The NASA Twin Study

might be giants fan. Now we're going to talk about some twins today, but I am under the distinct impression that not a one of these two guys is evil. No, no, that neither of them appeared to be evil as far as I can tell. The one has a mustad not well there at times he has a mustach, and we've got a story about that later. So we're talking specifically about NASA's twin study. But before we get into that, we were going to set the ground here a little bit.

We've talked in previous episodes that space. You know that that big black thing up in the sky is trying to kill you where most of the everything is most of everything that's not us, that's out there it's trying to kill us. It's yeah, yeah, our earth does a really good job of protecting us from deadly, deadly space. Yeah. So it's it's about as harsh an environment as you

can get to. Uh uh, and and it takes a lot of effort to get there actually, But at any rate, there are a lot of things that can kill you in space, some of which are pretty immediate, like the lack of oxygen. That'd be a big one. We need that also pretty regularly. Yeah. I was actually talking earlier today about someone who was asking me, Hey, does tonightus in your ear bother you all the time? I said, only when I think about it, and you're making me

think about it. It's kind of like when you think about breathing, and then you get to a point when you think about breathing that you worry you will never stop thinking about breathing. Oh no, Jonathan, Can I be pedantic and say we recently had a listener right in and tell us to stop pronouncing tenitas tenitas and pronounce it tend us because the listener said that is how it is pronounced. Well, that's funny because it's not the way that the guy who was telling me about my

tenitas was pronouncing it, and he was a doctor. But it could totally be wrong at any rate. So there are some other concerns besides the immediate ones that will kill you right away. Uh, there's radiation. There's a lot of radiation out in space, different types of radiation, and some of which is potentially extremely harmful to humans. You're in a low gravity environment, which is precisely the kind

of thing that human beings did not evolve in. Yeah, low low gravity environment means that you can lose muscle mass as well as bone density. I mean, there's some some long term effects that can easily be very detrimental if you are out there for any good length of time. Yeah, Astronauts spend a lot of time on the exercise machines just trying to stave off this physical de kay, And it doesn't work entirely, No, it's it's at best it slows it. Yeah. It also does fun things like reshape

your eyeballs. Yeah, that's a good one. Makes you taller. We'll talk about that a little bit too. I've got a fun fact about that. Interesting. So NASA has been studying the effects of space on living, breathing human beings for decades, right, so that's not anything new. But but you know, there's a problem with it, which is that you can never know exactly how somebody's health would have

looked had they not gone into space. Yes, this is the problem we talk about with like weather control, because you can never tell if it would have rained without the weather control either. Right, so what do you do? I mean, you send someone up in space, maybe they catch a really bad cold, and you aren't really sure if that was you know, if being in space made that easier for that to happen. How can you tell sure?

Because a lot of what we're learning about about genetics, like the more we dig into the human genome, the more we realize that a person's very specific makeup and body chemistry has so much to do with how they with how they deal with environments. Yeah, so, if you want to follow the scientific method, the ideal thing to do, if you could, would be to take two exactly identical humans and send one into space and keep the other one on Earth. But those never exist, Joe, where would

we find such people? Oh, identical twins. Yeah, and that's exactly what has happened. We have just recently seen one identical twin, Scott Kelly, come back to Earth and rejoin his his fellow identical twin, Mark Kelly here on the surface. I think only one of the twins is identical. Oh I'm sorry, but one identical twin and the unidentical twin

met up with each other, of course I'm kidding. Yes, uh so they and NASA this was a great opportunity for NASA to say, let's take a look at how the two compare and contrast after a prolonged exposure to Oulter Space for one of them, while the other ones remains here on Earth. So, then, being twins, I assume they were born on the same day. Yes, I mean technically, if it were really close to midnight, they could be on two different days, or if it was a really

long delivery. Yeah, yeah, that possibility. But they were both born in February twenty first, nineteen sixty four, Mark and Scott Kelly. So here's some little little bit of background information on the two. Mark Kelly attended the United States Merchant Marine Academy and received a bachelor's degree in Marine Engineering and Transportation UH. Much later, he earned a master's

degree in aeronautical engineering at the US Naval Postgraduate School. Meanwhile, Scott Kelly attended the State University of New York and received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He also pursued post graduate degrees. He got a master's degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee. And they would both wind up being pilots in the Navy YEP. So between their initial college and their postgraduate work, they both joined

the Navy, and they both became pilots. Scott became a pilot in nineteen eighty seven and Mark came a pilot in ninety nine, and in they both graduated the U. S Navy Test Pilot School. And if you know anything about test pilots, and you take a look at where a lot of the pilots from the astronaut UH class come from, Yeah, the the US Navy Test Pilot School.

That's a large representation. They tend to have the right stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you're not a if you're not trying to become a top gun, you're trying to become an astronaut. So at any rate. In nineteen they also both began training to become astronauts, So Scott Kelly was the first one to go into space, becoming the pilot for the Space Shuttle mission STS one oh three. That's a good one. It was the Discovery. It was a good one. This was the mission sent up to make repairs to a

very important piece of equipment in orbit, the Hubble space telescope. Yeah. If you recall, the Hubble had a couple of problems that needed to be adjusted after Yes, now I could be wrong about this, but I believe that that is the farthest anybody has gone from Earth since the Moon, since the last Moon mission would have been this would have been the mission to repair the Hubble. That sounds correct to me. I don't happen to know that because the hubbles in a higher orbit space then yes, exactly,

the International Space stations at a lower orbit. I think you're correct. So here's hoping if we're wrong, people will let us know. At any rate. Mark would then get his first chance to go into space in two thousand one, so a few years after Scott had gone up and Mark piloted the Endeavor for mission STS one oh eight, which brought astronauts up to the International Space Station, and both brothers flew on and commanded several other missions to space.

They both were involved in them, never together, but they both were working in on various missions throughout the years. At one point they were actually going to be the first siblings to be in space at the same time. They were going to both be Scott I think, was going to be up on the International Space Station. Mark was going to command a launch, a launch and launch into space, so they would both be in space at

the same time. But uh, various delays pushed back the launch for um for Mark's mission to further back in two thousand and eleven, and it pushed it beyond the time when Scott was returning from the International Space Station. Uh and and Mark wound up retiring out of the astronaut business. Yeah, he did so because of a truly terrible moment in US history, one that I'm sure a

lot of our listeners will remember. So he almost didn't go on this, this two thousand eleven mission at all after the delay because his wife, Gabrielle Gifford's, who was a representative for the state of Arizona in the House of Representatives here in the United States. Was one of the victims of mass shooting. She was having a meeting with constituents and a parking lot at a supermarket and uh a man open fired into the crowd, killing a few people and hitting Gifford's in the head. She survived

and made a remarkable recovery. Everyone talked about how amazing it was that she was able to recover so quickly. Yeah. Yeah, Although after after he did return from that mission, he he wound up retiring in order to help her with her continued recovery. Yes, she actually was able to attend the launch of his mission. She was able to recover enough to be there for that. And then a few months after he returned from his mission, he said, I'm leaving the Navy, I'm leaving the the Space program, and

I'm going to be with my wife. So that was at that point. Mark ends up retiring from the space program. But that doesn't mean he has to be done helping with space research. That is correct, he can do. He actually is helping with space research by not going into space. He's the control twin. So how does the twin study work? It was part of another project, the one year mission, which is a little bit of a misnomer. Uh. There

were two people who were part of this. One was Scott Kelly and the other was a Russian cosmonaut, and the idea was to send these two people up into space for three forty days. That's not exactly a year, which is that's why it's a misnomer. Yeah, three days and not a full year. But the purpose was to study the long term effects of space on the human body, as well as a ton of other research projects which

I'll talk about in a second. So part of this is NASA's plan to try and build, uh build a path for us to get to Mars, to have human explorers go to Mars. Not an easy path, not an easy path at all, because, as we've said said in previous episodes, NASA's approach to a Martian mission would be about thirty months long. And that's partially because getting from Earth to Mars takes several months, and getting from Mars

to Earth back to Earth takes several months. But more importantly, in order for you to conserve fuel so that you don't have to have as heavy as spacecraft, you have a better chance of success. Your mission is slightly less horrifyingly expensive. Yeah, and you are also spending the least amount of time in the most dangerous of the environments. Not that we remember, Mars is trying to kill you too, it's just not trying to kill you as hard as

space is. You can dig a hole on Mars and that's that's a little bit better than being in space. So also Mars has a little bit of gravity. Yes, At any rate, the the trip you would want to launch your your spacecraft when the orbits of Earth and Mars are at their most advantageous, where it's going to require the least amount of distance to travel from one

to the other. And by the time you make that trip once the two planets are no longer in that configuration, and you're gonna have to wait a significant amount of time for them to come back round to that so you can make the return trip with that same smaller distance, which is why the overall mission would last thirty months.

In order for us to get there, we have to know what are the long term effects of space on the human body, so that we can make sure that the people we send there have the best chance for success. And and we're not going to put people's lives in danger. Uh, because or not at least not more danger than the otherwise would be just going into space in the first place. So very important type of mission. So at any rate,

the two went up, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko. Uh. This was they were representing a joint operation between the Russian Space Program and NASA, and the idea is that they're going to share all information and results with one another to benefit mankind. Uh, in an effort to get to Mars and beyond in the future. Yeah. And this is the longest that anyone has been up for a NASA mission, but not for a Russian mission. Yeah. So there's a cosmonaut named Valerie Polyakov who spent nearly four

D thirty eight days. I think technically it's four D thirty seven points seven days space aboard the Mere Space Station in my r space station, but that obviously was not a NASA mission, So that was the longest anyone has spent in space. In fact, Uh, Polyakov said upon returning that, in his opinion, we could totally go to Mars um. Also, there's some great, possibly apocryphal stories about some of the things he did. As soon as he got out of his space capsule. But that's for another time.

I'm like, yeah, it was was that statement part of the space badness? Or well he he seemed to be like about as stereotypical a likely think of your stereotypical big bear of a Russian. Those are the kind of stories attributed to this guy. Like at any rate? Okay, um,

so so what so what specifically? Uh? Was a study trying to look for Well, it's part of NASA's Human Research Program or HRP, and some of it was just really basic stuff like how do you provide for the long term nutrition of astronauts going out into deep space? Because for shorter missions it's not I mean, obviously you want them to have enough calories and the right nutrients to be able to do their job, but you're not

thinking necessarily for long term people. You know a lot of like the spatial missions lasted about a week to ten days, so you didn't have to worry about that much. When you're talking about long term, you guys start thinking about other stuff that can set in, like scurvy, So you actually have to sit there and think, all right, well, how do we make sure that they get enough vitamin C so that they are not going to be prone discurvy,

that sort of stuff. They also wanted to study things like fluid redistribution in space, I mean fluid within the human body. We've talked about that, Joe. I remember when we talked about space foods. You talked about how a lot of people like the spicy shrimp cocktail partially because the fluid redistribution makes you feel kind of like you're congested and have a cold, and so it's hard to smell and taste things. So they wanted to study that into in greater detail and see if there were ways

of of of working with that. How how dangerous could it be? Could it actually impact things like your vision over time? That's really important stuff to know. Everything does impact your vision right now, Yeah, because of the aforementioned eyeball reshaping. Right. So they also wanted to find out ways to ward off stress and fatigue. Obviously, morale is going to be a very important thing for long distance missions, where you're going to be feeling increased sense of isolation

from everybody who isn't on your crew. Uh, you're gonna feel the opposite of that for everyone who is on your crew. Because, as Scott Kelly has said, it's it's tricky to find a way to fall asleep on these missions because you're so close to everyone else if they have to be, if they're on a task and you have a sleep shift, being able to sleep next to

someone who's working is challenging. So you have to design your spacecraft in such a way to try and limit the kind of noise and other interference you might encounter while someone else is trying to do his or her job. So the things that I wouldn't have even really thought about, like oh, yeah, I guess you know, that could be a huge impact on your mental and physical health over the long term. So they wanted to look into that as well, and uh, they did tons of other science

besides the various impact on the bodies. They actually did four d fifty different investigations aboard the International Space Station over that three days stay, and only eighteen of those four fifty were actually about human reactions and functions. Everything else was various exploratory science, like what happens when you put worms in space? You get what does happen? Dune happened. It didn't really get a lot of coverage, but I'm pretty sure the thing I made up happened. Wait a minute,

you made up dune. You're Frank Herbert. Look, I don't like to toot my own horn, especially when I'm lying like crazy. So let's just move on with the twin study. Okay, excellent. What about that twin study? So this was the more specific study that was encapsulated in that one year mission, right, the idea being that, hey, we've got an identical twin here on Earth who must face unrelated to anything else that I've lied about so far. Now we have this one uh one guy on Earth and his identical twins

in space. So we and compare the two. We can do a whole bunch of different measurements before the mission, We can monitor people throughout the mission, we can do a bunch of studies after the mission is over. Compare and contrast the two and figure out what if any variables we can eliminate from certain outcomes. Are there certain things that we can be fairly certain are due to the exposure to the microgravity environment being on the International

Space Station for three forty days. Are there somewhere we can't be absolutely certain, or you know, in science, nothing is ever an absolute certainty, but which ones do we feel very strongly about versus which ones our possibility, but we don't have enough information to really make a determination

that kind of stuff. So it involves ten investigation teams who are all working together to look at the differences between the two twins, And these ten teams are sharing all their work with one another, and their findings create integrated studies. So it's kind of like an integrated study with ten many studies inside it, many being M I N I, although each one is actually pretty impressive and exhaustive.

Um so, because the twins share the same genes, the hope is that the investigations will give us those insights as to the real effects of space. So those ten investigations fall into four broad categories. Uh. The first is human physiology, So how does space affect the various tissues and organs of the human body, including the heart, the brain, and your muscles. Then you have behavioral health. How does being in space for a year affect a person's ability

to reason and to make decisions? How does it affect that person's perception and alertness? Does this include testing the ingestion of spice? I never should have brought up to the third one, especially with me in the room, Jonathan, come on, you know me. The third category is microbiology. So how did the two different diets that the very you know, the guy on Earth and the guy in space, how did their diets and the various stressors that they

experienced throughout that year affect the organisms in their respective guts. This, this one is really interesting to me. Yeah, and it's especially important because we we keep learning that that your microbiome has a lot to do with other bodily processes, like like your immune system function and your mental health. Yeah, yeah, that that the stuff in your guts can affect whether or not, you know, how you're feeling, like not just how you're feeling in your stomach, but how you're feeling

upstairs up in the brain. It's it's kind of it's kind of crazy how much we see, you know, how big an influence we see down there is. Suddenly going with your gut has a much stronger implication than did before. And then the fourth category is molecular and oh mix on a genetic level, what effect does space have on a person? Which genes switch on or off in space

due to various stressors? Everything from microgravity to radiation exposure to just the sense of isolated shouldn't and how much of that does that change in other ways, like what sort of proteins and metabolites are in the body. UM. Usually you would find that out through collecting various samples like urine and sweat and blood, that kind of thing. There's also a related question here about whether time and

space ages you faster. Uh and and this is due to recent research that's pointed out the length of your telomeres as an indicator of your health and your youth. Telomeres being sort of like like caps on the end of our chromosomes. I think we've talked about them on the show before. They sort of protect our DNA from deterioration and other wiggy stuff disease issues, stuff like that.

UM and space radiation could potentially affect your telomeres, So that's one of the things that they're going to be looking at UM. But they're they're also going to do like a like a whole genome analysis, which is just so nerdy and terrific. I'm really excited about pretty cool. I I will be very curious to hear about the

differences between the two genomes once this is all done. Yeah. Uh, So each individual investigation under those four categories, all of them have really long technical names, so I thought going through all of them would at some point you just started to tune out because you're hit hearing a lot of technical words. But here's an example. Uh, Proteomic assessment of fluid shifts and association with visual impairment and intracranial

pressure and twin astronauts. That's rolls off the tongue. Uh. These are very important studies, but like I said, if I were to list all of them by name, I'd have to take a break. One of the investigations ties into another topic we covered not that long ago, and that would be vaccines. So that particular investigation is called characterizing Personalized changes in baseline immune abnormalities and Stimulated Immune response in the presence of a benign trivalent and activated

flu vaccination. Yeah. I told you they were long titles. So the purpose of that one, obviously is to study the long term effects of spaceflight on the immune system, very important for us to know if we're ever going to and people to explore or colonize Mars for example. Now, the really neat thing about this to me, beyond just the idea that this gets us a little closer to our ability to go to Mars, is that we could stand to see incredible benefits from this research well outside

of the space industry. Uh. And that's something that we talked about on this show all the time, the idea that research and science stands to give us incredible benefits that we cannot necessarily anticipate when we first start engaging in that investigation. Although this is one that NASA was specifically looking towards, they were thinking that this approach would allow them to help advance the study of personalized medicine, and that's one of those things that is a great

promise of the future. We have a certain amount of personalized medicine today, but the idea of being able to essentially cater medical care to an individual well based upon their genetics and their body chemistry is incredibly powerful as opposed to the one size fits some approach that medicine

often follows, at least traditional medicine. Of course. Yeah. I also just just on another like like warm fuzzy kind of level, uh, that this research is bringing together dozens of universities and facilities around the US and the world in order to look into this kind of stuff, which is which is just all scientist buddies. Yeah, it's neat, especially when you consider how the initial space race was fueled by the opposite, right, So it's nice to see

it's nice to see collaboration as opposed to competition. Uh. So what have we actually learned so far? Well, Uh, we have learned from Scott Kelly that a trip to Mars is doable in his opinion. That's that's him stating that, based upon his experiences, he thinks that we have the capability of sending people to Mars right now. It just as a question of making that choice. So that's very um,

that's that's that's really ambitious. Obviously, I think a lot of people at NASA would argue that there needs to be some more intermediary steps before we take that particular jump. But it is very encouraging to see that from a person who actually went through and experience this three and forty day immersion in space. Uh. He also said that in order to keep himself motivated, he would focus on tasks and in his downtime he read a lot of email, He watched TV and movies. Uh, he would read just

in general. He would also take lots of photos of Earth, and he said that normal activities helped keep him from feeling too isolated. It was really important, like the having scheduled tasks helped, but also just keeping himself occupied when he wasn't doing a specific investigation was really important. Otherwise it just starts to get to you about how isolated you are from almost all of the rest of humanity.

So um, also with something else we we talked about earlier, he ended up growing, or at least ended up being stretching, stretching by about depending upon the source you read, I've seen up from one and a half to two inches, but one half inches is the source that NASA itself said, which is about four centimeters while he was up in space. But since that time hasn't been very long since he got back. It's been like eight or nine days as of the recording of this podcast, right since that time,

he's already returned to his normal height. Yeah, so this related to a fact one of these factoids that that I bet you've heard before, the one about how when you wake up in the morning you are taller than you were when you went to bed at night, and I wondered if that was true. But I actually looked

it up, and it is true that this is a fact. Yeah, I read um a. There was a two thousand six article in the medical journal Journal Scoliosis that said, the effects of gravity on the upright human posture are powerful. Individuals are as much as twenty five millimeters taller five

millimeters something. Come on, that's not that much. It says millimeters taller in the morning than in the evening as a result of compressive forces bearing down all day, and astronauts grow growing quotation marks by nearly seventy five millimeters when released from the force of Earth's gravity. So uh so, I thought that was really interesting. Not only is that fact true, but it's the same reason that you're taller

when you get out of bed in the morning. Is why Scott Kelly was taller when he got back from space. He didn't have gravity compressing him vertically all day. Right, it's not like they put in space lifts. Well, he was well, he was aboard the I s s uh So. Most of what there is to be learned through this study has not yet happened, as the recording of this podcast, the research is ongoing, so we don't have a lot

of results that we can give right now. Maybe perhaps in a future episode we can revisit this topic and talk about some of the specific was results that have been publicly revealed by NASA, But right now that's still ongoing research. Uh. And of course we also always have to remember that even once we get that research, there are variables that might be in play that have nothing to do with one person being on Earth and one

person being in space. Uh. You can't, you know, you can't always be certain that, uh it's one particular thing that lead to a result unless you've got an extremely carefully controlled experiment. And this experiment is awesome and it stands to give us a lot of really useful information. But it's not the most carefully controlled experiment I've ever

read about. But it's really exciting stuff. Um, and I promised a kind of a fun story about mustaches at the beginning, and here he goes about they can be Yes, I have my own mustache that will be twirling, Sue. And so I've got mustache wax at home to actually apply to it. I might do that, Souf byself West

let's find out. I find out on Saturday. So anyway, this specific mustache story relates to the fact that when it came time for Scott to launch into space back in March two thousand fifteen, his twin brother Mark showed up at the launch facility, but he was clean shaven, and Mark usually wears a mustache, so that threw everybody off. Because Scott is typically clean shaven, Mark typically wears a mustache.

Mark comes in with no mustache. People look at Mark and they suddenly think, oh, my gosh, Scott isn't in the spacecraft and we're right now, why Scott not? Oh it's Mark. Yeah. According to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Mark fooled everyone because the mustache was how they just told the two apart. Now, if you look at pictures of the two back when Mark was where sporting his mustache. Uh, there are other notable differences, but isolated, you're only seeing

one of the two twins. I could easily see how you would make that mistake and have a moment of pure panic. So I thought that was really cool. Uh, and I love the At least the article I read made it sound as if this was entirely planned by Marcus. To prank, you have to pull a prank on NASA, and I love that kind of sense of humor. It's also something you typically find with test pilots. I mean, I think that also like any time that you can prank NASA, you're having a pretty good day. So this

research is really cool. But I've got a proposal for the next thing they should do. Okay, what's that. The next stage after the twins study for a year in space should be the twin paradox study for a year at light speed. Yeah, I guess not at light speed. Light speed. You get to work on the near light speed engine. I foresee one minor stumbling block before we are able to carry out that investigation, and I'll start

working on recruiting some twins. Yeah. Now, if you're not familiar, the twin paradox would be an interesting thing to study in reality. It's it's sort of been a an experiment conducted in thought. In the math of it seems to work out, but it would be interesting to see if it happens in reality. Of course. The idea is that if you due to the effects of relativity, the time

dilation effects of relativity. If you took two twins, put one of them in the spaceship and had to go near the speed of light for a certain amount of time and then come back to Earth, theoretically the one living on Earth should have aged more than the one on the space ship. Right time for each twin would have seemed to have passed at the same rate, but

in reference to one another it would be at different rates. So, in other words, the the twin on Earth would think that the twin aboard the spacecraft was living in slow motion, and the twin aboard the spacecraft would think the twin on Earth was living fast forward, but individually they would each experience time as we normally do. That's one of those crazy things about relativity. Well, if you have crazy things to tell us, don't just tell us the really

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