So so before you go I'm sorry to cut you off very quickly. I didn't realize that you were a you didn't come up with the experiments and with the way you just said it. You are a an organization that they come to you and say or you go to them. I'm not sure you can explain.

You go to them or they go to you come to you when you say they say, I would like to do x, and then you help to convert, transform, make it happen. Is that That is correct. We actually do both. So we actually have, in house science, expertise, and we do some of our own science experiments. Some of which I probably talk a little bit about today. But we also support external researchers as well to, support their science experiments. So we do both.

So we do we have expertise on the science side, and we have expertise on the the translation side, how to translate that science into a space flight experiment. And then we have expertise on the hardware side, which is how do we make the hardware that will hold that experiment as we launch it to the space station. Okay. I I yeah. I never even thought about it in that way. So that's interesting. Okay. Great.

Yeah. So, so in order to understand this process, I think the first thing you have to do is think about, you know, what a life science lab looks like on the ground. So when we think about a life science lab on the ground, you know, it can support lots of different types of life sciences. And so, as you know, when we're talking about life sciences, we're talking about, you know, mammalian cell culture, small organism research, which could be fruit flies or spiders.

We're talking about looking at different types of bacteria. You know, anything that's essentially a living organism. So if you think about that life science lab, what's in there? Well, let's talk about all the equipment. There's incubators to keep things temperature controlled and alive. There's gas inside that incubator. If you're doing mammalian cell culture, there's 5% c o two.

There's freezers and refrigerators so that you can, keep all of your reagents, in a state so that when you want to use them, they, are, healthy and working the way that you think they should. All the nutrients haven't gone bad. You also have refrigerators and freezers so that when you're done doing your experiments that you can, freeze or refrigerate them so you can do your later analysis.

There's micro, microscopes, cameras, biosafety cabinets for doing sterile work, and then you just have the equipment. You have petri dishes or multi well plates or maybe some type of, a container that is gas permeable, maybe has a lid that you can keep loose on it so that you can grow all of your, cultures or your organisms that you're studying. So think about that lab. Now you have to think about all of those pieces of equipment are pieces of equipment that we need up on the space station.

But, So so just one clarity, my mind, unfortunately, even though I have a degree in biology, my mind immediately went to chemistry lab. Mhmm. If because I think that's probably a more visible image that we see more often. Uh-huh. How different is it from a chemistry lab as to a biology lab, life sciences lab? Well, I I think there there there's, there's a lot of similarities in chemistry labs.

You have, you know, you're you're you're pouring and you're pipetting and you're mixing and you have heater plates and stir plates and, you have fume hoods to if you're working with caustic chemicals. So they're they're very similar with regards to the different types of equipment. There may be some specific equipments that are for a chemistry lab that you may not see in a, cell culture lab and the same thing like in a cell culture or life science lab.

You you'll have, like, the biosafety cabinet, which is really a cabinet designed so that you can work with infectious organisms in a sterile environment. You typically wouldn't have that in a chemistry lab, but you'd have a fume hood that is pulling, you know, you're working in the fume hood and that fume hood is pulling any, toxic fumes out and away from you. Okay. So, so so they're very similar.

Okay. I just for my imagery's sake, I wanted to make sure because I know there's differences when you have a living organism as compared to not. It's I was just trying you had different types of freezers. You have pre pre and post freezers. So I wanted some clarity. So thank you. Okay. Yeah. So now so now think about needing all of that equipment to do an experiment on the space station. Right?

So except the space station has rules and guidelines that we have to follow and necessarily so so that we can keep the crew safe. We can keep the vehicle safe, that we don't adversely affect the ECLSS system, which is the environmental control and life support system of the station because all of that is operating in a in a in a nice balance to keep, the crew alive and to keep the station healthy and operating as it should.

So now you take that equipment and you let's just take an incubator, for example. An incubator on the ground is, you know, about 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide and 3 feet in-depth. So it's about 3 cubic feet. Well, there's not a lot of space on the space station. Think about now miniaturizing that to about a foot and a half by a foot and a half.

So all of the equipment that you would need in a life sciences lab now has to be modified to not only, be miniaturized, but also to, be, safe to operate on the station and also, be built so that it operates continuously with very little, support technically. So if it breaks down, there's not a whole lot you can do on station. Does that make sense? Yeah. The the you're creating a better refrigerator. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

But you're trying to do it, and it's a difficult, environment, really, because of, not only in the miniaturization, but then all the safety guidelines that we have to follow. So when, you're building something that's powered on the station, there's all kinds of, things that we have to do in order to get that approved to launch to the space station and and operate it on the space station. And that includes things like, electromagnetic, interference testing.

So you wanna make sure that when we plug that into the station, we now don't interfere with everything else operating on the station, nor does everything operating on the station interfere with that piece of equipment. So these are just some of the things in terms of the large pieces of equipment, that we have to think about and have to have available on the station in order to operate it like it's a life science or chemistry lab. So is, are you using, are, is there shared equipment?

So that you you say, look, I wanna do this, and they say, hey. We've got this 1 by 1.5 by 1.5 by 1.5 cube refrigerator in, or do you have to have everything that you're doing for your experiment go up for that experiment? That's a it's a good question. So it's actually a little bit of both. So let's take the biosafety cabinet, for example, that you would have in the lab to protect yourself if you're working with infectious organisms.

So on the space station, we have what's called the life sciences glove box, and that's actually a facility that was built by NASA and is offered by NASA. So that's a shared facility. So we are launching an experiment that wants to do, and we'll get to it, some fluid exchanges where we're breaking levels of containment, which I'll talk about in a minute, then, we do that inside of the life sciences glove box. And it's exactly, the glove box portion is exactly what it sounds like.

The crew, in order to protect the crew, this glove box is exactly that. They put their hands into gloves, and now they operate the experiment inside of this sealed box so that, you know, they're protected from any, organism that you may be, studying. And also it protects the vehicle from any fluids that may, you know, be It's it's like the movie. It's like the movies. Mhmm. When you see when there's an Ebola breakout or COVID breakout, their people are working on it.

This is probably a question you you may or may never have been asked. Mhmm. In space, how do you clean it? See now that's a great question as well because typically in a life sciences lab, you just, you know, get your ethanol bottle and you just spray, spray, spray or your isopropyl spray, spray, and then you just wipe it down. Well, in space, on the on the ISS, the, environmental control life support system can only handle a small amount of, alcohols.

So ethanol, isopropyl, there's only a very small amount of that that can be, released into the atmosphere in order for that, system to scrub it. So we're not allowed to use any of that. So we have to find alternatives. And this is part of the whole puzzle of trying to figure out how to conduct these experiments, in a manner that is as close as possible to the way we would do it on the ground.

So we have found things, different types of biocide wipes or other types of sterilization wipes that now are compatible with the science, but allow us to clean that space. So one, we clean the space by having these biocide wipes, which the crew puts inside the glove box then opens them up and now they wipe everything down. But the life sciences glove box also has a UV license, UV light system just like you would in a biosafety cabinet.

There's a UV light system that you turn on after you use it and you leave it on for X period of time and the longer you leave it on, the more variety of organisms it would potentially kill. So before we use the life sciences glove box, they always run that UV light for about 3 hours.

And then once, we're getting ready to start an experiment inside that glove box, the crew then uses those biocide wipes and wipes everything down so that we can try to keep everything as sterile as possible, even though technically, it's not a sterile environment. Does that make sense? Yeah. No. It makes it makes tons of sense because I'm thinking you go with a spray bottle and and it's floating all over the place, and that's Exactly.

That's not an easy thing to clean, and I'm assuming that many of the astronauts are not skilled in as their expertise life sciences. So you're more or less giving them instructions as to what has to be done to make sure that your experiment goes as planned. Yes. And that's exactly right. And a little bit later, I was gonna talk a little bit about that crew training. And and and think about it in a life sciences lab, you know, the people that work in there are typically trained.

Now you have an experiment that you want to conduct, that you spent the last 2 years of your life designing, and you find somebody on the street. Maybe it's not quite that bad, but you find somebody in your building and you say, hey, come here, I want you to do this experiment for me. Yes. Now you're putting that in the hands of somebody else. So it's definitely, you know, there is a an art to conducting these experiments successfully.

And then if later you can also go over the transfer of knowledge as to how it's been how you the education, of the astronauts, because I'm assuming there's an educational part so that they know what they're supposed to do, and they do it on time. And they do it the way it's expected. Okay. Yeah. There absolutely is. So yep.

So if you get an idea about the equipment that's needed, then I just wanna talk about, quickly about the, you know, the smaller pieces of equipment needed to let's let's just give an example, of a, a cell culture experiment. So, again, we're talking to our scientists, and they'll say, okay. Well, I just wanna launch this 12 well plate. I'll load it with my cell cultures and the media.

We'll launch it to station, and then all we have to do is a media exchange on it and then stick it in the freezer. Well, I don't know if you know what a 12 well plate looks like, but it's essentially, something that's about the size of a cell phone. And it has, you know, 12 round circular, wells in it that hold about, you know, 3 milliliters of liquid. And then it has a lid that sits on top of it, but the lid just sits there. It's not sealed.

It's not it it can come on and off very easily, and that allows for gas exchange to occur into those cell cultures. So it's it's like, the best way to I would say is because I I seen these. It's like an ice cube tray that are tiny little wells that you'd put in something else sent to. So it's like a small ice cube tray. Is that a good way to analogize it?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then just think about, you know, setting on something on top of setting on something on top of that ice cube tray just so you don't have, you know, stuff falling into your wells. Mhmm. So and then and then that goes into an But in space, you know, think about, well, first of all, for a space station, we have what's called levels of containment. So NASA, depending upon what organism you're flying, you have to have levels of containment.

Well, liquids always have to be in one level of containment. Right? Because if you get to space and you don't have your liquids contained, and you don't have a small enough well for good surface tension, your liquids are just going to start floating away. Right? There's no there's And that's that's what that's even putting a lid on something has to be snapped down. Yeah. Exactly. And think about the launch effects now.

If you just put that, you know, ice cube tray, that 12 well ice cube tray with know, just a lid on top of it, and you fill it with water and you launch it on a rocket, you know, you can imagine what you'll have when you get to station. So, you know, so now what you have to do is figure out how to contain a cell culture experiment completely so you have it in a completely sealed environment, but you still have to have appropriate gas exchange because those, cells are living. They're alive.

They have to breathe. And so part of what we do is designing the hardware that can support that cell culture experiment and support it as close to how it's supported on the ground in terms of how the cells function. Because we don't want when we fly an experiment in space, we don't want the effects that a scientist may seem to be a result of the hardware.

We don't want it to be a result of the cells having to now live in a sealed container when that's not the way that they normally would do the cell culture on the ground. We want whatever result they see to be a result of those cells, being in microgravity and being exposed to microgravity. So so we designed the sealed container. And then what happens is once we get to space, now we, ourself and I don't think I ever finished answering your question.

BioServe actually has our own incubator facilities. So the question of, is it NASA or is it each organization's own facilities? It's both. So NASA has some facilities that we use, but then we have our own facilities, and we have a smart incubator on station that we communicate to from the ground, from our paler operations and command center. And that provides appropriate temperature control for, any type of life science experiment for the most part.

It it can, hold things at minus 5 Celsius all the way up to 43 Celsius. But for cell culture, we would now put this cell culture that's sealed, and it actually if it's human cells has to be in two levels of containment. So now it's in a sealed culture plate, and then that culture plate is goes into another box that's sealed, but the whole thing allows for appropriate gas exchange again so those cells can stay alive.

And then once it gets to station, that goes into our incubator and it incubates for x period of time. When those cells, what now that it's in a sealed system and it happens on the ground as well, those cells are, using up the nutrients that's in their media. So at some point, you have to change that that, media. So now you have a sealed system, but somehow you have to get the media out of that sealed system, the old media, and put in the new media.

But you can't break the seal of the system, and you also don't wanna drain it because if you drain, a sealed container on space, the air that you would potentially let into the system now doesn't do what it normally does on the ground. Right? I mean, when, if you have a sealed container on the ground and you wanna pull air off, you would just, you know, hold it so all the air goes to the top, and then you would inject a needle and pull out that air and everything would be done.

But in space, if you have some air in your container, it doesn't matter which way you move it. The the bubbles just stay wherever they are. So there's no so anyway, so you have to figure out how now to do media exchanges dealing with the sealed system, keeping everything sterile and dealing with air that could be introduced, when you're, doing that media exchange.

And so with our cell culture plates, what happens is the crew now goes into that incubator, they pull out that box that's holding the plates, They put it into the the, life sciences glove box, and we have what we call support kits that are flown with that. And this is the other thing that you have to think about, the media. Typically, the media that, a scientist would use to, feed their cell cultures, they just pull a a a big, you know, 500 milliliter container out of their refrigerator.

They warm it up in a water bath, and then they, pour a little bit into a 50 milliliter tube, and then they pipette some of that out, and then they pipette that into that fresh media into their cultures. Well, everything I just said there can't be done in space. Right? You can't have You you use the term media. Yep. Why is it called media? So does this doesn't sound like the right word? Yeah. It's it's medium or the you can say media or medium. So it's it's the, material.

That's why they call it media. They think rather than media like the news media, it's media. Like, it's it's, a medium. It's a substance. Right. I would understand medium, but so the it's the equivalent of medium. Mhmm. Okay. I just was because to give us something a new word, media means in my mind that there's some other, significant difference between the other, but you're saying it's the same thing.

It's just a medium that's being created that needs to be injected in so that the cells survive, thrive, and do whatever you're looking to do in the experiment. Right. Exactly. So so now that process, you know, we have to translate that into how we can do that in space. So what we typically do is all the medium, I'll say I've nice media or medium that we're using.

We fill up the appropriate size, syringes, that are, you know, syringes that you would see in a life science lab, and we put caps on them. And then that all goes into the life sciences glove box. And now our sealed culture plate, the crew takes that out of a box, the box that's the second level of containment. They take it out, and there's ports on this culture plate that are sealed until you connect a syringe to it.

And so they'll connect the filled medium syringe to one of the ports because there's 2 ports in this culture plate and then they connect a waste syringe to the outlet port. And now what they do is they pull a little bit of the old media out of the culture and they push in a little bit of the fresh and they pull and push and they pull and push until all of that fresh medium has been added to the culture. And about 80% of the old medium has been pulled out, and it's now in a waste syringe.

And then I I'm trying to visualize this. Mhmm. It I'm I'm seeing a space that is contains the cells or whatever you're looking to work with floating around. Mhmm. And therefore, how do you ensure that you don't get the actual culture, the cell the culture itself? How do you make sure that you're just getting the medium? Right? There I'm picturing movies where you have air pockets all over the place and, yeah, and there's little bubbles floating.

How do you make sure that they're not separated or you're taking the wrong particulate out? Another great question. So so there's 2 types of cell cultures that you, that we support. 1 is an adherent cell culture, and that's where the cells are actually growing attached to the bottom surface of that culture plate. And then the other type is the suspended cell culture, and these are cells that are floating, inside of the media and not attached to anything. So you're right.

If you do just immediate exchange on those suspended cell cultures, you very well could pull all of the cells out. So now that's part of the puzzle. How what do you do to address that, right, in space? Because it's easy on the ground because even on the ground, when you do suspended cell culture, those little cells, even though they're suspended, they float down towards the bottom of the cell culture plate.

Right. So and how did I before you get to the answer of it, please don't forget to give the answer. Yep. What's an example of a suspended environment? What on earth is suspended? Right. Well, I mean, I know that if you sneeze, something stays for a period of time and can float down or there's wind or some type of activity that can create a suspended particle. But I never thought in a closed environment, it wouldn't all eventually fall to the ground. Right. And it does.

And and it's really one of the reasons to do cell culture in space. And particularly with, there's reasons to do both adherent and suspended cell culture. But suspended cell culture in space, it's really the only place that you can do an environment that's totally quiescent. That, because on the ground what they do is they will, either just let them settle. They don't necessarily attach to the plate, but they let them settle. So a lot of times they put them on shaker tables.

So they're in their culture plates and they're on a shaker table that just gently continuously shakes the culture so those cells stay in suspension. Sometimes they have a stir bar inside of the culture where just every so often it spins and then it makes the cultures, suspended. There are different types of culture plates on the ground that, encourage the cells not to attach.

And so so, yes, it's it's definitely, difficult to keep cells in suspension on the ground, and that is one of the reasons to do suspended cell culture in space because the thought is that it can more closely mimic what's happening with your cells in your body.

Okay. Mhmm. So that statement and then itself itself is a challenge for me because, unless it's a liquid or being brought in through your lungs, it's really never it's suspended, but it's not suspended the same way your body would be suspended. Right. You're you're right on that. But what it does is it allows the cultures in suspension to grow in three dimension, which when they're adherent or on the ground, it's hard to keep some and and cells in your body grow in three dimension. Right.

Because they're sitting in a fluid bath that allows it to be able to grow in any or example being in the ocean. Mhmm. You you it can grow in any dimension it wants. Once it's on the floor, it's gonna grow in half of the half of the dimension, half of a 360. Okay. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yep. So the idea of suspended cell culture is that, you know, you're replicating what's going on in the body by keeping those, allowing those cells to grow in three dimension.

And and the other thing is is that when you grow them in three dimension, the thought is is that you're more closely replicating, you know, say some of the different organs in your body. So say, a lot of research is done on the heart using, the heart cell, which is called a cardiomyocyte.

And so having, you can actually grow, cardiomyocytes in three dimension that are functional in the sense of that they're beating like your heart is Not functional in the sense that they're pumping necessarily pumping blood through, you know, something else. But you can have, little they're like little teeny three-dimensional, you know, heart tissues floating around. And they're beating Does the the actual myocyte pump? It beats. Really? Not yet.

Yes. You can make, we actually just did a, experiment up on station with, it wasn't cardi it it was cardiomyocytes, but they were seeded, which means they were inserted into these collagen tissues. Yeah. And then they start growing. And what they do is they make that it's called an engineered heart tissue. It makes that tissue start beating. And so we have video of the little engineered heart tissues. They're all beating up on orbit.

So the in our in our body, the heart cells, the myocytes, are, I'm gonna use terrible words, but please excuse me on this. They are designed to be a actively pumping or beating cell type to perform its function as an aggregate of the whole heart. Yes. I said that right? Yes. Yep. They they are designed. They are programmed to beat. And and, you know, you have to give them the correct media and nutrients in order to start that.

But you can even have, and we've done this experiment as well on station where we had 2 dimensional, cardio, cardio, a 2 dimensional, culture of cardiomyocytes, and that that will beat as well. So you can and what happens is they start they if you look at it, and it's the same with a three-dimensional culture as it is with a two dimensional culture.

If you look at it through the microscope, when the cells are first, kind of joining for lack of better words, joining together and becoming one culture instead of a bunch of different separate cells. In the early stages, you can see those cells are start to beat, but they beat at irregular rays. They beat at different. They're not in synchrony. But as that culture matures because of the, communication between the cells, once they're touching each other, it starts beating in synchrony.

And so you can see, in a two dimensional culture, you can see one side of the cultures beat, which then kind of ripples through the whole culture, and you can see it start becoming synchronous. And then it's the same thing with the engineered tissues. Once they start beating, which it takes about a week after you've formed these tissues, the whole tissue, the experiment we did there, they were on posts, flexible posts.

So when the tissue, when the cells beat, the whole tissue contracted and you could see the little posts flexed because we're, you know, they were actually, you know, essentially little heart tissues. Okay. So you're gonna give me a little heart lesson here. Sorry. The heart is continuously beats. We don't know why it continue why it goes and why it stops to a in terms of the those larger the universe itself, like this thing continues to go. I didn't realize that they beat. Uh-huh.

When we look at other as there any other part of the body that does the function that it's supposed to do when it's not part of the larger whole? Let me give you an example. If I'm not clear, are does a lung cell exchange oxygen without the aviolis and not the the system setup? Does the liver cell detox by itself? Does the brain, axi the I mean, I'm I'm you know what I'm asking?

Yeah. I know what you're asking, and and I will preface it to say with that I am not the expert in all of these different types of cells. But I can tell you that, you know, like, these cardiomyocytes, they're not actually they're beating, but they're not necessarily pumping because it doesn't have all of the components, all of the musculature that's required to actually pump something.

Maybe someday, and that is the idea that someday you can make, you know, quote, artificial organs out of stem cells. So they're not really artificial. They're just made in a lab as opposed to, you know, you're being born with your heart. But so they don't so it's not really doing the pumping of the blood, but it is beating. And it's the same thing with other organs in your body, which is the idea of trying to get three-dimensional tissues.

The idea is that a three-dimensional tissue more closely represents what is happening in your body. And when you, you know, say do a drug study, because this is how they do it on the ground. Right? They they have, you can have a 2 dimensional. Let's just say you have a 2 dimensional culture of kidney cells. And then you wanna see how drugs impact those different drugs impact themselves.

And so you add, a drug to that two dimensional culture, and then you may do some genomic analysis or metabolomics, you know, transcriptomics. You may do some type of analysis to look at how that drug affected those cells. The idea is that that can translate to how the drug would affect your kidney in your body. But people think that the 2 dimensional structure of cell culture on the ground is not necessarily, well representative of a three-dimensional organ in your body.

Hence, the reason to try to do three-dimensional. So the idea is that now if you have a three-dimensional tissue of kidney and you add, drugs to it, because that three-dimensional, tissue of kidney may have several different types of cells in it because each of your organs have a variety of cell culture cells within them.

That that that more closely So so to tie this back, the one reason for BioLife Sciences is a, in theory, is a better reaper a better representation of the biological systems that would exist in I'm tying this together. I'm a little slow. Oh. We're tying it together because life sciences, which is biologicals or or living organisms, you're that can't be reproduced the same way on earth. So space gives us that three-dimensional perspective, data, analysis that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

Right. Or maybe it gives us a better model for three-dimensional. Yeah. That's right. Improved over what we would have. So the 2 would give us 1, but this one level could be by a factor of 15%, but 15% could be the difference between living and dying. Right.

Exactly. So Okay. And so then the idea back to even what I was discussing with the post to the hardware is now, you know, now we can if if space provides a good model for, representing three-dimensional tissue And also which I haven't even talked about provides a model of different types of disease processes that occur on the ground potentially. Now we wanna be able to make that hardware tying this back to the hardware.

You wanna be able to make hardware that supports that and doesn't impact that. That you wanna be able to be studying strictly the microgravity environment. You don't wanna be studying how, you know, your little three d spheres or cardiomyocytes are are reacting because they're in type some type of, piece of hardware that they don't like. Is it about as No. No. No. So you yeah.

You're you're a combination of analyzing what the actual experiment is while simultaneously, negating all the posit possible reasons for the experiment to not be indicative of a true condition. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So those and that's why I say that, you know, there's no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. It it takes go ahead. Where can you give me an example of where you went wrong or how you've like, I mean, 2 things. 1, how expensive is this?

And 2, have you I've gotta believe that this team, so you have been a part of the actual of doing it wrong. You just missed the boat. You got it up there and we just made that mistake. And because of that, the data is useful, but not as much. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've I've been doing this for over 20 years, and our center has been around for 37 years.

So we've certainly had our share of, you know, I hate to call them failures, but, you know, anomalies is really the word in the, in the space business. And, you know, and and you you can have a whole range. You can have a range where maybe something didn't go quite the way you wanted it to the range of things going, you know, horribly wrong. And so there's a there's a huge range of, you know, things that can happen in space. Really. So what's an example of a horribly wrong?

Well, so this is this is, this is a life. I can think of 1. So this 2. There was a, we actually support a lot of K through 12 educational experiments. And so we have this experiment, that was, butterflies in space. And the idea was, can, can, without gravity, can an organism, like a butterfly, go through complete metamorphosis? And, so we had, and it was a K through 12 educational experiment.

So this is one where in house of BioServe, we, we work with the organism, which kinda brings me to our next point in bullet point. But we work with the organism to design the habitat to, to be able to successfully keep it alive and then through its entire life cycle. And of course we tested that all on the ground. And so when we got to space, now I have hundreds of kids watching. We had a camera on it. We're watching it in real time. We're, we're putting that on a website.

And so now I have hundreds of kids, in their classrooms where they have they're watching this happen. They have experiments running in their classrooms, and these caterpillars are eating their food every day. And pretty soon they go to, make their chrysalis. And, as they're forming their chrysalis, they all go to the top of the, interestingly enough, we go to the top of the habitat. They hang down and they start forming their chrysalis.

But instead of forming their chrysalis, they all dried up and died. And it was, like, ho ho what? You're like, what? Because, you know, you you do these experiments in the spaceflight hardware over and over again on the ground to ensure that you, you know, it's an iterative process and you do it over and over again and you and you, you know, so that you at least have a, you know, a a very high level of confidence that you're going to be able to conduct it successfully on the ground.

And, and and they didn't they all died. And and so it's something that when we came back, you know, we did a bunch of testing with it and everything to try to figure it out. And what we figured it out was I I had decided that, I should for the space flight experiment, I should get a a fresh batch of food because, you know, we wanna have everything as pristine and as good as possible for the space flight experiment. Well, it turned out that that fresh batch of food was contaminated. Oh, wow.

So I've always learned that we always do a big test, prior to the space flight. And we do a big test on the ground in the, in the configuration that we're gonna use for the space flight. And so what I've learned is if there's something like that, that we're gonna use for space, then I use it in that last big test too, to ensure there's no issues. So there's a bunch of little kid there's a bunch of children who've been, like, damaged for life. Well, funny.

So funny because this was part of something I was gonna say later in terms of the broader impact, but I might as well just talk about it now, like, broader impacts. Was so, I had sent out an email to all the teachers saying, you know, I'm so sorry that this happened, blah blah blah.

And I have one of the teachers, actually several of the teachers respond and say that their kids were super excited about it because in their classrooms, their butterflies, their caterpillars, all formed chrysalises successfully and all formed butterflies. And so they all felt like they were just a little bit superior to the engineers.

And and so and and the other thing they said was it was an incredibly, great learning experience for the students to see that not everything always goes the way that you want it to. Right. It's not the it's not the plate. It's not this, whitewashed or not whitewashed, but Yeah. This fabulous mirror that we see that things go well. Right. You said you had a second one that I I do wanna bring up. Now I remembered how I got to you.

I I was trying to figure out where I had read an article about spiders in the International Space Station. And we brought this on our first conversation and how the spiders had, they had positioned themselves well, on Earth, a normal spider has a web. And it's a little bit off center where the center is. And they they come from the top and they go down and they would get to the center. That's how they would capture their prey.

But I think I had read that in this situation, even being in space, the spiders were using light as an orientation, not just gravitational polar positioning. And that the the center of the spider web was more central as compared to the way it was on earth. Mhmm. And that's what got me excited about finding someone involved in life sciences and space. That's where we got. So I don't know if I said that well. Yes. You did.

And actually, I think that kinda ties into my second bullet point of how you make an unnatural environment natural. Okay. And and because I really wanted to talk about the spider experiments that we've conducted Oh, perfect. In regards to this. So, you know, one of the things that we wanna do when we fly these, experiments to space and particularly when we're flying these small organisms and we wanted to see about behavior, like, can a spider spin an orb web in space?

You know, we wanna make an environment again that's really as natural for them as possible so that they exhibit the behaviors that they would normally exhibit on the ground. Right? And so with this, we we actually did 2 different spider we did 2 different spider experiments. And, the first one that we did, you know, what what we wanted to do was because these, it's about well, we did one on the shuttle. Trying to organize my thoughts.

We did we we did one on the space shuttle that launched on the space shuttle, and we did one that launched on the, Dragon capsule to the space station. Yeah. And those two vehicles have a little bit different requirements. Right? So the Space Shuttle 1, you hand over your hardware to NASA. They load it on the Space Shuttle, and within a couple of, days, it's in space. Right? And so we we actually conducted the first experiment on the space shuttle.

And then with the SpaceX vehicle, you hand your experiment over to NASA, and it can be 5 to 7 days before it's, you can get eyes on it. So one of the things yeah. So one of the things we had to do with the first, with the spider experiment was we had to figure out, okay, how do we contain this spider so it doesn't start building webs before we can get a camera on it. Right? Because we don't want we wanted to catch it adapting to the, spaceflight environment.

We didn't want to, catch it after it already adapted. Because once it launches like showing showing up after the baby's born. Right. Exactly. So exactly. That's good. That's okay. Keep in mind. I apologize for the yeah. I'm sorry, honey. I missed it. Well, that's right. There's yeah.

And, so, you know, so what we had to do was we had to contain the little spider, in a in a little cubbyhole for, lack of a better word for in a little cubby hole and, but also keep it alive in that cubby hole until we needed it, you know, to be released and then into its environment. And the environment has to be, while we have to contain them. Right?

I mean, you have plastics or you have metals, and those aren't necessarily something that, you know, is conducive in a microgravity environment necessarily of a spider walking on. So Oh, okay. Because, just because, with low gravity, they're not gonna get the same traction Right. When they're okay. Yeah. And so, you know, so we add, we do testing with different types of materials, that we can, put into the habitat that would make the, you know, organism more quote comfortable.

Obviously, a spider isn't thinking higher level like that, but you want it to be able to move around easily. And so for us, we use balsa wood, which, you know, has some gripping capability. Because because with the, you know, plastics, it's so slippery. There's not necessarily any gripping and you don't know if it's just gonna float off of that, you know, float off of the plastic as opposed to being able to kind of grip it.

They can obviously lay a a web anchor with their silk, but they can't grip with their legs. So we did blossom wood. And, so anyways, so, and our first flight experiment, and this kind of goes back to things going wrong, we actually launched 2 spiders because we thought, okay, well if one of the spiders, doesn't want to come out of its cubby hole or, dies, we're going to launch 2. And so we launched 1 in the, the one that we really wanted to study.

We, we want, we launched that one in the primary section of the habitat and we launched the second one in a little in the little cubby hole. Well somehow, right before launch, that one in the cubby hole, there was just like the smallest little, space between the door of the cubby hole and the wall. And that spider squeezed through there and went out into the, main compartment of the habitat. So now we have 2 spiders inside of the main portion of the habitat.

Yeah. And typically, spiders aren't necessarily friendly towards each other. You know, spiders are they're really kind of they may. You may find multiple spiders in an area, but each one has their own space. Right? So so you don't you don't sit down with them before you send them up and give them instructions. Like, please stay in your cubby hole. When we get to this point, you come out. Don't do anything bad in the cubby hole.

And by the way, if you run into your friend, we want you to play nice. You don't do that, I'm assuming. Nope. You don't be you don't have, like, a survey that they have to fill out to see if they're behaviorally ready for this type of test? Exactly. It's the crazy I thought I thought this was more like science really experiments, but I guess it's kinda random. You just put them together. Exactly. So that was, so then it we thought, oh, man.

And we saw this right when we were turning over, and it was too late to do anything because, again, that container is sealed. Yeah. So you saw this on the ground? Yes. We saw it right before. You saw it before it even got off. So now you're like, oh my god. We don't know what's gonna happen. Exactly. And it and it you'd and it was just too late because, again, these are sealed containers. They're, you know, they you can't you don't just snap a latch and open them up.

It's they're screwed shut, essentially. And so, we had to let it go. And and, and so we it got to station, and we got it under the camera. And, we this is a long story. That's okay. Go ahead. I wanna hear it because I I the store I had heard a little bit about this. I don't know where. Maybe it was something I was reading when I was first looking at the this these, those articles. And I thought this happened all in space, but the fact that it happened on the ground, it that's a panic mode.

Like, we we screwed up, and we have no clue. And it's it's like going to bed at night and saying, I shouldn't have sent that letter. I don't know why I sent that letter. This is gonna be a big issue. You wake up in the morning and say, don't worry about it. Right. Okay. So, yeah, tell me the tell the whole story. So so, you know, so it gets to station. It gets in front of the camera. And the reason the the spider really hadn't we hadn't released any food because here's the other thing, right?

You have to have spiders will build webs if they don't have food because they are trying to catch food. But eventually, if they don't have food, they'll stop building webs because, they obviously need food to live, but they just they stop having kind of the stimulation to do that. So we had little fruit flies larvae because, these spiders can, catch fruit flies. They were small spiders. So we, in the bottom of the habitat, had a different little habitat specifically for the fruit flies.

And once it got to station, the cover on that habitat was pulled off by the crew member. And now that allowed any fruit fly larvae in that section to kind of come out, you know, form little. They also go through a metamorphosis and, form a little cocoon and then hatch as a fly and, and come into the habitat where the spiders were so that they would have food.

So those flies started coming in and, lo and behold, one of the spiders so when we first got the camera on it, you couldn't really see any of the spiders. It looked they were tucked up. Each one of them was in a separate corner, kinda tucked in their own corners. But pretty soon, one of the spiders came out and spun a web, and it was a mishmash of web. It was just webbing everywhere, and it was hard to tell, because we didn't have the camera continuously running.

So it was hard to tell whether both spiders actually came out and just made, like, it was like a cross hatch of webbing. It was not an orb web at all. But then pretty soon, one of the spiders started you know, the spiders eat their eat their web is how they take down their web every day. They Oh, really? Every day? Yes. Typically, spiders will rebuild their web every day and they and they basically eat their silk and then produce more silk.

So they they eat it to because the web becomes less functional or they eat it because they're hungry? It's just they they take it down. They're taking it down and they're they're eating it because it's, I should know the answer to that, but it they're basically eating that because it's it's a lot of nutrients. Think of it as nutrients. Yeah. I that's what I mean. It's that it's food, but they don't take down the whole thing, do they?

They take down the whole thing or just pieces of it and replace it? They'll take down the whole thing. Really? Yes. So, like, they wake up and say, let me take this all down, start again. Yeah. After a certain amount of time, they will. They take down their webs, and then they rebuild it. And usually what they'll do is, you know, at a certain time of day, they'll take down their web, and, and it depends on the spider because not all spiders are orb weavers, of course.

But, for an orb weaving spider, it will be, typically, it can be, it can bite be either really. They can be building them in the evening in the in the, you know, dusk hours, or they build them in the dawn hours, typically. All I'm thinking about is I'm thinking about a street merchant. You know, they they go they end of the day, they take down their whole display. Everything they've spent all the time, they go home, they come back the next morning, and they set their whole display up again.

And they read so Every day. Yeah. I I I bet if we did a survey of a 100000 people that there would be 3 who say, no. No. No. No. I take it down every day. Yeah. Yeah. Never knew that. That's great. You know, and there'll be times where for whatever reason, a spider doesn't do that, but typically, they take it down every day and build a a fresh one. Okay. So so this spider came out, and she's she's, and and, also, if you didn't know, most, of the spiders that you see on webs are females.

They're either females or young males. The males, once they get older, they don't build webs. They only look for females. The females are the ones that build the orb webs. So they're work there's they're working as a spider, and they're working in as a human.

Yep. Yep. So so she'll, so she'll spin, so she started eating all the web, and then pretty soon, lo and behold, she built an orb web that was way better than the crisscross cross web, but it wasn't quite as perfect or, you know, as a web that you would see on the ground. But it's like, wow. She she did pretty good. She's learning. She's learning orientation to space.

And and what spiders do when they build an orb web is the radii of the web, which are kind of like the anchoring lines, they they drop typically, what they do is they'll be on a tree branch or, you know, underside of your house or whatever, and they set an anchor with their web with the silk, and then they let basically let go and drop down, and then anchor their line somewhere. And then they crawl back up, and then they move over, and then they lay a line, and then drop down.

So they use gravity, right, to lay a lot of those lines. And, obviously, in space, there is no gravity. So we watched her, and what she did was she would lay an anchor line, and then she tried to let go. Right? She let go, and then she just spun there and didn't and and was basically just spinning spinning in the habitat without holding on to anything. So she got back to the wall. You know, she kind of bumped back into the wall, grabbed it, then she would let go again and she wouldn't drop down.

So then what she did was she laid her anchor line. She crawled all the way down the side of the habitat all the way across the bottom, laid her anchor line, and then climbed up her anchor line. And then she walked across a little bit, laid, put an anchor in, and then crawled all the way down. So she learned that she just had to crawl down the sides of the habitat in order to make her web. And she was able to make a pretty good web. Now along comes the 2nd spider. Right?

2nd spider It's fascinating because we you you don't I'm always asking myself, is this spider thinking? Like, wow. This is not working. How do I do this? Or is it just a reaction? And I've gotta believe there's more. And I'm sorry to I'm sorry to make an insect sound so intelligent. Right. But I've gotta be thinking they're sitting there going, come on. Something's wrong here. I've gotta figure this out. And they their trial and error, it's not completely genetic anymore. Right.

It's it's really you know, if you and this to me is what's so fascinating about these types of experiments in space is that you're you're taking an organism that for 1000000 of years has evolved in a gravitational environment. Right? Everything they do, everything that they've ever learned to do for 1000000 of years, they've learned in a gravitational field.

Now we're taking them and we're and, you know, and it's not a higher order organism, really, and and you're putting in them in an environment with no gravity. And yet, what you see is really kind of the the survival of the species. Right? It's gotta figure out how to make a web because that's how it catches its food. Yeah. And if it doesn't make its web.

Yet, it's you can we can downplay it to survival of the species, but the actual act of figuring that out because millions or thousands of years of evolutionary change didn't adapt them at all to living in space. Right. Exactly. And they're they're figuring it out within hours or days Yes. Or days in this case. So so is there a cognitive, even microcognitive component of, well, let me see. I've gotta build this. Right.

Well and and that's exactly what I was gonna continue on to saying that although it's survival of this you know, you think, okay. That's survival of species. They still have some mechanism to figure out, like, this is what they have to do. And so, you know, it's it's just and that's, again, what I find so fascinating about these types of experiments is that you think, oh, it's a spider in space. What's the big deal?

It's like, to me, it really has an impact of looking at behavior and organisms and looking in an environment that you would never be able to replicate for the extended period of time that you can on the International Space Station. So it's just you just learn things that you wouldn't ever be able to learn. So what happened to spider 2? Because I think it was spider 2. So spider 2 comes along and, and we think, oh, no. Now this is gonna be like, you know, spider wars.

But that spider 2 came along and and not too long after the first one spun her web, and she started spinning her web. And and and she essentially spun a web just in like, the first spider was more like the first the top half of the of the habitat. 2nd spider was the bottom half of it, the habitat. So they kind of got their little territories and the second one made their web and pretty soon we had pictures of 2 orb webs in the habitat and you know, and it's just like you never.

We didn't predict that at all. We thought with the 2 spiders that they either wouldn't spin the web. We thought that maybe they would, you know, eat each other. Eat each other. Yep. And yet Did did you find that the second spider learned it faster by watching the first one? I I don't I don't think so. I their webs were very kind of similar in in in their asymmetry. But I think that was just the I don't think They both went through the through the same process.

Yep. And and orb and orb weavers typically don't have very good eyesight. So it probably really it can sense the other spider there, but it doesn't really see what that spider necessarily is doing. So so as an experiment now, this would be an interesting outcome.

If 1 spider built it in 1 geometric pattern in the beginning screwing up and another one built it in a different geo geometric pattern, and they built it differently in different geometric patterns to get to the end, it meant that they have the capacity to no matter what environment it is, find their own path. Mhmm. Not just that they didn't find it this way and they eventually both follow the same path. Right. They actually had to cognitively come up with a path. Yeah. Independently.

Independently. Mhmm. Yep. Yeah. So I I don't know if it was you, but there's one interview and I don't remember which one. If it was an interview, someone said that when cockroaches were reproduced in space, they came back a different color and faster. That wasn't me. I don't I'm not familiar with that one. Yeah. The this they they came back I think I'd have to think about which one.

It might be the one we just did on the reproduction and sexuality, but they came back a slightly different color and they actually operated they were faster. So my my theory is don't bring any more up. Right. Okay. Yes. Well, that's I've always said it's funny because I've always said, working in this field and, you know, and having things die and things like that, I always say, oh my god. We should just fly cockroaches. You can't kill them, and they live forever.

And, well, now you know, and I think it's in the reproduction and sexuality one, is that they actually improve their performance. So they were slightly bigger and they are faster. So if you bring that one up and do it again, pretty soon, we're like some of these movies. Right. Yeah. So so the, and both of them survived. So go back to your spiders. Both of them survived. Both of them were able to eat. What else did you what else did you glean from this?

So and then, and they were both and then eventually, what they started to do was they started to spin very symmetrical webs. And, and that's not necessarily what they do on the ground. On the ground, and this is where the impact or lack thereof of gravity came into play on the station experiment. On the ground, the spiders build the, the orb, the center part of their web is typically, a little bit higher off center. So it's not exactly in the center of the web.

It's it's in the top, let's say, 1 third of the web. And and then that the orb weaver typically sits in the middle of that center part of the web and faces downwards. Right? Because that bigger section of the web is is really where, you know, they're probably, you know, planning on some type of fly to get caught or bug to get caught in their web. And so then they drop down on it quickly.

So, what we started seeing on orbit was that these webs, at least for these first orb weavers that we, we launched, became very symmetrical. And so the the center of the web was exactly that in the center of the web, which is not necessarily, you know, what they do on the ground. So that was also fascinating. So not only did they learn how to build their web web very well, they built it symmetrically. So that was that was a very exciting and and habitat ended up being okay.

Going back to the fruit flies, one of the things that happened there was because the fruit flies had unlimited access to the, habitat because we're thinking, well, you know, we wanna be able to have those flies, in there to feed the spiders. Essentially, the fruit flies, propagated so much so that they the larvae just started crawling out of their little container because it had access to the whole habitat.

And essentially within about, 2 weeks, totally slimed the entire front viewing, window of the habitat and we couldn't see what was going on inside of the habitat anymore because the fruit flies took over. Okay. So a question? Mhmm. Do you kill them all? Or do you bring them back home? So they eventually use up all of their, nutrients. And then, you know, and of course, the because they it was up there for oh, I, oh, this experiment did go to the station, actually. This one went to the station.

It was up there, I think, for, I don't know, maybe a 120 days or something like that. And and by the time, it it the hardware came back, the spiders had both died and the fruit flies had all dried up. Like, they're they ate all their food, and then there was no more food and they dried up. My wife likes to take whatever she finds in the house, put a cup over it, and bring in bring it to the window or to to to put it outside.

So, you know, I'm thinking, okay, would you ever do you ever bring them home? Well, I have a great story on that, which is really part of, you know, the art of having a successful experiment. And it's really about Is that the next hour? Would we have any more to finish on the unnatural or is that the okay. I'm kind of all I'm meshing them all together. Yep. That's that that ends up happening. But I'm just making sure. The art of achieving a successful life science experiment.

Yeah. So I, I wanna talk about on this, which we'll get to your question of, we, we supported a worldwide contest that was called the YouTube Space Lab. And and basically YouTube and Google teamed up, and they did this big contest where kids all over the world could submit ideas for experiments to be conducted on board the station. And, it and and then there would be essentially 2 winners, and we helped support this whole contest.

And and so one of the winning experiments was proposed by a young man from Egypt, and his experiment was and, again, it's spiders, but a different type of spider. Hold on. Sorry. Just one second. Nope. No worries. It was, he was looking at a jumping spider, which is called a, zebra jumping spider or Salticus senecus. And his he proposed launching a jumping spider to space. And, his theory was is that jumping spiders, they don't build webs.

Now what jumping spiders do as opposed to most spiders, jumping spiders have very good eyesight and they hunt in the daytime. And what they do is they, you know, just crawl around looking for bugs. And when they see a bug that they wanna eat, you know, they jump on it. And that's how they catch there. So they jump to catch their prey.

And so the idea was when this spider got to space, his theory was it wouldn't be able to catch its prey because now if it jumps, you know, it just starts ping ponging around the habitat. Yeah. Right? So, so anyways, so now and and the the, organizers of the contest had a certain mission that they wanted to, launch this experiment on, which was, in Japan. And it was, it was to launch it on an HTV Rocket, which is just the name of the, Japanese rocket that was going to the space station.

So now how, how do we do this? I thought, okay, First so now I'm like, okay. I'm responsible for this. Now how how do I okay. I can't there's no store to buy a zebra jumping spider. Right? There's yep. I I how do I Well, there's there's no store where you are. There is no store. Okay. The yeah. So so when you think about the the other spiders, the the first two, there is a store you can buy them. No. Actually, there wasn't a store for that either.

Well Okay. There are, you know, there are a few orbweavers that you potentially can purchase online, but not really. Okay. So so in theory, I would you have to find so it's not only there's not a store. There's normally not a store, but you had to find a jumping spider, which is indicative of a certain region in the world. Right. And and and luckily, jumping spiders can be found all around the world. But I needed to find this particular, the Salticus Senecus, the zebra jumping spider.

And luckily for me, the, zebra's jumping spider is, found right here in Colorado. Okay. And so but what I don't just need a jumping spider. I need a lot of jumping spiders because now I'm starting from scratch. Right? I'm trying to figure out how to build a habitat, to keep this jumping spider alive so that when it gets to station, you know, we can film it and see if it can catch its prey. And so, I was out, and and, of course, this experiment starts in the middle of winter. Right?

It's like, okay. How am I going to get a jumping spider in the middle of winter? So two things. Again, lucky for me in Colorado, it, it, gets pretty warm in March. And when it gets warm, jumping spiders start coming out. Because they, they basically, can winter over and they winter over in cracks and crevices and then, come out when they start getting warm.

So, I was out in the back of my house, searching for jumping spiders and was able to collect over a course of a month about, you know, 10 zebra jumping spiders. And so that's kind of the first thing where, know, I I almost call this session like going above and beyond because my my daughter has a video of me, you know, talking to the jumping spiders as I was trying to find them all and catch them.

But, but these are the things that sometimes you have to do in order to make these experiments successful. So, but anyways, so the next thing we needed to do was, you know, we definitely had a video these, spiders once they got to space. And, we had to make a habitat that it would feel comfortable crawling around on again.

But it also needed little cubbies where it could hang out, but what we learned from our first experiment was that you don't want a little cubby where it can hang out where you can't see it. Because in the first experiment prior to the fruit fly larvae kinda sliming the whole window, those spiders would get up kind of behind some little pieces in the habitat and you really couldn't see them. So we wanted to be able to see this jumping spider, the entire time.

And so what we ended up doing was designing a balsa wood insert that went in the back of the habitat that just basically had circles drilled out of it that were about, you know, a half inch deep, and there were bigger circles and little circles so that the spider could crawl into those circles and feel like it was contained, and yet we would it would always be in view of the camera.

And then the next thing that we had to do was we needed to provide it food, which we were gonna provide with the fruit flies like we did with the first experiment. And, that, but we didn't want the fruit flies to slime all over the habitat again.

So we had to so we used the experience for the first experiment to now, help us design a new habitat that also fit into where the spider was that would allow us to control the release of the fruit flies into the habitat and not just have them crawling everywhere, the larvae crawling everywhere and sliming the habitat. Japanese rocket, this spider, again, we didn't want it to learn how to catch food in space before we got the camera on it.

And spiders are actually water limited as opposed to food limited. They can go for extended periods of time like most organisms. Living organisms can go for an extended period of time without, eating, but they can't go for a very long time without water. So what we did, what we figured out with this spider was we actually kept her. We designed a little cubby that had, a little water container, which of course now has to be sealed.

But what we did was we put a little, cotton wick that came out of that water container so that cotton wick was always moist so that she could, you know, get her water from that wick, but stay in the container where the water was and not, you know, get drowned with water. Right. So And because because the water's right there, she's going to stay in the location even longer because there's no need at this point. Right. And we actually had, we had a lever that kept that compartment closed.

And then once she got on station, the idea was that the crew would open up that lever and then Okay. That would be easier into the big. And this one, we also learned not to have any small slots that she could squeeze through. You know? So, you know, it's so it's really, you do Instead of think like an Egyptian, think like a spider. How would this thing get out? Right. Exactly. Could talk about Egyptian. Isn't that a song Yes. Or a singing? Yep. It is.

Okay. Wanna make sure I wasn't saying anything derogatory. I I thought it was a song. Yep. It is. So so then you have to think about, the for the HTV vehicle, it takes 15 days A while. Once that vehicle it did at that point. Once that vehicle launched to get to the station. And there really isn't any there at that point. There wasn't any temperature control on that. I mean, it was a pressurized, cargo compartment and, the temperature. They warm it before they launch it.

But the temperature could get down to, pretty, not freezing, but, fairly cold and fairly cold for a spider. So all of this testing, it seems, you know, I'm kind of talking about how we just developed all this. All of this testing took over a year, all of the development and with multiple spiders and and putting spiders through their paces of, okay, I'm gonna put you in the dark with some water for 15 days, and I'm gonna cool you down to 15 c or 10 c, and we'll see if you make it. You know?

Sorry, guy. Yeah. Yeah. So but those are all the things that we did because those are all of the issues with launching something to space and and, you know, that you have to address. And so lo and behold, to make a long story short, we were able to successfully, get the zebra jumping spider. And actually, we chose one other jumping spider. We wanted to hedge our bets, again, but we had 2 separate habitats this time instead of just one with 2 spiders in it.

We did 2 habitats each with 1 spider in it. And we did a spider that's called a a Fidippus johnsonii, which is just a red jumping spider. And the reason why we picked that one was that because it was red, we thought, well, if for some reason we don't see the zebra jumping spider, this one will be a little bit easier to see. So these spiders traveled from in their habitats from Colorado all the way to Japan. And that's a story in and of itself.

I hand carried them all the way to Japan, all the way to Tanigashima, the island where they launched their rocket, handed them over to the, Japanese space agency who installed them on their rocket. And, and they were launched to the space station. And so, these jumping spiders got there, and of course, now 15 days had gone by and we had no idea. We we were hopeful that they were still alive.

And lo and behold, the crew, installed them into our incubator so that, they could have, you know, ambient temperature control. But also we powered the camera and the lights for the habitat because the jumping spiders needed to have light in order to hunt. And, when she installed them, this was actually Sunny Williams crew.

When she installed them into the habitat, into the incubator, she released the spiders from their water compartments and we leave that compartment open so the spider can access the water whenever they needed it. And then she also released fruit flies into the habitat.

But what we did with the fruit fly habitat was there was 4 separate compartments so that she would release flies from the first compartment, and she would leave that open for 2 or 3 days, and then come back and she would close that compartment and open up the next one, which was just food. And any leftover flies, the idea was that any leftover flies would climb in there to get their food, lay eggs, and start a new colony of flies.

And that way because flies only live about, you know, a little less than a month, the fruit flies. So that way we would have multiple, generations of flies to keep the spiders alive over, an extended period of time with the idea to go back to your original question. Could we bring them home alive? So so we were able to get video of the jumping spiders in space. They actually were able to learn how to catch their prey.

They we caught them on video several times, trying to catch their prey and really wanted. There's 2 really fascinating things about this experiment. 1 was I we have video of the jumping spider. She saw she was on the backside of the habitat. She saw a fly on the front side of the habitat, but it was floating. It had lost its traction, the fly, so it was just kind of floating in the middle of the habitat. She crawled all the way over, like ran essentially all the way to the front of the habitat.

She laid a piece of web anchor, and she jumped out into the air, grabbed that fruit fly, and then her webbing pulled her back to the front of the habitat. Wow. So she learned that she must have learned that she couldn't necessarily jump because she without an anchor because she would just go wherever.

But she she not only learned how to, jump to catch a fly, but she learned somehow, in my opinion, how short of a silk line she had to let out so that when she grabbed the fly, it would pull her back to a surface that she could hold on to. And it's interesting because Ira thought she just would've kept on going to the other side of the wall, to the other wall. No. She somehow figured this out. And so that was really fascinating to me. And so then, actually, the, the spiders both got packed.

They were both alive. You said there were 2 things you learned how to catch prey? Yep. And I'm gonna tell you that. So the so to answer your question, both of these spiders were sent back to Earth alive. They were both alive when they came back. By the time that we got them because now they came back in a capsule that landed in the Pacific ocean and then it takes the boat to the, Bay. By the time we got there, we got them in our hands, which was about 3 or 4 days.

Unfortunately one of the, the zebra jumping spider had died, but the, red jumping spider was still alive. And so now I thought, oh, this is perfect because she, she had no flies by this time because she had been on station for about a 100 days and the fruit fly colonies had run out. And so I thought, this is perfect. I can get a video of her readapting to catching prey on the ground and see what happens. So I got a video camera on her.

We fed her and she saw the spider, and again, she was on the back wall of the habitat. The spider was on the, I mean, the fly was on the floor of the habitat and she saw it and she jumped to get it. And the, and the fly was about halfway from the back to the front on the floor of the habitat. She completely missed and crashed into the front window and landed upside down on her back on the floor of the habitat.

And I can tell you through the year and a half that I worked on developing this experiment and watching jumping spiders, they never did that. They never jumped so far that they crashed into something, and then, and missed their prey. Like they'll miss it a little bit, but not like that. So whatever mechanism she was using for jumping in space, she employed.

I don't know what exactly, but she just the fact that she just completely crashed into the front of the habitat was just not something that you see. I wanna know when it happened, did you say, oh, shit. Like, was there any empathy for the fact that you screwed up her entire jumping mechanism and now she's slamming into a wall? Well, I had been taking care of this spider for about 10 months. Yes. So, I mean, I you gotta feel bad.

The spider didn't for no fault of their own, is now overshooting its food and smashing into a wall. Yep. Yep. But the good news is, really within a short period of time, 10 minutes, she figured it out. Oh, really? So that's how long it took? Just 10 minutes? It took her 10 minutes. And it took her about 4 more tries. Do you can see in each time, she was closer and closer, and then she figured it out. That's how quickly she adapted back to the gravitational environment.

Have you I've I don't think this is not an experimentation. Have you, in your time doing this, sat there and said, okay. How does this relate to humans? Would this happen? How does it if this was a I don't think we're gonna have rhinoceros in space, but would this happen? Have you have you taken that mental journey to so many other species and said, would it do this? Would it not? Would it adapt? Would it not? Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, absolutely.

I mean, you you think about it because clearly we've shown that humans can adapt. But I don't know that we, you know, look I mean, we do, and there's certainly studies on it. But there are probably, I don't know, a 100 different things that a crew member does every day that they've when they're on the station, that they've figured out some way to adapt that whatever it is they're doing to do because they're not in grab. Right?

And we're not even thinking about it just because they, you know, you see them on video and they're just moving around and but you know, that all takes quite a bit of adaptation. And, and now we're looking at a small spider and in a very simple thing as catching their food and realizing that they can adapt.

And so yes, you, you, you, for me, I always think about the bigger picture of, you know, if we want to go and colonize other places and, and you know, at varying levels of gravity, you know, would we want to bring different organisms with us and can they adapt? And what does that look like? Because, you know, if you want to have some type of home on a different plan, planet or the moon or wherever, you know, do you want an ecosystem that's similar to what you have on the ground?

And if you do, then what does that look like? What are the ramifications of it? What organisms do you bring? How do they adapt? How can you keep them alive? You know, so it's something that you can sit and ponder for a long period of time. Well, and but in essence, what you've shared is that it will not be the same Mhmm. Unless you really, really, really think about the complete ecosystem in which they live. So therefore, you're it's it could be the experiment gone wild.

Mhmm. Because you might figure out how to help a zebra spider mite figure out how to do its jumping. Yet the the fruit fly or any of the other types of insects it eats, it will perform its own evolutionary change, which could mean that the fruit fly never get is the jumping spider doesn't get the same amount of food. It doesn't eat the same.

It it does some so you don't know what that evolutionary or that that modification through a factorial of 10 different animal species or whatever, they could be completely running amok. Right. And you just don't know until until you do it. Which is which is scary because do you want to do it? Right. Well and that's why I think you have to think about what do you what do you want your ecosystem to look like?

And and, you know, and it really can it plays into I mean, it's on a philosophical, but it plays into it really demonstrates on the ground. Like, people talk about, you know, you impact one part of the ecosystem, how it impacts another part of the ecosystem. And these simple little experiments essentially show that.

I mean, to me, they show how, you know, taking something, putting it in, you know, putting them in an environment that's not something that they're they've evolved in and looking at their behavior, you know, and then adding another thing to that environment, like you said, the fruit flies, you know, you're impacting the way that that ecosystem would normally have worked. You know? Still trying you're still trying to make it similar to Earth. Right. Exactly.

And is that what we want to do if we go out to other, you know, planets? Well, it could be yes. If we just went to the moon or if we were between Mearth, the moon, and Earth. And what types of things can happen between them? There are I don't know the number that I hear all different types of numbers. Maybe I'll ask you this. A good question. How many species of, of animals are on Earth? Jeez. I don't know the I've been told 50,000,000. Yeah. And I've been told like 12,000,000.

And I'm trying to get a number that's more concrete because if we're losing 200 to 250 species per day on this planet, which is the numbers that are coming back, then how many do we have? And the complexity of the biosphere, the complexity of the the ecosystem is so intense that there's no human capacity for us to be able to completely understand how all of them would react, let alone just humans reacting. Right. Mhmm. I know.

It it's, you know, and and I don't know the number of species, and I'm sure it's in the millions. And, but it it just, you know, you eat I don't know if I'll say it right, but it you you know, you just do realize how interconnected everything is, when you do these small experiments. And it does make you think, you know, how, you know, how does this all work in the way that it works? I don't know. It's kinda silly to say. But No. No. Well, I the follow-up to that is why do you do this?

Mhmm. Well, I I mean, for me, it really is. I mean, honestly, part of me, I I kind of accidentally, fell into this work. I can't say that my I wasn't one of the kids growing up that was like, hey, I wanna do something in space. So I've definitely learned about space through my work here at the center. And, but I've always been interested in, you know, the life around me and ecosystems and, you know, obviously life sciences has always been a passion for me.

And so, to me, it's being able to do these simple experiments and, and maybe it sounds cliche, but it, it, it's, it's the challenge because these are certainly challenging to do any type, whether it's cell culture or these small organism experiments. It is super challenging to do these. And I always say it is not for the faint of heart.

Because, you know, things go wrong, and and it truly is 2 years of your life for for an experiment, and then something goes wrong, And you can't do anything about it because you can't walk down the hallway into your lab and say, oh, I'll fix it. So do you do, you've got insects. Do you do, mice or any of those type of experiments?

Yeah. So we've been a, and and not necessarily I'm not the expert on rodent research, but, we have somebody in our organization, Louis Stodick, who's, he's been one of on the forefront of rodent research in space station, and, and we, our center, has supported quite a bit of rodent research on space station. So we've we've worked with, because you can use microgravity as a model for bone loss and muscle loss. Right? Because you're not loading the systems.

Yeah. And so, you know, so your body just says, well, I guess you don't really need all this bone anymore and you don't really need those big strong muscles anymore. And so, so really, microgravity can be used as a model for bone loss and muscle loss in terms of drug development. So on the ground it can take a whole year for an osteoporotic woman to lose 1% of their bone density. In space, that can happen in a month. And so think of it as an accelerated model.

So we've worked, we actually worked with the company to test a countermeasure for bone loss and we did that in, mice. So we launched the mice, they were administered the drug and then you, you know, obviously measured their bone density pre and post mission and look at the effects of the countermeasure that you gave to them. And we've done that with a muscle, a counter measure for muscle loss, which is cachexia in people, which is muscle loss and people who have cancer.

You lose a lot of your muscle. And if you lose a lot of your muscle, obviously that has other deleterious health effects. So, if you can develop a countermeasure to that, not only for people who are in space, but also for, you know, a large population of people on earth who have, muscle wasting for or bone loss for a variety of reasons. So we've done that testing on station for sure. The, I'm going to swing all the way back to a question I asked earlier, cost wise.

I mean, you, you, this has gotta be exponentially expensive to do a single experiment. It is. You know, it's it's not cheap. I I would say that. It can run from the tens of thousands to the 100 of 1,000 depending upon what is being done. You know, developing the hardware is expensive because of all of the requirements, the safety guidelines that we have to follow.

And and that's a big part of the driver because now you have to develop, like I mentioned in the beginning, you have to develop these systems to support the organisms, but to meet all of the containment and safety, guidelines so that you don't injure the crew or injure the vehicle. So it is quite expensive. And of course there takes lots of testing, both on the hardware side, the science side, and then the integration of both the hardware and the science.

I would have thought this would have been 1,000,000. So you've kind of shocked me with tens of thousands to 100 of thousands. I would have thought a single experiment in space, taking the time that it takes, building the content, putting it together, and getting the cost for launch Mhmm. The tie on on a vehicle, and then the time and space, I would have thought this would have been 1,000,000 of dollars for any experiment.

Well, I I guess I'll preface that to say, those costs that I, said don't include the cost of the ride to space or the crew time, because at this point in time, for the most part, NASA provides those services. Right? That NASA's already contracting with the, the cargo suppliers, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman at this point. They're already contracting them to bring supplies to the Space Station.

So, you know, and of course there's space on those cargo missions for science since, you know, the Space Station is the, for the US portion is the ISS National Lab. So it is a national lab, and you are supposed to be conducting science on board. So NASA supports a lot of those costs because this it's in the national interest, and this is what they're tasked to do. So it doesn't have there is no cost factor. They NASA determines that if we're going to do this, this is the experiment we want.

There are 500 applications. We're gonna select these 10. We're gonna select them over a period of time. This is the space, the time, the resources we have, and whether that cost is an $80,000,000 launch or it's, whatever $1,000,000 launch doesn't matter. You're not getting a proportionate bill, or no one's getting a proportionate bill for that. Right.

And that's actually done between NASA and for the US portion, it's done between NASA and, the center for the advancement of science and space, which is CASIS, but also known as the ISS National Lab. That's the organization that's responsible for the portion of resources that are part of the, Space Station National Lab. And so NASA and CASIS work together to a portion the resources to, support the different types of experiments. And those experiments can be, funded by NASA.

They can be funded by CASES, the ISS National Lab. They could be funded by, like we support experiments that are funded by the NIH. And then it flies under the the allotment that That's a national, Institute of Health. Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. The National Institutes of Health and the, National Science Foundation. We support experiments that are sponsored by those organizations. We've even supported experiments that are science experiments but totally funded by a commercial entity.

You know, that doesn't happen as much because the cost is higher, but it does happen or sometimes that their funding is leveraged by other funding. So, you know, it's kind of a wide variety. Now NASA now does have a pathway for a strictly commercial, kind of marketing PR types of things to be launched. And in those instances, like, I think I think Revlon did something like this last fall where they launched I I think it was like their perfume or something.

And then they took a video of it in the cupola, which is the viewing window of the station. And so NASA now offers a pathway for companies that wanted to do something like that to pay to have that done. So in that instance, where it's strictly marketing, you know, PR commercial, that organization pays, NASA has a price list of its Yes. I think that's fairly recent. The ability to do commercial. Yes. I think it was just 2 or 3 years ago. Time flies. So I don't know. It's It is.

I don't know how much you know about the other countries and their same orientation to testing in space. The the Japanese, the Russians, the Canadians, the Germans are are are they very similar in their approach? Do they have a a national lab on theirs the same way? So as far as I know, I I don't think, you know, that their sections of the space station have necessarily been, you know, named a national lab in their country.

You know, the Japanese space agency, which is called JAXA, you know, they have their own experiment module, Kibo, it's called. And, you know, and they and they have experiments that launched the station. They actually even have a, a specific habitat that they built to support rodent research, and they've launched it and supported some of that. The the bulk of the resources available on the station go to, you know, primarily US entities, and then the international partners get a portion.

So, and and that's primarily because the US Foots the Majority of the Bill for the International Space Station. But the the the the Japanese Space Agency and also the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, They all have, you know, resources allocated to them during time periods on the station where they can also conduct conduct experiments and and they typically do sponsor experiments and they conduct them.

They just don't have as much resources allocated to them, if that makes sense. Yeah. No. It does. So the I and I don't know how much we've covered already the direct impacts of these experiments. You're number 4. I'm Yes. Think we covered a lot of it. But I I figured that, but there there's gotta be I'm I'm going a little further in my my head is spinning to okay. You did this spider experiment. What happened on Earth? You did this. What happened on Earth?

What are these true impacts that we're feeling? So I don't know if you've covered or plan to cover. I'm trying to go bigger to the larger Yeah. Future of humanity or future of all species on Earth.

Yeah. I mean, I think and I guess that was my point of the impacts is that you you can have a experiment by experiment impact where, you know, you look at some gene expression experiment and and you understand which genes were up regulated and which ones were down regulated as a result of being in microgravity. And you can try to, you know, figure out what that means. And then you have, you know, technology that's being developed, obviously, that, can be used for the benefit of station.

I mean, it was benefit of Earth. Right? So it's true that NASA has a lot of technology that has helped, improve things on earth. And even for us, like, when you miniaturize these systems, you're advancing the technology field in labs. You're a lot of these pieces of hardware are huge, like we talked about in the beginning. They're they're large and, you know, and if you can make them smaller, it takes less space. People have more ability to do things, when they have less space to do them in.

You know? And and then you have the kids that I was talking about. You know? You have the next generation of explorers. You're inspiring them. And I know that's kind of cliche, but it's true.

I mean, a simple experiment like a butterfly or spider experiment or even a jumping spider experiment or the a contest that's worldwide can expire a huge number of students to now go into, these types of fields to be the next explorers and, you know, the next adventurers because I really think that's part of exploring outside of our planet is you have to be part adventurer to do that.

So to me, and then, of course, you're advancing the scientific knowledge and of just the fields of all these different types of science. So it it just it's so hard to put it into words, but to me, it just impacts, you know, such a broad array of things from the very, you know, like this one child was impacted to we've impacted an entire field. We've impacted how people think about doing things in space.

You you've helped, inspire and get people to think more broadly about what could be in space, not just what is currently. And so, you know, it's it's hard to put into words, but it No. That that's okay. One that maybe this might help to give a little bit of traction here is the IP, the intellectual property for building the hardware. Is that owned by NASA? Is that owned by you? Do you release that to the general public as designs? Do you share that information with the world?

So now that there is now that you've learned how to miniaturize, do you give that away so that they can? Mhmm. And I would, the answer isn't clear. So most of the if we develop IP like our organization, there's other organizations like us. Typically, we own our IP. We're a little bit different because we're a nonprofit entity and we are part of a university. And so we do share a lot of our IP so that other people can learn from what we do. So we definitely do.

There are some, I would say, trade secrets that we keep secret. Only because this is our we're nonprofit, but it is our line of business. So we we wanna be able to continue to do this for a long time. And and there is competition in the field, and so we wanna be able to stay on the forefront of the competition. So it it's really both.

And I mean, one of the challenges that I've had, and I've already shared this with you that I've been in this industry, however you want to call it, I think life is everything I it's amazing how many things that we use every day are in space. So when we talk about space, I think the word denotes going to moon going to Mars going to Jupiter going on and on and on and exploration and everything else. And it's not that.

It's the my the mouse that I'm using is a space tech has space technology in it. The the call that we're doing, which is a Zoom call recording, that's space technology. My package that I'm still waiting for that has been 2 months in delay. I don't know why. Makes sense. But it it it it is being tracked by logistics firms that use space technology, GPS, and coordination, and our foods get this way.

And so everything that in a tier 4 country in the world, almost everything we do, you can't go through a day not being touched by space. So it's not really an industry. It's just where we are. Right. Yet NASA has I learned this at Ames, NASA Ames facility in Silicon Valley. NASA's not allowed to market. Right. They cannot go out and promote. They can educate, but they can't promote. Right.

And so the challenge that I'm having with these life sciences, this is my challenge, not like the industry has a challenge with mine, is I hear about these great experiments. They sound like they're doing something. They sound like, you know, you learned something that was exciting. You know, too bad our our, our zebra didn't come back. Yes. We did learn about the red the red guy fall smashing into a wall. Yeah. Great. And the and there's a lot of them.

We've had Charlie Bolden on the line, and there are pieces of them, but it's not something I hear about. It's not that I'm uneducated. And yet if you asked me to really give you 10 things that life sciences when it comes to these type of experiments or rodents or I couldn't, I can't name them except for those that you just gave me or the few that I've heard throughout these podcasts. I don't, I don't know. And so we could talk about it as being beneficial to all species on earth.

But at the same time, I draw blanks. And I don't think that's a positive for the space industry, if we're again calling it that. And I don't think it's positive for the possibilities unless there are better mechanisms to get this information out or, as you called it, you said, the direct impacts of these experiments outlined not in scientific papers, but for someone like me. Mhmm. I don't know if you agree with that sentence, that statement or not.

Well, I so, you know, I agree that, you know, the, the dissemination of this information, you know, isn't as broad as you would hope. But the other thing is, I would say, is that in terms of the life sciences, it's it's really baby steps, as opposed to giant footsteps. You know, it's like, let's go to the road and experiment, for example, where I talked about, you know, testing a countermeasure for bone loss. That countermeasure that we tested with that company is actually on the market now.

Well, is it on the market because of the experiment that they did on space station? No. But when they submitted their packet of information to the FDA, the data from that experiment was included in that information. So the the research that they did in space wasn't the entire reason that that, medicine is now on the market, but it was a piece of the reason why that medicine is on the market. Even if it was to exclude an option. Right. Or or it it showed that it had a benefit. Right?

So it had data that that contributed to the story of the development of that product. And and the other thing I would say is and and so to finish that thought. So a lot of the experiments that we're doing are small pieces to hopefully a bigger thing. You know, a big discovery, a bigger product discovery, but nobody but we're not there yet.

And we're not there yet because one, the space station, you know, while it's been around for 20 years, it's really only been in the last 10 years where it's really been open to do science, you know, and and more science. Like, every year we are able to do more and more science. But we're still not able to do as much science on the space station as you can do in your own lab, obviously, on the ground.

Because I can walk down the hall, get into my lab, and I can do, you know, set up 10 different experiments in one day. I obviously can't do that on the station.

And so part of it is developing the technology to allow us to do these types of experiments and to do them at a higher frequency, at a lower cost, and and be able to do iterative experiments so that if you find something interesting, it's not another 2 years until you can fly again to see, you know, to follow on with that experiment, to see if that result that you found that was interesting is in fact interesting. Whereas in your lab, you would do that within 2 months.

And so there's there is a logistical, component of this, which is why, you know, I think that we will, in terms of the life sciences, discover things from doing experiments in microgravity. It's just gonna take longer just because the logistics of doing it takes longer. It's interesting as you're bringing this up, and I you know this. The people who will eventually hear this don't know this, that I actually do no research before I do an interview. So you come to me with the information.

I'm really the student in the entire environment. So these are real true questions that are happening in real time, is that I had made an and the reason I would say that is I had made a misjudgment call. Because it's space, because there's a lot of technology and I hate to use that word, but rocketry through to life sciences to the International Space Station is the existing. I think it's easy to overlay on top of it that life science and experimentation is advanced.

Mhmm. And what you just said in all of this at the end, just a few seconds ago, what that said to me was I had I had given you a PhD in space. And the reality is if we were to give it relative terms, we're using PhDs on earth or skilled craftsman or whatever you want to call it. But what we're really doing in space is almost like a 1st grader getting used to and getting its legs. Mhmm. Is that a good way to say it? It's a good analogy with regards to, you know, life sciences.

I mean, I I maybe after all these years, we're up to 6th grade. Well and in certain places, but some would be less, some would be more, but we're not in university yet. We're not at this. We're I took the experiments to make them even bigger than they were. And Yeah. That that's just an assumption that I had made and I we all make assumptions. Right. And that's where go ahead. No. And I was gonna say, but it's not to say that we haven't done complex experiments.

There's been some very complex life science experiments done. It's just that the the quantity is not there. I feel like the quality is there now, and more and more of the quality gets better and better.

We've gone to from just being able to do things in glass test tubes in or in space to, you know, designing culture plates that if you put yourselves in that culture plate that's for space and you put them in a petri dish next next to it and you run an experiment on the ground that at the end of them, both of the cells in both conditions have the same exact end results. And so that's huge. So the quality is really is is really starting to get there.

Now we need to get the quantity and the throughput there. And I and I do know, and I it's kind of jumbling in my head because I do know that for experimentation from one of our guests, Yossi Amin, from SpacePharma, you they're creating a chip. And the chip has all sorts of experiments.

It could have 280 experiments in 1 chip, and a chip is a, a micro lab where materials are merged that are treated in a certain way, so you get all these experiments back, But it's not at the same level that I probably had made assumptions about. Mhmm. It's you know, and the chip and we've supported or it's called an organ on a chip. And, we actually have supported, an organ on a chip.

We have a system that supports organ on a chip and but that organ on a chip itself is new technology on the ground. So, so that's, you know, that's technology that's just coming along on the ground that we're now flying to space and trying to utilize in space, which we've made the system to support these chips and we're able to. But at the same time, that technology is still rapidly evolving on the ground. So it it's you know? And that and it's very exciting technology.

The whole point of an organ on a chip is to do, you you know, a lot of drugs are tested in animal models prior to going to humans, and and there really, are differences between obviously rodents and humans.

And so one of the ideas behind organ on a chip that goes back to what we're talking about, the tissues from different organs in your body is is that you could put, you know, some kidney tissue, some liver tissue, some heart tissue, some skin tissue, some brain tissue on one chip, and then you profuse a drug through. And the idea is that it now more closely represents the human body. And that's what those organ on a chips are really trying to get to. They're not there yet, but that's the goal.

Is So then it can eliminate animal testing if we're actually using okay. Yeah. It limit it eliminates animal testing and reduces the number of failures of drugs because there's lots of drugs that get tested in animals and they look very promising, but then they go to humans and there's issues. And so that the idea of that is it you can eliminate animal testing, but you're also testing in a model that's much closer to the human body.

And the because it's in microgravity, it allows that flotation component, which is a huge part. You're not in 2 d, you're in a, you're in 3 d, and actually you're in a 4 d environment. Time, space, location, there's actually 4 of them, Lengths, width, height, space, and time. And, and the other thing is, is while you're in that space environment, not only is the idea that, you know, you're, you're more replicating kind of what happens in the human body.

There are deleterious effects of the to the human body of being in space. So the ideas and some of them are, with regard not only bone and muscle loss, but also potentially, they think that, you know, it can impact how your cardio, your cardiac function is. Fluid shifts within your body. And so now you have these chips and now you're testing for a certain disease that is mimic in microgravity.

Like microgravity, when you culture these cells in microgravity, they if it's a cardiomyocyte, the idea is that it may start replicating the same issues that crew might have with cardiac function after being in microgravity for an extended period of time. So it's to use the microgravity as a disease model of potentially aging or bone loss, muscle loss, cardiac dysfunction, you know.

But those are all all of those things, in my opinion, with regards to microgravity are just they're on the cusp of being, you know, quantified and discovered how it really does impact these systems.

Changes or I wanna say not the changes, the tools that are going to be developed using space to improve it, not only human, but species on earth, done in a way through the leveraging of this capacity, this capability of being able to go into space and I hadn't really, I think we it's I think I talk more about or think more through these experimentations about humans.

Yet the same thing could be done to save a species on earth, that could be challenged with an environment or a disease or something that would not have been solved otherwise without space. You had brought up before we had started, we started talking about the previous podcast was 2 ago where Alex Landecker did a fantastic job about reproduction and sexuality in space. And you started to comment about sperm cells.

Mhmm. What were you going to and I cut you short, so anybody who's listening in, we don't normally talk to the audience, but you're here. Somebody's listening in. I'm bringing back a conversation where I brought talk about Alex doing a phenomenal job, and you started to share with me something about, sperm cells. What were you going to add? Well, I was, just adding that.

You know, we we I I mean, the idea is if you can do reproduction and one of the things is if you can reproduce in space, you know, how how does the microgravity environment you would need to know how it impacts the sperm cell? And we actually did an experiment with a scientist from Kansas State University where he was looking at, the motility and viability of both bovine sperm and human sperm. It really was the first time. Not really.

It was the first time that, an experiment of this type was done on station. And so what we did was we, flew up syringes of frozen sperm, which the crew thawed. They put them in this, bag that had reagents in it that would essentially and then the name of the reagent is escaping me at this moment in time. But what it did was it it it, started it basically kind of woke up the sperm and and made them start moving like they should.

And so then we had designed a slide that was contained that they could inject a sample of the sperm into. And then we video the on a microscope, we video image the sperm moving. And, you know, and yes, there were differences, between flight and ground. But the fact of the matter was the sperm did have, you know, potentially adequate motility and viability to, you know, re to to have an organism reproduce in space.

So it was very fascinating to see to see on, the large screen in our payload operations and command center. So but very cool. It's like a little bit of a toy. You You know? Like, hey. Look. We're gonna we wanna figure out if this will work Mhmm. And the implications of it because Alex had spoken highly about the fact that if we don't solve sexuality and reproduction, we can't go anywhere. Right. That's the end. The the the game is over. And he didn't say it in that way, but that's the cause.

If we cannot reproduce in space, if we cannot go someplace else and take care of, reproduction, it's not gonna happen. And in the case of these experiments on the International Space Station or in space that you're doing, they also show, I'm thinking more they do give us future possibilities. A lot of them, though, are really what's what is Earth's possibilities. Mhmm. And fascinating. Cool. I really love it. Is is there anything that we didn't discuss that I think that you think, you wanna add?

I think we covered a lot of grounds. I I never I don't normally ask that because but it just seemed like there's something I feel like I'm missing here that I would like to ask that I can't think of at the moment. I know I can always call you or anybody can call you, but this was this was great. I, personally, I I was able to connect a lot of dots.

Even what you just said about the organ and a chip and now the floating in three-dimensional space and now the ability to be able to test, now I get the reason for the organ and a chip. And, Project Moon Hat, we have many spin offs we're working on. One of them is a biotech business. Okay. And the, by you sharing it in this way, I was like, oh, wow. Now I get it. Now I get what the viability is, and now I understand how this could work.

And I also see, non International Space Station activity happening where vehicles will go to space, do the experimentation in space, not on the International Space Station, and then return back to Earth having done the experiment, no human interaction via robotics. Right. Mhmm. And that's a whole another, you know, manual versus automated robotics. You know? I mean, really, I feel like like what we talked about today is just, like, kinda just the talk of it.

You know, just the tip of the iceberg, really. I mean, there's so much more to discuss and there's so much more, like, pros and cons to doing things in certain ways. And and you're right. You know, in order to, improve throughput, you you we would have to automate, and that has a whole set of issues in and of itself. And and so there's just this field is so broad and there's so much to discover, and there's so much to talk about. I know I I talk we talked a lot about the spiders.

And, you know, when I talk about the spiders because, you know, a lot of people can relate to them and and, you know, it's it it helps demonstrate the problem. But but as we talked about the organ on the chip and the cell culture and the rodent research, there's so much more to the life sciences research. It's not just spiders in space. It's all of these other types of research that really, you know, the end goal is really to try to do these experiments to somehow improve life on earth.

It really is the point of these life science experiments. So I'm hoping we get there someday where we make some huge discoveries and, and we'll improve the planet. Well, and Project Moon Hut, we'll end it with this. Project Moon Hut's initiative is, as you heard in the beginning, is designing plans for us to live sustainably on the moon through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. And that's the development of the Mearth ecosystem.

But within that, you're going to ex we the first thing we have to do is accelerate earth's capabilities. If you think you would come from earth, then you go to atmosphere in low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, high earth orbit, you go to the moon. But to develop that with and then those ideas, those innovations, that paradigm shifting, which we went I went through today Mhmm. We turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

So built right into what we're trying to accomplish Right. As Project Moon Hut is exactly what you just shared. Mhmm. I mean, how do we improve the, in 40 years, we'll have 10,000,000,000 people on this planet. How do we ensure that we have a tomorrow that is a better, I hate to say campfire than we have today. So, this was fantastic. I really want to thank you, for taking the time. And I also wanna thank all of you out there who are continually adding to the list of listeners.

I know some of these go extremely long, yet at the same time, the feedback that we're getting is they're real. I mean, I don't start off with any questions. This was really Stephanie taking the time. I think it was over a month or a month and a half to figure out what she wanted to share and help me help you understand. So I want you to take thank you for taking the time to listen in. And I do hope that you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

The Project Moon Hut Foundation, which I just set, establish a box of the roof and the door on the moon. The accelerated development of Earth and space based ecosystem, and then take those endeavors paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. We're not just about the human species, but all species on this incredible planet that we live. So, Stephanie, is there one best single way to get, to connect with you?

Probably the best way is my email. And do you want me to give that to you? You could if you It's okay. I will. It's it's, Be like, oh, where is it? I'll have to look it up. It's, that's it's probably is the best way to get a hold of me. It's it's countrym atcolorado.edu. So it's [email protected]. And I too would like to connect with anybody who's interested. You can reach, me at [email protected]. You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moon hut or at goldsmith is my personal.

You can connect with us. We're on LinkedIn as Project Moon Hut Foundation. We're on Facebook, we do have an Instagram account, we really have been working on it. And we have a lot that is happening in the background at the present time. So there's going to be a lot more programs. There's a lot more activity. And I'm David Goldsmith. And thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the Age of Infinite.

Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes in which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into what we call ages. And you have just lived through an amazing experience of this information age. It's been an amazing ride. Now consider that you might now be living through another transformational age, the age of infinite. An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance by a redefining lifestyle consisting of of infinite possibilities and infinite resources.

The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of the future. Now our podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation. We were looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a Moon Hut, h u t. We were actually named by NASA, Project Moon Hut, through the accelerated development of an earth and space space ecosystem.

Then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations, and to turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring another amazing topic. We've had so many amazing guests on this series. The topic is the complex puzzles of life science experimentations in space and their impacts. And today we have with us Stephanie Countryman. How are you, Stephanie? I'm good. Thanks, David. Well, fantastic to have you.

Stephanie is the director of BioServe Space Technologies and a research associate at the Anne and H. J. Smith Aerospace Engineering and Science Department of the University of Colorado in Boulder. How we how I met Stephanie was I had been looking for life science individual, and I reached out and several people felt they were not as qualified. And the name that came back was this individual who we have today, Stephanie. And they said that this is the individual that should be on the program.

So it took several series. Many guests take multiple steps to get there. Stephanie is one of them. And so I personally am very excited to learn today. So, Stephanie, you have an outline for me today, I'm assuming. I do. Okay. How many points do we have just so I know in advance? I have 4 bullet points. Okay. What's number 1? There is no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. Experiment. Okay. Next. Making an unnatural environment, Experiment.

Okay. Next. Making an unnatural environment natural. Next. The art of achieving a successful space life science experiment. Science experiment. And next. And the broad impacts of these experiments. Of these experiments. Fantastic. So let's start with the first one. There's no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. Alright. Well, I wanted to start with this because, you know, David, we work with a lot of, scientists to support their experiments on space station.

And typically, we start out with a conversation on the phone talking about what type of experiment they're wanting to focus on and how they conduct it in their lab. And if I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, well, it's really a simple experiment because all we have to do is just do this. And we always stop them right there and say, okay, the first thing we're gonna have to do in this process is cross out the word just from your vocabulary and never say that ever again.

Because there's one thing I found in this business is that just there's nothing just about trying to translate a space like space life science experiment or a life science experiment into a space flight one. So So so before you go I'm sorry to cut you off very quickly. I didn't realize that you were a you didn't come up with the experiments and with the way you just said it. You are a an organization that they come to you and say or you go to them. I'm not sure you can explain.

You go to them or they go to you come to you when you say they say, I would like to do x, and then you help to convert, transform, make it happen. Is that That is correct. We actually do both. So we actually have, in house science, expertise, and we do some of our own science experiments. Some of which I probably talk a little bit about today. But we also support external researchers as well to, support their science experiments. So we do both.

So we do we have expertise on the science side, and we have expertise on the the translation side, how to translate that science into a space flight experiment. And then we have expertise on the hardware side, which is how do we make the hardware that will hold that experiment as we launch it to the space station. Okay. I I yeah. I never even thought about it in that way. So that's interesting. Okay. Great.

Yeah. So, so in order to understand this process, I think the first thing you have to do is think about, you know, what a life science lab looks like on the ground. So when we think about a life science lab on the ground, you know, it can support lots of different types of life sciences. And so, as you know, when we're talking about life sciences, we're talking about, you know, mammalian cell culture, small organism research, which could be fruit flies or spiders.

We're talking about looking at different types of bacteria. You know, anything that's essentially a living organism. So if you think about that life science lab, what's in there? Well, let's talk about all the equipment. There's incubators to keep things temperature controlled and alive. There's gas inside that incubator. If you're doing mammalian cell culture, there's 5% c o two.

There's freezers and refrigerators so that you can, keep all of your reagents, in a state so that when you want to use them, they, are, healthy and working the way that you think they should. All the nutrients haven't gone bad. You also have refrigerators and freezers so that when you're done doing your experiments that you can, freeze or refrigerate them so you can do your later analysis.

There's micro, microscopes, cameras, biosafety cabinets for doing sterile work, and then you just have the equipment. You have petri dishes or multi well plates or maybe some type of, a container that is gas permeable, maybe has a lid that you can keep loose on it so that you can grow all of your, cultures or your organisms that you're studying. So think about that lab. Now you have to think about all of those pieces of equipment are pieces of equipment that we need up on the space station.

But, So so just one clarity, my mind, unfortunately, even though I have a degree in biology, my mind immediately went to chemistry lab. Mhmm. If because I think that's probably a more visible image that we see more often. Uh-huh. How different is it from a chemistry lab as to a biology lab, life sciences lab? Well, I I think there there there's, there's a lot of similarities in chemistry labs.

You have, you know, you're you're you're pouring and you're pipetting and you're mixing and you have heater plates and stir plates and, you have fume hoods to if you're working with caustic chemicals. So they're they're very similar with regards to the different types of equipment. There may be some specific equipments that are for a chemistry lab that you may not see in a, cell culture lab and the same thing like in a cell culture or life science lab.

You you'll have, like, the biosafety cabinet, which is really a cabinet designed so that you can work with infectious organisms in a sterile environment. You typically wouldn't have that in a chemistry lab, but you'd have a fume hood that is pulling, you know, you're working in the fume hood and that fume hood is pulling any, toxic fumes out and away from you. Okay. So, so so they're very similar.

Okay. I just for my imagery's sake, I wanted to make sure because I know there's differences when you have a living organism as compared to not. It's I was just trying you had different types of freezers. You have pre pre and post freezers. So I wanted some clarity. So thank you. Okay. Yeah. So now so now think about needing all of that equipment to do an experiment on the space station. Right?

So except the space station has rules and guidelines that we have to follow and necessarily so so that we can keep the crew safe. We can keep the vehicle safe, that we don't adversely affect the ECLSS system, which is the environmental control and life support system of the station because all of that is operating in a in a in a nice balance to keep, the crew alive and to keep the station healthy and operating as it should.

So now you take that equipment and you let's just take an incubator, for example. An incubator on the ground is, you know, about 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide and 3 feet in-depth. So it's about 3 cubic feet. Well, there's not a lot of space on the space station. Think about now miniaturizing that to about a foot and a half by a foot and a half.

So all of the equipment that you would need in a life sciences lab now has to be modified to not only, be miniaturized, but also to, be, safe to operate on the station and also, be built so that it operates continuously with very little, support technically. So if it breaks down, there's not a whole lot you can do on station. Does that make sense? Yeah. The the you're creating a better refrigerator. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

But you're trying to do it, and it's a difficult, environment, really, because of, not only in the miniaturization, but then all the safety guidelines that we have to follow. So when, you're building something that's powered on the station, there's all kinds of, things that we have to do in order to get that approved to launch to the space station and and operate it on the space station. And that includes things like, electromagnetic, interference testing.

So you wanna make sure that when we plug that into the station, we now don't interfere with everything else operating on the station, nor does everything operating on the station interfere with that piece of equipment. So these are just some of the things in terms of the large pieces of equipment, that we have to think about and have to have available on the station in order to operate it like it's a life science or chemistry lab. So is, are you using, are, is there shared equipment?

So that you you say, look, I wanna do this, and they say, hey. We've got this 1 by 1.5 by 1.5 by 1.5 cube refrigerator in, or do you have to have everything that you're doing for your experiment go up for that experiment? That's a it's a good question. So it's actually a little bit of both. So let's take the biosafety cabinet, for example, that you would have in the lab to protect yourself if you're working with infectious organisms.

So on the space station, we have what's called the life sciences glove box, and that's actually a facility that was built by NASA and is offered by NASA. So that's a shared facility. So we are launching an experiment that wants to do, and we'll get to it, some fluid exchanges where we're breaking levels of containment, which I'll talk about in a minute, then, we do that inside of the life sciences glove box. And it's exactly, the glove box portion is exactly what it sounds like.

The crew, in order to protect the crew, this glove box is exactly that. They put their hands into gloves, and now they operate the experiment inside of this sealed box so that, you know, they're protected from any, organism that you may be, studying. And also it protects the vehicle from any fluids that may, you know, be It's it's like the movie. It's like the movies. Mhmm. When you see when there's an Ebola breakout or COVID breakout, their people are working on it.

This is probably a question you you may or may never have been asked. Mhmm. In space, how do you clean it? See now that's a great question as well because typically in a life sciences lab, you just, you know, get your ethanol bottle and you just spray, spray, spray or your isopropyl spray, spray, and then you just wipe it down. Well, in space, on the on the ISS, the, environmental control life support system can only handle a small amount of, alcohols.

So ethanol, isopropyl, there's only a very small amount of that that can be, released into the atmosphere in order for that, system to scrub it. So we're not allowed to use any of that. So we have to find alternatives. And this is part of the whole puzzle of trying to figure out how to conduct these experiments, in a manner that is as close as possible to the way we would do it on the ground.

So we have found things, different types of biocide wipes or other types of sterilization wipes that now are compatible with the science, but allow us to clean that space. So one, we clean the space by having these biocide wipes, which the crew puts inside the glove box then opens them up and now they wipe everything down. But the life sciences glove box also has a UV license, UV light system just like you would in a biosafety cabinet.

There's a UV light system that you turn on after you use it and you leave it on for X period of time and the longer you leave it on, the more variety of organisms it would potentially kill. So before we use the life sciences glove box, they always run that UV light for about 3 hours.

And then once, we're getting ready to start an experiment inside that glove box, the crew then uses those biocide wipes and wipes everything down so that we can try to keep everything as sterile as possible, even though technically, it's not a sterile environment. Does that make sense? Yeah. No. It makes it makes tons of sense because I'm thinking you go with a spray bottle and and it's floating all over the place, and that's Exactly.

That's not an easy thing to clean, and I'm assuming that many of the astronauts are not skilled in as their expertise life sciences. So you're more or less giving them instructions as to what has to be done to make sure that your experiment goes as planned. Yes. And that's exactly right. And a little bit later, I was gonna talk a little bit about that crew training. And and and think about it in a life sciences lab, you know, the people that work in there are typically trained.

Now you have an experiment that you want to conduct, that you spent the last 2 years of your life designing, and you find somebody on the street. Maybe it's not quite that bad, but you find somebody in your building and you say, hey, come here, I want you to do this experiment for me. Yes. Now you're putting that in the hands of somebody else. So it's definitely, you know, there is a an art to conducting these experiments successfully.

And then if later you can also go over the transfer of knowledge as to how it's been how you the education, of the astronauts, because I'm assuming there's an educational part so that they know what they're supposed to do, and they do it on time. And they do it the way it's expected. Okay. Yeah. There absolutely is. So yep.

So if you get an idea about the equipment that's needed, then I just wanna talk about, quickly about the, you know, the smaller pieces of equipment needed to let's let's just give an example, of a, a cell culture experiment. So, again, we're talking to our scientists, and they'll say, okay. Well, I just wanna launch this 12 well plate. I'll load it with my cell cultures and the media.

We'll launch it to station, and then all we have to do is a media exchange on it and then stick it in the freezer. Well, I don't know if you know what a 12 well plate looks like, but it's essentially, something that's about the size of a cell phone. And it has, you know, 12 round circular, wells in it that hold about, you know, 3 milliliters of liquid. And then it has a lid that sits on top of it, but the lid just sits there. It's not sealed.

It's not it it can come on and off very easily, and that allows for gas exchange to occur into those cell cultures. So it's it's like, the best way to I would say is because I I seen these. It's like an ice cube tray that are tiny little wells that you'd put in something else sent to. So it's like a small ice cube tray. Is that a good way to analogize it?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then just think about, you know, setting on something on top of setting on something on top of that ice cube tray just so you don't have, you know, stuff falling into your wells. Mhmm. So and then and then that goes into an But in space, you know, think about, well, first of all, for a space station, we have what's called levels of containment. So NASA, depending upon what organism you're flying, you have to have levels of containment.

Well, liquids always have to be in one level of containment. Right? Because if you get to space and you don't have your liquids contained, and you don't have a small enough well for good surface tension, your liquids are just going to start floating away. Right? There's no there's And that's that's what that's even putting a lid on something has to be snapped down. Yeah. Exactly. And think about the launch effects now.

If you just put that, you know, ice cube tray, that 12 well ice cube tray with know, just a lid on top of it, and you fill it with water and you launch it on a rocket, you know, you can imagine what you'll have when you get to station. So, you know, so now what you have to do is figure out how to contain a cell culture experiment completely so you have it in a completely sealed environment, but you still have to have appropriate gas exchange because those, cells are living. They're alive.

They have to breathe. And so part of what we do is designing the hardware that can support that cell culture experiment and support it as close to how it's supported on the ground in terms of how the cells function. Because we don't want when we fly an experiment in space, we don't want the effects that a scientist may seem to be a result of the hardware.

We don't want it to be a result of the cells having to now live in a sealed container when that's not the way that they normally would do the cell culture on the ground. We want whatever result they see to be a result of those cells, being in microgravity and being exposed to microgravity. So so we designed the sealed container. And then what happens is once we get to space, now we, ourself and I don't think I ever finished answering your question.

BioServe actually has our own incubator facilities. So the question of, is it NASA or is it each organization's own facilities? It's both. So NASA has some facilities that we use, but then we have our own facilities, and we have a smart incubator on station that we communicate to from the ground, from our paler operations and command center. And that provides appropriate temperature control for, any type of life science experiment for the most part.

It it can, hold things at minus 5 Celsius all the way up to 43 Celsius. But for cell culture, we would now put this cell culture that's sealed, and it actually if it's human cells has to be in two levels of containment. So now it's in a sealed culture plate, and then that culture plate is goes into another box that's sealed, but the whole thing allows for appropriate gas exchange again so those cells can stay alive.

And then once it gets to station, that goes into our incubator and it incubates for x period of time. When those cells, what now that it's in a sealed system and it happens on the ground as well, those cells are, using up the nutrients that's in their media. So at some point, you have to change that that, media. So now you have a sealed system, but somehow you have to get the media out of that sealed system, the old media, and put in the new media.

But you can't break the seal of the system, and you also don't wanna drain it because if you drain, a sealed container on space, the air that you would potentially let into the system now doesn't do what it normally does on the ground. Right? I mean, when, if you have a sealed container on the ground and you wanna pull air off, you would just, you know, hold it so all the air goes to the top, and then you would inject a needle and pull out that air and everything would be done.

But in space, if you have some air in your container, it doesn't matter which way you move it. The the bubbles just stay wherever they are. So there's no so anyway, so you have to figure out how now to do media exchanges dealing with the sealed system, keeping everything sterile and dealing with air that could be introduced, when you're, doing that media exchange.

And so with our cell culture plates, what happens is the crew now goes into that incubator, they pull out that box that's holding the plates, They put it into the the, life sciences glove box, and we have what we call support kits that are flown with that. And this is the other thing that you have to think about, the media. Typically, the media that, a scientist would use to, feed their cell cultures, they just pull a a a big, you know, 500 milliliter container out of their refrigerator.

They warm it up in a water bath, and then they, pour a little bit into a 50 milliliter tube, and then they pipette some of that out, and then they pipette that into that fresh media into their cultures. Well, everything I just said there can't be done in space. Right? You can't have You you use the term media. Yep. Why is it called media? So does this doesn't sound like the right word? Yeah. It's it's medium or the you can say media or medium. So it's it's the, material.

That's why they call it media. They think rather than media like the news media, it's media. Like, it's it's, a medium. It's a substance. Right. I would understand medium, but so the it's the equivalent of medium. Mhmm. Okay. I just was because to give us something a new word, media means in my mind that there's some other, significant difference between the other, but you're saying it's the same thing.

It's just a medium that's being created that needs to be injected in so that the cells survive, thrive, and do whatever you're looking to do in the experiment. Right. Exactly. So so now that process, you know, we have to translate that into how we can do that in space. So what we typically do is all the medium, I'll say I've nice media or medium that we're using.

We fill up the appropriate size, syringes, that are, you know, syringes that you would see in a life science lab, and we put caps on them. And then that all goes into the life sciences glove box. And now our sealed culture plate, the crew takes that out of a box, the box that's the second level of containment. They take it out, and there's ports on this culture plate that are sealed until you connect a syringe to it.

And so they'll connect the filled medium syringe to one of the ports because there's 2 ports in this culture plate and then they connect a waste syringe to the outlet port. And now what they do is they pull a little bit of the old media out of the culture and they push in a little bit of the fresh and they pull and push and they pull and push until all of that fresh medium has been added to the culture. And about 80% of the old medium has been pulled out, and it's now in a waste syringe.

And then I I'm trying to visualize this. Mhmm. It I'm I'm seeing a space that is contains the cells or whatever you're looking to work with floating around. Mhmm. And therefore, how do you ensure that you don't get the actual culture, the cell the culture itself? How do you make sure that you're just getting the medium? Right? There I'm picturing movies where you have air pockets all over the place and, yeah, and there's little bubbles floating.

How do you make sure that they're not separated or you're taking the wrong particulate out? Another great question. So so there's 2 types of cell cultures that you, that we support. 1 is an adherent cell culture, and that's where the cells are actually growing attached to the bottom surface of that culture plate. And then the other type is the suspended cell culture, and these are cells that are floating, inside of the media and not attached to anything. So you're right.

If you do just immediate exchange on those suspended cell cultures, you very well could pull all of the cells out. So now that's part of the puzzle. How what do you do to address that, right, in space? Because it's easy on the ground because even on the ground, when you do suspended cell culture, those little cells, even though they're suspended, they float down towards the bottom of the cell culture plate.

Right. So and how did I before you get to the answer of it, please don't forget to give the answer. Yep. What's an example of a suspended environment? What on earth is suspended? Right. Well, I mean, I know that if you sneeze, something stays for a period of time and can float down or there's wind or some type of activity that can create a suspended particle. But I never thought in a closed environment, it wouldn't all eventually fall to the ground. Right. And it does.

And and it's really one of the reasons to do cell culture in space. And particularly with, there's reasons to do both adherent and suspended cell culture. But suspended cell culture in space, it's really the only place that you can do an environment that's totally quiescent. That, because on the ground what they do is they will, either just let them settle. They don't necessarily attach to the plate, but they let them settle. So a lot of times they put them on shaker tables.

So they're in their culture plates and they're on a shaker table that just gently continuously shakes the culture so those cells stay in suspension. Sometimes they have a stir bar inside of the culture where just every so often it spins and then it makes the cultures, suspended. There are different types of culture plates on the ground that, encourage the cells not to attach.

And so so, yes, it's it's definitely, difficult to keep cells in suspension on the ground, and that is one of the reasons to do suspended cell culture in space because the thought is that it can more closely mimic what's happening with your cells in your body.

Okay. Mhmm. So that statement and then itself itself is a challenge for me because, unless it's a liquid or being brought in through your lungs, it's really never it's suspended, but it's not suspended the same way your body would be suspended. Right. You're you're right on that. But what it does is it allows the cultures in suspension to grow in three dimension, which when they're adherent or on the ground, it's hard to keep some and and cells in your body grow in three dimension. Right.

Because they're sitting in a fluid bath that allows it to be able to grow in any or example being in the ocean. Mhmm. You you it can grow in any dimension it wants. Once it's on the floor, it's gonna grow in half of the half of the dimension, half of a 360. Okay. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yep. So the idea of suspended cell culture is that, you know, you're replicating what's going on in the body by keeping those, allowing those cells to grow in three dimension.

And and the other thing is is that when you grow them in three dimension, the thought is is that you're more closely replicating, you know, say some of the different organs in your body. So say, a lot of research is done on the heart using, the heart cell, which is called a cardiomyocyte.

And so having, you can actually grow, cardiomyocytes in three dimension that are functional in the sense of that they're beating like your heart is Not functional in the sense that they're pumping necessarily pumping blood through, you know, something else. But you can have, little they're like little teeny three-dimensional, you know, heart tissues floating around. And they're beating Does the the actual myocyte pump? It beats. Really? Not yet.

Yes. You can make, we actually just did a, experiment up on station with, it wasn't cardi it it was cardiomyocytes, but they were seeded, which means they were inserted into these collagen tissues. Yeah. And then they start growing. And what they do is they make that it's called an engineered heart tissue. It makes that tissue start beating. And so we have video of the little engineered heart tissues. They're all beating up on orbit.

So the in our in our body, the heart cells, the myocytes, are, I'm gonna use terrible words, but please excuse me on this. They are designed to be a actively pumping or beating cell type to perform its function as an aggregate of the whole heart. Yes. I said that right? Yes. Yep. They they are designed. They are programmed to beat. And and, you know, you have to give them the correct media and nutrients in order to start that.

But you can even have, and we've done this experiment as well on station where we had 2 dimensional, cardio, cardio, a 2 dimensional, culture of cardiomyocytes, and that that will beat as well. So you can and what happens is they start they if you look at it, and it's the same with a three-dimensional culture as it is with a two dimensional culture.

If you look at it through the microscope, when the cells are first, kind of joining for lack of better words, joining together and becoming one culture instead of a bunch of different separate cells. In the early stages, you can see those cells are start to beat, but they beat at irregular rays. They beat at different. They're not in synchrony. But as that culture matures because of the, communication between the cells, once they're touching each other, it starts beating in synchrony.

And so you can see, in a two dimensional culture, you can see one side of the cultures beat, which then kind of ripples through the whole culture, and you can see it start becoming synchronous. And then it's the same thing with the engineered tissues. Once they start beating, which it takes about a week after you've formed these tissues, the whole tissue, the experiment we did there, they were on posts, flexible posts.

So when the tissue, when the cells beat, the whole tissue contracted and you could see the little posts flexed because we're, you know, they were actually, you know, essentially little heart tissues. Okay. So you're gonna give me a little heart lesson here. Sorry. The heart is continuously beats. We don't know why it continue why it goes and why it stops to a in terms of the those larger the universe itself, like this thing continues to go. I didn't realize that they beat. Uh-huh.

When we look at other as there any other part of the body that does the function that it's supposed to do when it's not part of the larger whole? Let me give you an example. If I'm not clear, are does a lung cell exchange oxygen without the aviolis and not the the system setup? Does the liver cell detox by itself? Does the brain, axi the I mean, I'm I'm you know what I'm asking?

Yeah. I know what you're asking, and and I will preface it to say with that I am not the expert in all of these different types of cells. But I can tell you that, you know, like, these cardiomyocytes, they're not actually they're beating, but they're not necessarily pumping because it doesn't have all of the components, all of the musculature that's required to actually pump something.

Maybe someday, and that is the idea that someday you can make, you know, quote, artificial organs out of stem cells. So they're not really artificial. They're just made in a lab as opposed to, you know, you're being born with your heart. But so they don't so it's not really doing the pumping of the blood, but it is beating. And it's the same thing with other organs in your body, which is the idea of trying to get three-dimensional tissues.

The idea is that a three-dimensional tissue more closely represents what is happening in your body. And when you, you know, say do a drug study, because this is how they do it on the ground. Right? They they have, you can have a 2 dimensional. Let's just say you have a 2 dimensional culture of kidney cells. And then you wanna see how drugs impact those different drugs impact themselves.

And so you add, a drug to that two dimensional culture, and then you may do some genomic analysis or metabolomics, you know, transcriptomics. You may do some type of analysis to look at how that drug affected those cells. The idea is that that can translate to how the drug would affect your kidney in your body. But people think that the 2 dimensional structure of cell culture on the ground is not necessarily, well representative of a three-dimensional organ in your body.

Hence, the reason to try to do three-dimensional. So the idea is that now if you have a three-dimensional tissue of kidney and you add, drugs to it, because that three-dimensional, tissue of kidney may have several different types of cells in it because each of your organs have a variety of cell culture cells within them.

That that that more closely So so to tie this back, the one reason for BioLife Sciences is a, in theory, is a better reaper a better representation of the biological systems that would exist in I'm tying this together. I'm a little slow. Oh. We're tying it together because life sciences, which is biologicals or or living organisms, you're that can't be reproduced the same way on earth. So space gives us that three-dimensional perspective, data, analysis that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

Right. Or maybe it gives us a better model for three-dimensional. Yeah. That's right. Improved over what we would have. So the 2 would give us 1, but this one level could be by a factor of 15%, but 15% could be the difference between living and dying. Right.

Exactly. So Okay. And so then the idea back to even what I was discussing with the post to the hardware is now, you know, now we can if if space provides a good model for, representing three-dimensional tissue And also which I haven't even talked about provides a model of different types of disease processes that occur on the ground potentially. Now we wanna be able to make that hardware tying this back to the hardware.

You wanna be able to make hardware that supports that and doesn't impact that. That you wanna be able to be studying strictly the microgravity environment. You don't wanna be studying how, you know, your little three d spheres or cardiomyocytes are are reacting because they're in type some type of, piece of hardware that they don't like. Is it about as No. No. No. So you yeah.

You're you're a combination of analyzing what the actual experiment is while simultaneously, negating all the posit possible reasons for the experiment to not be indicative of a true condition. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So those and that's why I say that, you know, there's no such thing as a simple space life science experiment. It it takes go ahead. Where can you give me an example of where you went wrong or how you've like, I mean, 2 things. 1, how expensive is this?

And 2, have you I've gotta believe that this team, so you have been a part of the actual of doing it wrong. You just missed the boat. You got it up there and we just made that mistake. And because of that, the data is useful, but not as much. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've I've been doing this for over 20 years, and our center has been around for 37 years.

So we've certainly had our share of, you know, I hate to call them failures, but, you know, anomalies is really the word in the, in the space business. And, you know, and and you you can have a whole range. You can have a range where maybe something didn't go quite the way you wanted it to the range of things going, you know, horribly wrong. And so there's a there's a huge range of, you know, things that can happen in space. Really. So what's an example of a horribly wrong?

Well, so this is this is, this is a life. I can think of 1. So this 2. There was a, we actually support a lot of K through 12 educational experiments. And so we have this experiment, that was, butterflies in space. And the idea was, can, can, without gravity, can an organism, like a butterfly, go through complete metamorphosis? And, so we had, and it was a K through 12 educational experiment.

So this is one where in house of BioServe, we, we work with the organism, which kinda brings me to our next point in bullet point. But we work with the organism to design the habitat to, to be able to successfully keep it alive and then through its entire life cycle. And of course we tested that all on the ground. And so when we got to space, now I have hundreds of kids watching. We had a camera on it. We're watching it in real time. We're, we're putting that on a website.

And so now I have hundreds of kids, in their classrooms where they have they're watching this happen. They have experiments running in their classrooms, and these caterpillars are eating their food every day. And pretty soon they go to, make their chrysalis. And, as they're forming their chrysalis, they all go to the top of the, interestingly enough, we go to the top of the habitat. They hang down and they start forming their chrysalis.

But instead of forming their chrysalis, they all dried up and died. And it was, like, ho ho what? You're like, what? Because, you know, you you do these experiments in the spaceflight hardware over and over again on the ground to ensure that you, you know, it's an iterative process and you do it over and over again and you and you, you know, so that you at least have a, you know, a a very high level of confidence that you're going to be able to conduct it successfully on the ground.

And, and and they didn't they all died. And and so it's something that when we came back, you know, we did a bunch of testing with it and everything to try to figure it out. And what we figured it out was I I had decided that, I should for the space flight experiment, I should get a a fresh batch of food because, you know, we wanna have everything as pristine and as good as possible for the space flight experiment. Well, it turned out that that fresh batch of food was contaminated. Oh, wow.

So I've always learned that we always do a big test, prior to the space flight. And we do a big test on the ground in the, in the configuration that we're gonna use for the space flight. And so what I've learned is if there's something like that, that we're gonna use for space, then I use it in that last big test too, to ensure there's no issues. So there's a bunch of little kid there's a bunch of children who've been, like, damaged for life. Well, funny.

So funny because this was part of something I was gonna say later in terms of the broader impact, but I might as well just talk about it now, like, broader impacts. Was so, I had sent out an email to all the teachers saying, you know, I'm so sorry that this happened, blah blah blah.

And I have one of the teachers, actually several of the teachers respond and say that their kids were super excited about it because in their classrooms, their butterflies, their caterpillars, all formed chrysalises successfully and all formed butterflies. And so they all felt like they were just a little bit superior to the engineers.

And and so and and the other thing they said was it was an incredibly, great learning experience for the students to see that not everything always goes the way that you want it to. Right. It's not the it's not the plate. It's not this, whitewashed or not whitewashed, but Yeah. This fabulous mirror that we see that things go well. Right. You said you had a second one that I I do wanna bring up. Now I remembered how I got to you.

I I was trying to figure out where I had read an article about spiders in the International Space Station. And we brought this on our first conversation and how the spiders had, they had positioned themselves well, on Earth, a normal spider has a web. And it's a little bit off center where the center is. And they they come from the top and they go down and they would get to the center. That's how they would capture their prey.

But I think I had read that in this situation, even being in space, the spiders were using light as an orientation, not just gravitational polar positioning. And that the the center of the spider web was more central as compared to the way it was on earth. Mhmm. And that's what got me excited about finding someone involved in life sciences and space. That's where we got. So I don't know if I said that well. Yes. You did.

And actually, I think that kinda ties into my second bullet point of how you make an unnatural environment natural. Okay. And and because I really wanted to talk about the spider experiments that we've conducted Oh, perfect. In regards to this. So, you know, one of the things that we wanna do when we fly these, experiments to space and particularly when we're flying these small organisms and we wanted to see about behavior, like, can a spider spin an orb web in space?

You know, we wanna make an environment again that's really as natural for them as possible so that they exhibit the behaviors that they would normally exhibit on the ground. Right? And so with this, we we actually did 2 different spider we did 2 different spider experiments. And, the first one that we did, you know, what what we wanted to do was because these, it's about well, we did one on the shuttle. Trying to organize my thoughts.

We did we we did one on the space shuttle that launched on the space shuttle, and we did one that launched on the, Dragon capsule to the space station. Yeah. And those two vehicles have a little bit different requirements. Right? So the Space Shuttle 1, you hand over your hardware to NASA. They load it on the Space Shuttle, and within a couple of, days, it's in space. Right? And so we we actually conducted the first experiment on the space shuttle.

And then with the SpaceX vehicle, you hand your experiment over to NASA, and it can be 5 to 7 days before it's, you can get eyes on it. So one of the things yeah. So one of the things we had to do with the first, with the spider experiment was we had to figure out, okay, how do we contain this spider so it doesn't start building webs before we can get a camera on it. Right? Because we don't want we wanted to catch it adapting to the, spaceflight environment.

We didn't want to, catch it after it already adapted. Because once it launches like showing showing up after the baby's born. Right. Exactly. So exactly. That's good. That's okay. Keep in mind. I apologize for the yeah. I'm sorry, honey. I missed it. Well, that's right. There's yeah.

And, so, you know, so what we had to do was we had to contain the little spider, in a in a little cubbyhole for, lack of a better word for in a little cubby hole and, but also keep it alive in that cubby hole until we needed it, you know, to be released and then into its environment. And the environment has to be, while we have to contain them. Right?

I mean, you have plastics or you have metals, and those aren't necessarily something that, you know, is conducive in a microgravity environment necessarily of a spider walking on. So Oh, okay. Because, just because, with low gravity, they're not gonna get the same traction Right. When they're okay. Yeah. And so, you know, so we add, we do testing with different types of materials, that we can, put into the habitat that would make the, you know, organism more quote comfortable.

Obviously, a spider isn't thinking higher level like that, but you want it to be able to move around easily. And so for us, we use balsa wood, which, you know, has some gripping capability. Because because with the, you know, plastics, it's so slippery. There's not necessarily any gripping and you don't know if it's just gonna float off of that, you know, float off of the plastic as opposed to being able to kind of grip it.

They can obviously lay a a web anchor with their silk, but they can't grip with their legs. So we did blossom wood. And, so anyways, so, and our first flight experiment, and this kind of goes back to things going wrong, we actually launched 2 spiders because we thought, okay, well if one of the spiders, doesn't want to come out of its cubby hole or, dies, we're going to launch 2. And so we launched 1 in the, the one that we really wanted to study.

We, we want, we launched that one in the primary section of the habitat and we launched the second one in a little in the little cubby hole. Well somehow, right before launch, that one in the cubby hole, there was just like the smallest little, space between the door of the cubby hole and the wall. And that spider squeezed through there and went out into the, main compartment of the habitat. So now we have 2 spiders inside of the main portion of the habitat.

Yeah. And typically, spiders aren't necessarily friendly towards each other. You know, spiders are they're really kind of they may. You may find multiple spiders in an area, but each one has their own space. Right? So so you don't you don't sit down with them before you send them up and give them instructions. Like, please stay in your cubby hole. When we get to this point, you come out. Don't do anything bad in the cubby hole.

And by the way, if you run into your friend, we want you to play nice. You don't do that, I'm assuming. Nope. You don't be you don't have, like, a survey that they have to fill out to see if they're behaviorally ready for this type of test? Exactly. It's the crazy I thought I thought this was more like science really experiments, but I guess it's kinda random. You just put them together. Exactly. So that was, so then it we thought, oh, man.

And we saw this right when we were turning over, and it was too late to do anything because, again, that container is sealed. Yeah. So you saw this on the ground? Yes. We saw it right before. You saw it before it even got off. So now you're like, oh my god. We don't know what's gonna happen. Exactly. And it and it you'd and it was just too late because, again, these are sealed containers. They're, you know, they you can't you don't just snap a latch and open them up.

It's they're screwed shut, essentially. And so, we had to let it go. And and, and so we it got to station, and we got it under the camera. And, we this is a long story. That's okay. Go ahead. I wanna hear it because I I the store I had heard a little bit about this. I don't know where. Maybe it was something I was reading when I was first looking at the this these, those articles. And I thought this happened all in space, but the fact that it happened on the ground, it that's a panic mode.

Like, we we screwed up, and we have no clue. And it's it's like going to bed at night and saying, I shouldn't have sent that letter. I don't know why I sent that letter. This is gonna be a big issue. You wake up in the morning and say, don't worry about it. Right. Okay. So, yeah, tell me the tell the whole story. So so, you know, so it gets to station. It gets in front of the camera. And the reason the the spider really hadn't we hadn't released any food because here's the other thing, right?

You have to have spiders will build webs if they don't have food because they are trying to catch food. But eventually, if they don't have food, they'll stop building webs because, they obviously need food to live, but they just they stop having kind of the stimulation to do that. So we had little fruit flies larvae because, these spiders can, catch fruit flies. They were small spiders. So we, in the bottom of the habitat, had a different little habitat specifically for the fruit flies.

And once it got to station, the cover on that habitat was pulled off by the crew member. And now that allowed any fruit fly larvae in that section to kind of come out, you know, form little. They also go through a metamorphosis and, form a little cocoon and then hatch as a fly and, and come into the habitat where the spiders were so that they would have food.

So those flies started coming in and, lo and behold, one of the spiders so when we first got the camera on it, you couldn't really see any of the spiders. It looked they were tucked up. Each one of them was in a separate corner, kinda tucked in their own corners. But pretty soon, one of the spiders came out and spun a web, and it was a mishmash of web. It was just webbing everywhere, and it was hard to tell, because we didn't have the camera continuously running.

So it was hard to tell whether both spiders actually came out and just made, like, it was like a cross hatch of webbing. It was not an orb web at all. But then pretty soon, one of the spiders started you know, the spiders eat their eat their web is how they take down their web every day. They Oh, really? Every day? Yes. Typically, spiders will rebuild their web every day and they and they basically eat their silk and then produce more silk.

So they they eat it to because the web becomes less functional or they eat it because they're hungry? It's just they they take it down. They're taking it down and they're they're eating it because it's, I should know the answer to that, but it they're basically eating that because it's it's a lot of nutrients. Think of it as nutrients. Yeah. I that's what I mean. It's that it's food, but they don't take down the whole thing, do they?

They take down the whole thing or just pieces of it and replace it? They'll take down the whole thing. Really? Yes. So, like, they wake up and say, let me take this all down, start again. Yeah. After a certain amount of time, they will. They take down their webs, and then they rebuild it. And usually what they'll do is, you know, at a certain time of day, they'll take down their web, and, and it depends on the spider because not all spiders are orb weavers, of course.

But, for an orb weaving spider, it will be, typically, it can be, it can bite be either really. They can be building them in the evening in the in the, you know, dusk hours, or they build them in the dawn hours, typically. All I'm thinking about is I'm thinking about a street merchant. You know, they they go they end of the day, they take down their whole display. Everything they've spent all the time, they go home, they come back the next morning, and they set their whole display up again.

And they read so Every day. Yeah. I I I bet if we did a survey of a 100000 people that there would be 3 who say, no. No. No. No. I take it down every day. Yeah. Yeah. Never knew that. That's great. You know, and there'll be times where for whatever reason, a spider doesn't do that, but typically, they take it down every day and build a a fresh one. Okay. So so this spider came out, and she's she's, and and, also, if you didn't know, most, of the spiders that you see on webs are females.

They're either females or young males. The males, once they get older, they don't build webs. They only look for females. The females are the ones that build the orb webs. So they're work there's they're working as a spider, and they're working in as a human.

Yep. Yep. So so she'll, so she'll spin, so she started eating all the web, and then pretty soon, lo and behold, she built an orb web that was way better than the crisscross cross web, but it wasn't quite as perfect or, you know, as a web that you would see on the ground. But it's like, wow. She she did pretty good. She's learning. She's learning orientation to space.

And and what spiders do when they build an orb web is the radii of the web, which are kind of like the anchoring lines, they they drop typically, what they do is they'll be on a tree branch or, you know, underside of your house or whatever, and they set an anchor with their web with the silk, and then they let basically let go and drop down, and then anchor their line somewhere. And then they crawl back up, and then they move over, and then they lay a line, and then drop down.

So they use gravity, right, to lay a lot of those lines. And, obviously, in space, there is no gravity. So we watched her, and what she did was she would lay an anchor line, and then she tried to let go. Right? She let go, and then she just spun there and didn't and and was basically just spinning spinning in the habitat without holding on to anything. So she got back to the wall. You know, she kind of bumped back into the wall, grabbed it, then she would let go again and she wouldn't drop down.

So then what she did was she laid her anchor line. She crawled all the way down the side of the habitat all the way across the bottom, laid her anchor line, and then climbed up her anchor line. And then she walked across a little bit, laid, put an anchor in, and then crawled all the way down. So she learned that she just had to crawl down the sides of the habitat in order to make her web. And she was able to make a pretty good web. Now along comes the 2nd spider. Right?

2nd spider It's fascinating because we you you don't I'm always asking myself, is this spider thinking? Like, wow. This is not working. How do I do this? Or is it just a reaction? And I've gotta believe there's more. And I'm sorry to I'm sorry to make an insect sound so intelligent. Right. But I've gotta be thinking they're sitting there going, come on. Something's wrong here. I've gotta figure this out. And they their trial and error, it's not completely genetic anymore. Right.

It's it's really you know, if you and this to me is what's so fascinating about these types of experiments in space is that you're you're taking an organism that for 1000000 of years has evolved in a gravitational environment. Right? Everything they do, everything that they've ever learned to do for 1000000 of years, they've learned in a gravitational field.

Now we're taking them and we're and, you know, and it's not a higher order organism, really, and and you're putting in them in an environment with no gravity. And yet, what you see is really kind of the the survival of the species. Right? It's gotta figure out how to make a web because that's how it catches its food. Yeah. And if it doesn't make its web.

Yet, it's you can we can downplay it to survival of the species, but the actual act of figuring that out because millions or thousands of years of evolutionary change didn't adapt them at all to living in space. Right. Exactly. And they're they're figuring it out within hours or days Yes. Or days in this case. So so is there a cognitive, even microcognitive component of, well, let me see. I've gotta build this. Right.

Well and and that's exactly what I was gonna continue on to saying that although it's survival of this you know, you think, okay. That's survival of species. They still have some mechanism to figure out, like, this is what they have to do. And so, you know, it's it's just and that's, again, what I find so fascinating about these types of experiments is that you think, oh, it's a spider in space. What's the big deal?

It's like, to me, it really has an impact of looking at behavior and organisms and looking in an environment that you would never be able to replicate for the extended period of time that you can on the International Space Station. So it's just you just learn things that you wouldn't ever be able to learn. So what happened to spider 2? Because I think it was spider 2. So spider 2 comes along and, and we think, oh, no. Now this is gonna be like, you know, spider wars.

But that spider 2 came along and and not too long after the first one spun her web, and she started spinning her web. And and and she essentially spun a web just in like, the first spider was more like the first the top half of the of the habitat. 2nd spider was the bottom half of it, the habitat. So they kind of got their little territories and the second one made their web and pretty soon we had pictures of 2 orb webs in the habitat and you know, and it's just like you never.

We didn't predict that at all. We thought with the 2 spiders that they either wouldn't spin the web. We thought that maybe they would, you know, eat each other. Eat each other. Yep. And yet Did did you find that the second spider learned it faster by watching the first one? I I don't I don't think so. I their webs were very kind of similar in in in their asymmetry. But I think that was just the I don't think They both went through the through the same process.

Yep. And and orb and orb weavers typically don't have very good eyesight. So it probably really it can sense the other spider there, but it doesn't really see what that spider necessarily is doing. So so as an experiment now, this would be an interesting outcome.

If 1 spider built it in 1 geometric pattern in the beginning screwing up and another one built it in a different geo geometric pattern, and they built it differently in different geometric patterns to get to the end, it meant that they have the capacity to no matter what environment it is, find their own path. Mhmm. Not just that they didn't find it this way and they eventually both follow the same path. Right. They actually had to cognitively come up with a path. Yeah. Independently.

Independently. Mhmm. Yep. Yeah. So I I don't know if it was you, but there's one interview and I don't remember which one. If it was an interview, someone said that when cockroaches were reproduced in space, they came back a different color and faster. That wasn't me. I don't I'm not familiar with that one. Yeah. The this they they came back I think I'd have to think about which one.

It might be the one we just did on the reproduction and sexuality, but they came back a slightly different color and they actually operated they were faster. So my my theory is don't bring any more up. Right. Okay. Yes. Well, that's I've always said it's funny because I've always said, working in this field and, you know, and having things die and things like that, I always say, oh my god. We should just fly cockroaches. You can't kill them, and they live forever.

And, well, now you know, and I think it's in the reproduction and sexuality one, is that they actually improve their performance. So they were slightly bigger and they are faster. So if you bring that one up and do it again, pretty soon, we're like some of these movies. Right. Yeah. So so the, and both of them survived. So go back to your spiders. Both of them survived. Both of them were able to eat. What else did you what else did you glean from this?

So and then, and they were both and then eventually, what they started to do was they started to spin very symmetrical webs. And, and that's not necessarily what they do on the ground. On the ground, and this is where the impact or lack thereof of gravity came into play on the station experiment. On the ground, the spiders build the, the orb, the center part of their web is typically, a little bit higher off center. So it's not exactly in the center of the web.

It's it's in the top, let's say, 1 third of the web. And and then that the orb weaver typically sits in the middle of that center part of the web and faces downwards. Right? Because that bigger section of the web is is really where, you know, they're probably, you know, planning on some type of fly to get caught or bug to get caught in their web. And so then they drop down on it quickly.

So, what we started seeing on orbit was that these webs, at least for these first orb weavers that we, we launched, became very symmetrical. And so the the center of the web was exactly that in the center of the web, which is not necessarily, you know, what they do on the ground. So that was also fascinating. So not only did they learn how to build their web web very well, they built it symmetrically. So that was that was a very exciting and and habitat ended up being okay.

Going back to the fruit flies, one of the things that happened there was because the fruit flies had unlimited access to the, habitat because we're thinking, well, you know, we wanna be able to have those flies, in there to feed the spiders. Essentially, the fruit flies, propagated so much so that they the larvae just started crawling out of their little container because it had access to the whole habitat.

And essentially within about, 2 weeks, totally slimed the entire front viewing, window of the habitat and we couldn't see what was going on inside of the habitat anymore because the fruit flies took over. Okay. So a question? Mhmm. Do you kill them all? Or do you bring them back home? So they eventually use up all of their, nutrients. And then, you know, and of course, the because they it was up there for oh, I, oh, this experiment did go to the station, actually. This one went to the station.

It was up there, I think, for, I don't know, maybe a 120 days or something like that. And and by the time, it it the hardware came back, the spiders had both died and the fruit flies had all dried up. Like, they're they ate all their food, and then there was no more food and they dried up. My wife likes to take whatever she finds in the house, put a cup over it, and bring in bring it to the window or to to to put it outside.

So, you know, I'm thinking, okay, would you ever do you ever bring them home? Well, I have a great story on that, which is really part of, you know, the art of having a successful experiment. And it's really about Is that the next hour? Would we have any more to finish on the unnatural or is that the okay. I'm kind of all I'm meshing them all together. Yep. That's that that ends up happening. But I'm just making sure. The art of achieving a successful life science experiment.

Yeah. So I, I wanna talk about on this, which we'll get to your question of, we, we supported a worldwide contest that was called the YouTube Space Lab. And and basically YouTube and Google teamed up, and they did this big contest where kids all over the world could submit ideas for experiments to be conducted on board the station. And, it and and then there would be essentially 2 winners, and we helped support this whole contest.

And and so one of the winning experiments was proposed by a young man from Egypt, and his experiment was and, again, it's spiders, but a different type of spider. Hold on. Sorry. Just one second. Nope. No worries. It was, he was looking at a jumping spider, which is called a, zebra jumping spider or Salticus senecus. And his he proposed launching a jumping spider to space. And, his theory was is that jumping spiders, they don't build webs.

Now what jumping spiders do as opposed to most spiders, jumping spiders have very good eyesight and they hunt in the daytime. And what they do is they, you know, just crawl around looking for bugs. And when they see a bug that they wanna eat, you know, they jump on it. And that's how they catch there. So they jump to catch their prey.

And so the idea was when this spider got to space, his theory was it wouldn't be able to catch its prey because now if it jumps, you know, it just starts ping ponging around the habitat. Yeah. Right? So, so anyways, so now and and the the, organizers of the contest had a certain mission that they wanted to, launch this experiment on, which was, in Japan. And it was, it was to launch it on an HTV Rocket, which is just the name of the, Japanese rocket that was going to the space station.

So now how, how do we do this? I thought, okay, First so now I'm like, okay. I'm responsible for this. Now how how do I okay. I can't there's no store to buy a zebra jumping spider. Right? There's yep. I I how do I Well, there's there's no store where you are. There is no store. Okay. The yeah. So so when you think about the the other spiders, the the first two, there is a store you can buy them. No. Actually, there wasn't a store for that either.

Well Okay. There are, you know, there are a few orbweavers that you potentially can purchase online, but not really. Okay. So so in theory, I would you have to find so it's not only there's not a store. There's normally not a store, but you had to find a jumping spider, which is indicative of a certain region in the world. Right. And and and luckily, jumping spiders can be found all around the world. But I needed to find this particular, the Salticus Senecus, the zebra jumping spider.

And luckily for me, the, zebra's jumping spider is, found right here in Colorado. Okay. And so but what I don't just need a jumping spider. I need a lot of jumping spiders because now I'm starting from scratch. Right? I'm trying to figure out how to build a habitat, to keep this jumping spider alive so that when it gets to station, you know, we can film it and see if it can catch its prey. And so, I was out, and and, of course, this experiment starts in the middle of winter. Right?

It's like, okay. How am I going to get a jumping spider in the middle of winter? So two things. Again, lucky for me in Colorado, it, it, gets pretty warm in March. And when it gets warm, jumping spiders start coming out. Because they, they basically, can winter over and they winter over in cracks and crevices and then, come out when they start getting warm.

So, I was out in the back of my house, searching for jumping spiders and was able to collect over a course of a month about, you know, 10 zebra jumping spiders. And so that's kind of the first thing where, know, I I almost call this session like going above and beyond because my my daughter has a video of me, you know, talking to the jumping spiders as I was trying to find them all and catch them.

But, but these are the things that sometimes you have to do in order to make these experiments successful. So, but anyways, so the next thing we needed to do was, you know, we definitely had a video these, spiders once they got to space. And, we had to make a habitat that it would feel comfortable crawling around on again.

But it also needed little cubbies where it could hang out, but what we learned from our first experiment was that you don't want a little cubby where it can hang out where you can't see it. Because in the first experiment prior to the fruit fly larvae kinda sliming the whole window, those spiders would get up kind of behind some little pieces in the habitat and you really couldn't see them. So we wanted to be able to see this jumping spider, the entire time.

And so what we ended up doing was designing a balsa wood insert that went in the back of the habitat that just basically had circles drilled out of it that were about, you know, a half inch deep, and there were bigger circles and little circles so that the spider could crawl into those circles and feel like it was contained, and yet we would it would always be in view of the camera.

And then the next thing that we had to do was we needed to provide it food, which we were gonna provide with the fruit flies like we did with the first experiment. And, that, but we didn't want the fruit flies to slime all over the habitat again.

So we had to so we used the experience for the first experiment to now, help us design a new habitat that also fit into where the spider was that would allow us to control the release of the fruit flies into the habitat and not just have them crawling everywhere, the larvae crawling everywhere and sliming the habitat. Japanese rocket, this spider, again, we didn't want it to learn how to catch food in space before we got the camera on it.

And spiders are actually water limited as opposed to food limited. They can go for extended periods of time like most organisms. Living organisms can go for an extended period of time without, eating, but they can't go for a very long time without water. So what we did, what we figured out with this spider was we actually kept her. We designed a little cubby that had, a little water container, which of course now has to be sealed.

But what we did was we put a little, cotton wick that came out of that water container so that cotton wick was always moist so that she could, you know, get her water from that wick, but stay in the container where the water was and not, you know, get drowned with water. Right. So And because because the water's right there, she's going to stay in the location even longer because there's no need at this point. Right. And we actually had, we had a lever that kept that compartment closed.

And then once she got on station, the idea was that the crew would open up that lever and then Okay. That would be easier into the big. And this one, we also learned not to have any small slots that she could squeeze through. You know? So, you know, it's so it's really, you do Instead of think like an Egyptian, think like a spider. How would this thing get out? Right. Exactly. Could talk about Egyptian. Isn't that a song Yes. Or a singing? Yep. It is.

Okay. Wanna make sure I wasn't saying anything derogatory. I I thought it was a song. Yep. It is. So so then you have to think about, the for the HTV vehicle, it takes 15 days A while. Once that vehicle it did at that point. Once that vehicle launched to get to the station. And there really isn't any there at that point. There wasn't any temperature control on that. I mean, it was a pressurized, cargo compartment and, the temperature. They warm it before they launch it.

But the temperature could get down to, pretty, not freezing, but, fairly cold and fairly cold for a spider. So all of this testing, it seems, you know, I'm kind of talking about how we just developed all this. All of this testing took over a year, all of the development and with multiple spiders and and putting spiders through their paces of, okay, I'm gonna put you in the dark with some water for 15 days, and I'm gonna cool you down to 15 c or 10 c, and we'll see if you make it. You know?

Sorry, guy. Yeah. Yeah. So but those are all the things that we did because those are all of the issues with launching something to space and and, you know, that you have to address. And so lo and behold, to make a long story short, we were able to successfully, get the zebra jumping spider. And actually, we chose one other jumping spider. We wanted to hedge our bets, again, but we had 2 separate habitats this time instead of just one with 2 spiders in it.

We did 2 habitats each with 1 spider in it. And we did a spider that's called a a Fidippus johnsonii, which is just a red jumping spider. And the reason why we picked that one was that because it was red, we thought, well, if for some reason we don't see the zebra jumping spider, this one will be a little bit easier to see. So these spiders traveled from in their habitats from Colorado all the way to Japan. And that's a story in and of itself.

I hand carried them all the way to Japan, all the way to Tanigashima, the island where they launched their rocket, handed them over to the, Japanese space agency who installed them on their rocket. And, and they were launched to the space station. And so, these jumping spiders got there, and of course, now 15 days had gone by and we had no idea. We we were hopeful that they were still alive.

And lo and behold, the crew, installed them into our incubator so that, they could have, you know, ambient temperature control. But also we powered the camera and the lights for the habitat because the jumping spiders needed to have light in order to hunt. And, when she installed them, this was actually Sunny Williams crew.

When she installed them into the habitat, into the incubator, she released the spiders from their water compartments and we leave that compartment open so the spider can access the water whenever they needed it. And then she also released fruit flies into the habitat.

But what we did with the fruit fly habitat was there was 4 separate compartments so that she would release flies from the first compartment, and she would leave that open for 2 or 3 days, and then come back and she would close that compartment and open up the next one, which was just food. And any leftover flies, the idea was that any leftover flies would climb in there to get their food, lay eggs, and start a new colony of flies.

And that way because flies only live about, you know, a little less than a month, the fruit flies. So that way we would have multiple, generations of flies to keep the spiders alive over, an extended period of time with the idea to go back to your original question. Could we bring them home alive? So so we were able to get video of the jumping spiders in space. They actually were able to learn how to catch their prey.

They we caught them on video several times, trying to catch their prey and really wanted. There's 2 really fascinating things about this experiment. 1 was I we have video of the jumping spider. She saw she was on the backside of the habitat. She saw a fly on the front side of the habitat, but it was floating. It had lost its traction, the fly, so it was just kind of floating in the middle of the habitat. She crawled all the way over, like ran essentially all the way to the front of the habitat.

She laid a piece of web anchor, and she jumped out into the air, grabbed that fruit fly, and then her webbing pulled her back to the front of the habitat. Wow. So she learned that she must have learned that she couldn't necessarily jump because she without an anchor because she would just go wherever.

But she she not only learned how to, jump to catch a fly, but she learned somehow, in my opinion, how short of a silk line she had to let out so that when she grabbed the fly, it would pull her back to a surface that she could hold on to. And it's interesting because Ira thought she just would've kept on going to the other side of the wall, to the other wall. No. She somehow figured this out. And so that was really fascinating to me. And so then, actually, the, the spiders both got packed.

They were both alive. You said there were 2 things you learned how to catch prey? Yep. And I'm gonna tell you that. So the so to answer your question, both of these spiders were sent back to Earth alive. They were both alive when they came back. By the time that we got them because now they came back in a capsule that landed in the Pacific ocean and then it takes the boat to the, Bay. By the time we got there, we got them in our hands, which was about 3 or 4 days.

Unfortunately one of the, the zebra jumping spider had died, but the, red jumping spider was still alive. And so now I thought, oh, this is perfect because she, she had no flies by this time because she had been on station for about a 100 days and the fruit fly colonies had run out. And so I thought, this is perfect. I can get a video of her readapting to catching prey on the ground and see what happens. So I got a video camera on her.

We fed her and she saw the spider, and again, she was on the back wall of the habitat. The spider was on the, I mean, the fly was on the floor of the habitat and she saw it and she jumped to get it. And the, and the fly was about halfway from the back to the front on the floor of the habitat. She completely missed and crashed into the front window and landed upside down on her back on the floor of the habitat.

And I can tell you through the year and a half that I worked on developing this experiment and watching jumping spiders, they never did that. They never jumped so far that they crashed into something, and then, and missed their prey. Like they'll miss it a little bit, but not like that. So whatever mechanism she was using for jumping in space, she employed.

I don't know what exactly, but she just the fact that she just completely crashed into the front of the habitat was just not something that you see. I wanna know when it happened, did you say, oh, shit. Like, was there any empathy for the fact that you screwed up her entire jumping mechanism and now she's slamming into a wall? Well, I had been taking care of this spider for about 10 months. Yes. So, I mean, I you gotta feel bad.

The spider didn't for no fault of their own, is now overshooting its food and smashing into a wall. Yep. Yep. But the good news is, really within a short period of time, 10 minutes, she figured it out. Oh, really? So that's how long it took? Just 10 minutes? It took her 10 minutes. And it took her about 4 more tries. Do you can see in each time, she was closer and closer, and then she figured it out. That's how quickly she adapted back to the gravitational environment.

Have you I've I don't think this is not an experimentation. Have you, in your time doing this, sat there and said, okay. How does this relate to humans? Would this happen? How does it if this was a I don't think we're gonna have rhinoceros in space, but would this happen? Have you have you taken that mental journey to so many other species and said, would it do this? Would it not? Would it adapt? Would it not? Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, absolutely.

I mean, you you think about it because clearly we've shown that humans can adapt. But I don't know that we, you know, look I mean, we do, and there's certainly studies on it. But there are probably, I don't know, a 100 different things that a crew member does every day that they've when they're on the station, that they've figured out some way to adapt that whatever it is they're doing to do because they're not in grab. Right?

And we're not even thinking about it just because they, you know, you see them on video and they're just moving around and but you know, that all takes quite a bit of adaptation. And, and now we're looking at a small spider and in a very simple thing as catching their food and realizing that they can adapt.

And so yes, you, you, you, for me, I always think about the bigger picture of, you know, if we want to go and colonize other places and, and you know, at varying levels of gravity, you know, would we want to bring different organisms with us and can they adapt? And what does that look like? Because, you know, if you want to have some type of home on a different plan, planet or the moon or wherever, you know, do you want an ecosystem that's similar to what you have on the ground?

And if you do, then what does that look like? What are the ramifications of it? What organisms do you bring? How do they adapt? How can you keep them alive? You know, so it's something that you can sit and ponder for a long period of time. Well, and but in essence, what you've shared is that it will not be the same Mhmm. Unless you really, really, really think about the complete ecosystem in which they live. So therefore, you're it's it could be the experiment gone wild.

Mhmm. Because you might figure out how to help a zebra spider mite figure out how to do its jumping. Yet the the fruit fly or any of the other types of insects it eats, it will perform its own evolutionary change, which could mean that the fruit fly never get is the jumping spider doesn't get the same amount of food. It doesn't eat the same.

It it does some so you don't know what that evolutionary or that that modification through a factorial of 10 different animal species or whatever, they could be completely running amok. Right. And you just don't know until until you do it. Which is which is scary because do you want to do it? Right. Well and that's why I think you have to think about what do you what do you want your ecosystem to look like?

And and, you know, and it really can it plays into I mean, it's on a philosophical, but it plays into it really demonstrates on the ground. Like, people talk about, you know, you impact one part of the ecosystem, how it impacts another part of the ecosystem. And these simple little experiments essentially show that.

I mean, to me, they show how, you know, taking something, putting it in, you know, putting them in an environment that's not something that they're they've evolved in and looking at their behavior, you know, and then adding another thing to that environment, like you said, the fruit flies, you know, you're impacting the way that that ecosystem would normally have worked. You know? Still trying you're still trying to make it similar to Earth. Right. Exactly.

And is that what we want to do if we go out to other, you know, planets? Well, it could be yes. If we just went to the moon or if we were between Mearth, the moon, and Earth. And what types of things can happen between them? There are I don't know the number that I hear all different types of numbers. Maybe I'll ask you this. A good question. How many species of, of animals are on Earth? Jeez. I don't know the I've been told 50,000,000. Yeah. And I've been told like 12,000,000.

And I'm trying to get a number that's more concrete because if we're losing 200 to 250 species per day on this planet, which is the numbers that are coming back, then how many do we have? And the complexity of the biosphere, the complexity of the the ecosystem is so intense that there's no human capacity for us to be able to completely understand how all of them would react, let alone just humans reacting. Right. Mhmm. I know.

It it's, you know, and and I don't know the number of species, and I'm sure it's in the millions. And, but it it just, you know, you eat I don't know if I'll say it right, but it you you know, you just do realize how interconnected everything is, when you do these small experiments. And it does make you think, you know, how, you know, how does this all work in the way that it works? I don't know. It's kinda silly to say. But No. No. Well, I the follow-up to that is why do you do this?

Mhmm. Well, I I mean, for me, it really is. I mean, honestly, part of me, I I kind of accidentally, fell into this work. I can't say that my I wasn't one of the kids growing up that was like, hey, I wanna do something in space. So I've definitely learned about space through my work here at the center. And, but I've always been interested in, you know, the life around me and ecosystems and, you know, obviously life sciences has always been a passion for me.

And so, to me, it's being able to do these simple experiments and, and maybe it sounds cliche, but it, it, it's, it's the challenge because these are certainly challenging to do any type, whether it's cell culture or these small organism experiments. It is super challenging to do these. And I always say it is not for the faint of heart.

Because, you know, things go wrong, and and it truly is 2 years of your life for for an experiment, and then something goes wrong, And you can't do anything about it because you can't walk down the hallway into your lab and say, oh, I'll fix it. So do you do, you've got insects. Do you do, mice or any of those type of experiments?

Yeah. So we've been a, and and not necessarily I'm not the expert on rodent research, but, we have somebody in our organization, Louis Stodick, who's, he's been one of on the forefront of rodent research in space station, and, and we, our center, has supported quite a bit of rodent research on space station. So we've we've worked with, because you can use microgravity as a model for bone loss and muscle loss. Right? Because you're not loading the systems.

Yeah. And so, you know, so your body just says, well, I guess you don't really need all this bone anymore and you don't really need those big strong muscles anymore. And so, so really, microgravity can be used as a model for bone loss and muscle loss in terms of drug development. So on the ground it can take a whole year for an osteoporotic woman to lose 1% of their bone density. In space, that can happen in a month. And so think of it as an accelerated model.

So we've worked, we actually worked with the company to test a countermeasure for bone loss and we did that in, mice. So we launched the mice, they were administered the drug and then you, you know, obviously measured their bone density pre and post mission and look at the effects of the countermeasure that you gave to them. And we've done that with a muscle, a counter measure for muscle loss, which is cachexia in people, which is muscle loss and people who have cancer.

You lose a lot of your muscle. And if you lose a lot of your muscle, obviously that has other deleterious health effects. So, if you can develop a countermeasure to that, not only for people who are in space, but also for, you know, a large population of people on earth who have, muscle wasting for or bone loss for a variety of reasons. So we've done that testing on station for sure. The, I'm going to swing all the way back to a question I asked earlier, cost wise.

I mean, you, you, this has gotta be exponentially expensive to do a single experiment. It is. You know, it's it's not cheap. I I would say that. It can run from the tens of thousands to the 100 of 1,000 depending upon what is being done. You know, developing the hardware is expensive because of all of the requirements, the safety guidelines that we have to follow.

And and that's a big part of the driver because now you have to develop, like I mentioned in the beginning, you have to develop these systems to support the organisms, but to meet all of the containment and safety, guidelines so that you don't injure the crew or injure the vehicle. So it is quite expensive. And of course there takes lots of testing, both on the hardware side, the science side, and then the integration of both the hardware and the science.

I would have thought this would have been 1,000,000. So you've kind of shocked me with tens of thousands to 100 of thousands. I would have thought a single experiment in space, taking the time that it takes, building the content, putting it together, and getting the cost for launch Mhmm. The tie on on a vehicle, and then the time and space, I would have thought this would have been 1,000,000 of dollars for any experiment.

Well, I I guess I'll preface that to say, those costs that I, said don't include the cost of the ride to space or the crew time, because at this point in time, for the most part, NASA provides those services. Right? That NASA's already contracting with the, the cargo suppliers, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman at this point. They're already contracting them to bring supplies to the Space Station.

So, you know, and of course there's space on those cargo missions for science since, you know, the Space Station is the, for the US portion is the ISS National Lab. So it is a national lab, and you are supposed to be conducting science on board. So NASA supports a lot of those costs because this it's in the national interest, and this is what they're tasked to do. So it doesn't have there is no cost factor. They NASA determines that if we're going to do this, this is the experiment we want.

There are 500 applications. We're gonna select these 10. We're gonna select them over a period of time. This is the space, the time, the resources we have, and whether that cost is an $80,000,000 launch or it's, whatever $1,000,000 launch doesn't matter. You're not getting a proportionate bill, or no one's getting a proportionate bill for that. Right.

And that's actually done between NASA and for the US portion, it's done between NASA and, the center for the advancement of science and space, which is CASIS, but also known as the ISS National Lab. That's the organization that's responsible for the portion of resources that are part of the, Space Station National Lab. And so NASA and CASIS work together to a portion the resources to, support the different types of experiments. And those experiments can be, funded by NASA.

They can be funded by CASES, the ISS National Lab. They could be funded by, like we support experiments that are funded by the NIH. And then it flies under the the allotment that That's a national, Institute of Health. Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. The National Institutes of Health and the, National Science Foundation. We support experiments that are sponsored by those organizations. We've even supported experiments that are science experiments but totally funded by a commercial entity.

You know, that doesn't happen as much because the cost is higher, but it does happen or sometimes that their funding is leveraged by other funding. So, you know, it's kind of a wide variety. Now NASA now does have a pathway for a strictly commercial, kind of marketing PR types of things to be launched. And in those instances, like, I think I think Revlon did something like this last fall where they launched I I think it was like their perfume or something.

And then they took a video of it in the cupola, which is the viewing window of the station. And so NASA now offers a pathway for companies that wanted to do something like that to pay to have that done. So in that instance, where it's strictly marketing, you know, PR commercial, that organization pays, NASA has a price list of its Yes. I think that's fairly recent. The ability to do commercial. Yes. I think it was just 2 or 3 years ago. Time flies. So I don't know. It's It is.

I don't know how much you know about the other countries and their same orientation to testing in space. The the Japanese, the Russians, the Canadians, the Germans are are are they very similar in their approach? Do they have a a national lab on theirs the same way? So as far as I know, I I don't think, you know, that their sections of the space station have necessarily been, you know, named a national lab in their country.

You know, the Japanese space agency, which is called JAXA, you know, they have their own experiment module, Kibo, it's called. And, you know, and they and they have experiments that launched the station. They actually even have a, a specific habitat that they built to support rodent research, and they've launched it and supported some of that. The the bulk of the resources available on the station go to, you know, primarily US entities, and then the international partners get a portion.

So, and and that's primarily because the US Foots the Majority of the Bill for the International Space Station. But the the the the Japanese Space Agency and also the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, They all have, you know, resources allocated to them during time periods on the station where they can also conduct conduct experiments and and they typically do sponsor experiments and they conduct them.

They just don't have as much resources allocated to them, if that makes sense. Yeah. No. It does. So the I and I don't know how much we've covered already the direct impacts of these experiments. You're number 4. I'm Yes. Think we covered a lot of it. But I I figured that, but there there's gotta be I'm I'm going a little further in my my head is spinning to okay. You did this spider experiment. What happened on Earth? You did this. What happened on Earth?

What are these true impacts that we're feeling? So I don't know if you've covered or plan to cover. I'm trying to go bigger to the larger Yeah. Future of humanity or future of all species on Earth.

Yeah. I mean, I think and I guess that was my point of the impacts is that you you can have a experiment by experiment impact where, you know, you look at some gene expression experiment and and you understand which genes were up regulated and which ones were down regulated as a result of being in microgravity. And you can try to, you know, figure out what that means. And then you have, you know, technology that's being developed, obviously, that, can be used for the benefit of station.

I mean, it was benefit of Earth. Right? So it's true that NASA has a lot of technology that has helped, improve things on earth. And even for us, like, when you miniaturize these systems, you're advancing the technology field in labs. You're a lot of these pieces of hardware are huge, like we talked about in the beginning. They're they're large and, you know, and if you can make them smaller, it takes less space. People have more ability to do things, when they have less space to do them in.

You know? And and then you have the kids that I was talking about. You know? You have the next generation of explorers. You're inspiring them. And I know that's kind of cliche, but it's true.

I mean, a simple experiment like a butterfly or spider experiment or even a jumping spider experiment or the a contest that's worldwide can expire a huge number of students to now go into, these types of fields to be the next explorers and, you know, the next adventurers because I really think that's part of exploring outside of our planet is you have to be part adventurer to do that.

So to me, and then, of course, you're advancing the scientific knowledge and of just the fields of all these different types of science. So it it just it's so hard to put it into words, but to me, it just impacts, you know, such a broad array of things from the very, you know, like this one child was impacted to we've impacted an entire field. We've impacted how people think about doing things in space.

You you've helped, inspire and get people to think more broadly about what could be in space, not just what is currently. And so, you know, it's it's hard to put into words, but it No. That that's okay. One that maybe this might help to give a little bit of traction here is the IP, the intellectual property for building the hardware. Is that owned by NASA? Is that owned by you? Do you release that to the general public as designs? Do you share that information with the world?

So now that there is now that you've learned how to miniaturize, do you give that away so that they can? Mhmm. And I would, the answer isn't clear. So most of the if we develop IP like our organization, there's other organizations like us. Typically, we own our IP. We're a little bit different because we're a nonprofit entity and we are part of a university. And so we do share a lot of our IP so that other people can learn from what we do. So we definitely do.

There are some, I would say, trade secrets that we keep secret. Only because this is our we're nonprofit, but it is our line of business. So we we wanna be able to continue to do this for a long time. And and there is competition in the field, and so we wanna be able to stay on the forefront of the competition. So it it's really both.

And I mean, one of the challenges that I've had, and I've already shared this with you that I've been in this industry, however you want to call it, I think life is everything I it's amazing how many things that we use every day are in space. So when we talk about space, I think the word denotes going to moon going to Mars going to Jupiter going on and on and on and exploration and everything else. And it's not that.

It's the my the mouse that I'm using is a space tech has space technology in it. The the call that we're doing, which is a Zoom call recording, that's space technology. My package that I'm still waiting for that has been 2 months in delay. I don't know why. Makes sense. But it it it it is being tracked by logistics firms that use space technology, GPS, and coordination, and our foods get this way.

And so everything that in a tier 4 country in the world, almost everything we do, you can't go through a day not being touched by space. So it's not really an industry. It's just where we are. Right. Yet NASA has I learned this at Ames, NASA Ames facility in Silicon Valley. NASA's not allowed to market. Right. They cannot go out and promote. They can educate, but they can't promote. Right.

And so the challenge that I'm having with these life sciences, this is my challenge, not like the industry has a challenge with mine, is I hear about these great experiments. They sound like they're doing something. They sound like, you know, you learned something that was exciting. You know, too bad our our, our zebra didn't come back. Yes. We did learn about the red the red guy fall smashing into a wall. Yeah. Great. And the and there's a lot of them.

We've had Charlie Bolden on the line, and there are pieces of them, but it's not something I hear about. It's not that I'm uneducated. And yet if you asked me to really give you 10 things that life sciences when it comes to these type of experiments or rodents or I couldn't, I can't name them except for those that you just gave me or the few that I've heard throughout these podcasts. I don't, I don't know. And so we could talk about it as being beneficial to all species on earth.

But at the same time, I draw blanks. And I don't think that's a positive for the space industry, if we're again calling it that. And I don't think it's positive for the possibilities unless there are better mechanisms to get this information out or, as you called it, you said, the direct impacts of these experiments outlined not in scientific papers, but for someone like me. Mhmm. I don't know if you agree with that sentence, that statement or not.

Well, I so, you know, I agree that, you know, the, the dissemination of this information, you know, isn't as broad as you would hope. But the other thing is, I would say, is that in terms of the life sciences, it's it's really baby steps, as opposed to giant footsteps. You know, it's like, let's go to the road and experiment, for example, where I talked about, you know, testing a countermeasure for bone loss. That countermeasure that we tested with that company is actually on the market now.

Well, is it on the market because of the experiment that they did on space station? No. But when they submitted their packet of information to the FDA, the data from that experiment was included in that information. So the the research that they did in space wasn't the entire reason that that, medicine is now on the market, but it was a piece of the reason why that medicine is on the market. Even if it was to exclude an option. Right. Or or it it showed that it had a benefit. Right?

So it had data that that contributed to the story of the development of that product. And and the other thing I would say is and and so to finish that thought. So a lot of the experiments that we're doing are small pieces to hopefully a bigger thing. You know, a big discovery, a bigger product discovery, but nobody but we're not there yet.

And we're not there yet because one, the space station, you know, while it's been around for 20 years, it's really only been in the last 10 years where it's really been open to do science, you know, and and more science. Like, every year we are able to do more and more science. But we're still not able to do as much science on the space station as you can do in your own lab, obviously, on the ground.

Because I can walk down the hall, get into my lab, and I can do, you know, set up 10 different experiments in one day. I obviously can't do that on the station.

And so part of it is developing the technology to allow us to do these types of experiments and to do them at a higher frequency, at a lower cost, and and be able to do iterative experiments so that if you find something interesting, it's not another 2 years until you can fly again to see, you know, to follow on with that experiment, to see if that result that you found that was interesting is in fact interesting. Whereas in your lab, you would do that within 2 months.

And so there's there is a logistical, component of this, which is why, you know, I think that we will, in terms of the life sciences, discover things from doing experiments in microgravity. It's just gonna take longer just because the logistics of doing it takes longer. It's interesting as you're bringing this up, and I you know this. The people who will eventually hear this don't know this, that I actually do no research before I do an interview. So you come to me with the information.

I'm really the student in the entire environment. So these are real true questions that are happening in real time, is that I had made an and the reason I would say that is I had made a misjudgment call. Because it's space, because there's a lot of technology and I hate to use that word, but rocketry through to life sciences to the International Space Station is the existing. I think it's easy to overlay on top of it that life science and experimentation is advanced.

Mhmm. And what you just said in all of this at the end, just a few seconds ago, what that said to me was I had I had given you a PhD in space. And the reality is if we were to give it relative terms, we're using PhDs on earth or skilled craftsman or whatever you want to call it. But what we're really doing in space is almost like a 1st grader getting used to and getting its legs. Mhmm. Is that a good way to say it? It's a good analogy with regards to, you know, life sciences.

I mean, I I maybe after all these years, we're up to 6th grade. Well and in certain places, but some would be less, some would be more, but we're not in university yet. We're not at this. We're I took the experiments to make them even bigger than they were. And Yeah. That that's just an assumption that I had made and I we all make assumptions. Right. And that's where go ahead. No. And I was gonna say, but it's not to say that we haven't done complex experiments.

There's been some very complex life science experiments done. It's just that the the quantity is not there. I feel like the quality is there now, and more and more of the quality gets better and better.

We've gone to from just being able to do things in glass test tubes in or in space to, you know, designing culture plates that if you put yourselves in that culture plate that's for space and you put them in a petri dish next next to it and you run an experiment on the ground that at the end of them, both of the cells in both conditions have the same exact end results. And so that's huge. So the quality is really is is really starting to get there.

Now we need to get the quantity and the throughput there. And I and I do know, and I it's kind of jumbling in my head because I do know that for experimentation from one of our guests, Yossi Amin, from SpacePharma, you they're creating a chip. And the chip has all sorts of experiments.

It could have 280 experiments in 1 chip, and a chip is a, a micro lab where materials are merged that are treated in a certain way, so you get all these experiments back, But it's not at the same level that I probably had made assumptions about. Mhmm. It's you know, and the chip and we've supported or it's called an organ on a chip. And, we actually have supported, an organ on a chip.

We have a system that supports organ on a chip and but that organ on a chip itself is new technology on the ground. So, so that's, you know, that's technology that's just coming along on the ground that we're now flying to space and trying to utilize in space, which we've made the system to support these chips and we're able to. But at the same time, that technology is still rapidly evolving on the ground. So it it's you know? And that and it's very exciting technology.

The whole point of an organ on a chip is to do, you you know, a lot of drugs are tested in animal models prior to going to humans, and and there really, are differences between obviously rodents and humans.

And so one of the ideas behind organ on a chip that goes back to what we're talking about, the tissues from different organs in your body is is that you could put, you know, some kidney tissue, some liver tissue, some heart tissue, some skin tissue, some brain tissue on one chip, and then you profuse a drug through. And the idea is that it now more closely represents the human body. And that's what those organ on a chips are really trying to get to. They're not there yet, but that's the goal.

Is So then it can eliminate animal testing if we're actually using okay. Yeah. It limit it eliminates animal testing and reduces the number of failures of drugs because there's lots of drugs that get tested in animals and they look very promising, but then they go to humans and there's issues. And so that the idea of that is it you can eliminate animal testing, but you're also testing in a model that's much closer to the human body.

And the because it's in microgravity, it allows that flotation component, which is a huge part. You're not in 2 d, you're in a, you're in 3 d, and actually you're in a 4 d environment. Time, space, location, there's actually 4 of them, Lengths, width, height, space, and time. And, and the other thing is, is while you're in that space environment, not only is the idea that, you know, you're, you're more replicating kind of what happens in the human body.

There are deleterious effects of the to the human body of being in space. So the ideas and some of them are, with regard not only bone and muscle loss, but also potentially, they think that, you know, it can impact how your cardio, your cardiac function is. Fluid shifts within your body. And so now you have these chips and now you're testing for a certain disease that is mimic in microgravity.

Like microgravity, when you culture these cells in microgravity, they if it's a cardiomyocyte, the idea is that it may start replicating the same issues that crew might have with cardiac function after being in microgravity for an extended period of time. So it's to use the microgravity as a disease model of potentially aging or bone loss, muscle loss, cardiac dysfunction, you know.

But those are all all of those things, in my opinion, with regards to microgravity are just they're on the cusp of being, you know, quantified and discovered how it really does impact these systems.

Changes or I wanna say not the changes, the tools that are going to be developed using space to improve it, not only human, but species on earth, done in a way through the leveraging of this capacity, this capability of being able to go into space and I hadn't really, I think we it's I think I talk more about or think more through these experimentations about humans.

Yet the same thing could be done to save a species on earth, that could be challenged with an environment or a disease or something that would not have been solved otherwise without space. You had brought up before we had started, we started talking about the previous podcast was 2 ago where Alex Landecker did a fantastic job about reproduction and sexuality in space. And you started to comment about sperm cells.

Mhmm. What were you going to and I cut you short, so anybody who's listening in, we don't normally talk to the audience, but you're here. Somebody's listening in. I'm bringing back a conversation where I brought talk about Alex doing a phenomenal job, and you started to share with me something about, sperm cells. What were you going to add? Well, I was, just adding that.

You know, we we I I mean, the idea is if you can do reproduction and one of the things is if you can reproduce in space, you know, how how does the microgravity environment you would need to know how it impacts the sperm cell? And we actually did an experiment with a scientist from Kansas State University where he was looking at, the motility and viability of both bovine sperm and human sperm. It really was the first time. Not really.

It was the first time that, an experiment of this type was done on station. And so what we did was we, flew up syringes of frozen sperm, which the crew thawed. They put them in this, bag that had reagents in it that would essentially and then the name of the reagent is escaping me at this moment in time. But what it did was it it it, started it basically kind of woke up the sperm and and made them start moving like they should.

And so then we had designed a slide that was contained that they could inject a sample of the sperm into. And then we video the on a microscope, we video image the sperm moving. And, you know, and yes, there were differences, between flight and ground. But the fact of the matter was the sperm did have, you know, potentially adequate motility and viability to, you know, re to to have an organism reproduce in space.

So it was very fascinating to see to see on, the large screen in our payload operations and command center. So but very cool. It's like a little bit of a toy. You You know? Like, hey. Look. We're gonna we wanna figure out if this will work Mhmm. And the implications of it because Alex had spoken highly about the fact that if we don't solve sexuality and reproduction, we can't go anywhere. Right. That's the end. The the the game is over. And he didn't say it in that way, but that's the cause.

If we cannot reproduce in space, if we cannot go someplace else and take care of, reproduction, it's not gonna happen. And in the case of these experiments on the International Space Station or in space that you're doing, they also show, I'm thinking more they do give us future possibilities. A lot of them, though, are really what's what is Earth's possibilities. Mhmm. And fascinating. Cool. I really love it. Is is there anything that we didn't discuss that I think that you think, you wanna add?

I think we covered a lot of grounds. I I never I don't normally ask that because but it just seemed like there's something I feel like I'm missing here that I would like to ask that I can't think of at the moment. I know I can always call you or anybody can call you, but this was this was great. I, personally, I I was able to connect a lot of dots.

Even what you just said about the organ and a chip and now the floating in three-dimensional space and now the ability to be able to test, now I get the reason for the organ and a chip. And, Project Moon Hat, we have many spin offs we're working on. One of them is a biotech business. Okay. And the, by you sharing it in this way, I was like, oh, wow. Now I get it. Now I get what the viability is, and now I understand how this could work.

And I also see, non International Space Station activity happening where vehicles will go to space, do the experimentation in space, not on the International Space Station, and then return back to Earth having done the experiment, no human interaction via robotics. Right. Mhmm. And that's a whole another, you know, manual versus automated robotics. You know? I mean, really, I feel like like what we talked about today is just, like, kinda just the talk of it.

You know, just the tip of the iceberg, really. I mean, there's so much more to discuss and there's so much more, like, pros and cons to doing things in certain ways. And and you're right. You know, in order to, improve throughput, you you we would have to automate, and that has a whole set of issues in and of itself. And and so there's just this field is so broad and there's so much to discover, and there's so much to talk about. I know I I talk we talked a lot about the spiders.

And, you know, when I talk about the spiders because, you know, a lot of people can relate to them and and, you know, it's it it helps demonstrate the problem. But but as we talked about the organ on the chip and the cell culture and the rodent research, there's so much more to the life sciences research. It's not just spiders in space. It's all of these other types of research that really, you know, the end goal is really to try to do these experiments to somehow improve life on earth.

It really is the point of these life science experiments. So I'm hoping we get there someday where we make some huge discoveries and, and we'll improve the planet. Well, and Project Moon Hut, we'll end it with this. Project Moon Hut's initiative is, as you heard in the beginning, is designing plans for us to live sustainably on the moon through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. And that's the development of the Mearth ecosystem.

But within that, you're going to ex we the first thing we have to do is accelerate earth's capabilities. If you think you would come from earth, then you go to atmosphere in low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, high earth orbit, you go to the moon. But to develop that with and then those ideas, those innovations, that paradigm shifting, which we went I went through today Mhmm. We turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

So built right into what we're trying to accomplish Right. As Project Moon Hut is exactly what you just shared. Mhmm. I mean, how do we improve the, in 40 years, we'll have 10,000,000,000 people on this planet. How do we ensure that we have a tomorrow that is a better, I hate to say campfire than we have today. So, this was fantastic. I really want to thank you, for taking the time. And I also wanna thank all of you out there who are continually adding to the list of listeners.

I know some of these go extremely long, yet at the same time, the feedback that we're getting is they're real. I mean, I don't start off with any questions. This was really Stephanie taking the time. I think it was over a month or a month and a half to figure out what she wanted to share and help me help you understand. So I want you to take thank you for taking the time to listen in. And I do hope that you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

The Project Moon Hut Foundation, which I just set, establish a box of the roof and the door on the moon. The accelerated development of Earth and space based ecosystem, and then take those endeavors paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. We're not just about the human species, but all species on this incredible planet that we live. So, Stephanie, is there one best single way to get, to connect with you?

Probably the best way is my email. And do you want me to give that to you? You could if you It's okay. I will. It's it's, Be like, oh, where is it? I'll have to look it up. It's, that's it's probably is the best way to get a hold of me. It's it's countrym atcolorado.edu. So it's [email protected]. And I too would like to connect with anybody who's interested. You can reach, me at [email protected]. You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moon hut or at goldsmith is my personal.

You can connect with us. We're on LinkedIn as Project Moon Hut Foundation. We're on Facebook, we do have an Instagram account, we really have been working on it. And we have a lot that is happening in the background at the present time. So there's going to be a lot more programs. There's a lot more activity. And I'm David Goldsmith. And thank you for listening.