Engineering Humans for Deep Space with Ronke Olabisi

What happens to the human body in deep space? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore tissue engineering, Wolverine & Deadpool’s healing style, and the science to help humans adapt to long-term space travel with biomedical engineer Ronke Olabisi.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, Dr. Ronke Olabisi.

• 0:04Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still at it.

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's doing tissue engineering. She's.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  Making people.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which.

• 0:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's generating organs. This is, this is her laboratory.

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, some might say she's playing God. I'm just saying.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. More on that coming up on StarTalk Special Edition.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. And since it's special edition, you know who else is my co-host. Chuck Nice, Chuck, baby. Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right, professional comedian and actor. Yes. Of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, dude.

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, Neil.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former soccer pro and soccer announcer.

• 1:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your community of soccer players shares you with us, and I want to thank them for it.

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm sure they won't care. Happy to get rid of me.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in special edition, as you know, we discuss things that affect the human mind, human physiology, just what it is to be human in this world, biochemically and physically. And this particular episode, the topic is, I love this topic. Let me get, the human body in deep space. Oh. Oh. Yeah. That's the best. That is. That's a good subject. Gary, how'd you and your producers come up with that one?

• 1:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, we thought it was about time we sort of delved into some biomedical engineering. Followed it with some regenerative medicine.

• 1:54Gary O'Reilly?

  And then decided, you know what, let's point it out into space and ask it to find ways to help the human body adapt to long-term space travel. If you remember, about fourteen years ago or so, the Hundred Year Starship Project from 2011, well, our guest was a part of, an integral part of that endeavor. So that's where we'll begin. We'll then hand over the floor to our Patreon listeners to answer their questions. So Neil, if you would introduce our guest and you'll find out where the human body and space will meet.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yes, our guest today, it's not her first time. Oh, yeah. We have Professor Ronke Olabacy, right here in the StarTalk house. Professor, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So your background here, oh my gosh. If I did not do astrophysics, this is what I'd want to do. Your PhD is in biomechanical engineering. Wow. So you're the ones who invented like the Terminator, okay? Let's be clear about that.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be us.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Living tissue, living tissue over endoskeleton. Let me hear you say, no, we would never do that. Let me hear you say that.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I would never do that, but I am sure that somebody would be like, that's cool.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  And if they could, would, but we're so far away from that right now.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you also have a degree in aeronautical engineering. And so that would help get the space dimension of this biomechanical engineering off the ground. And like I said, you're a previous guest on StarTalk. So just welcome back.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so Gary, why don't you launch this rocket here? What do you have in mind?

• 3:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Ronke, if I can call you that, or if you prefer, Professor, remind us, if you would, about the Hundred Year Starship Project and your area of involvement in what

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was the overall outcome?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Well, so it's not done because it's not 100 years yet, right? So it's the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and it was initiated by DARPA in order to kind of inject an enthusiasm for space travel and spaceflight. If you look back at what the Apollo missions did for not just the economy, but for technology that we're still using today, it really transformed our world to the point that we're living in the space age. So like we have cell phones because they needed to communicate with the astronauts, things like that. And so the idea is we decided in 1961 to go to the moon and landed there in 1969.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  What if we had decided that in 1869? What would our technology and world look like today? And so that was the goal to initiate, like, let's stop saying it's impossible because in 1869, they thought it was impossible too. Let's just say, okay, if we can do it, what, what do we need? Well, we need, you know, to go fast.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, just to wait, just to be clear, you're talking about traveling to the stars?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  To another star.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another star.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Interstellar.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right now, we're jet setting around the solar system. That's like nothing.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, a few years here and there. So Starship was not just a poetic name, it's a destination.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  It's a destination, but it's also a think project. So it's a, it's, it doesn't matter if we don't get there, if we can get all the things that we need to do so. So in the same way that even if we didn't land on the moon, all of the technology that was built around trying to make that happen really transformed our world. And so if we decide that we need suspended animation, right? How is that going to help on Earth? Well, maybe you can get somebody, there's some, there are some fields where there's only five people in the world who can perform that surgery.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  And if their backlog is 100 patients wide, put them in suspended animation. Or maybe you're in a battlefield. Can you put them in suspended animation so that they don't bleed out, so that they don't die right there?

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe you just really need a good nap.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, suspended animation.

• 6:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So what you've, what you've done is ask yourself, what are the questions that we haven't yet thought to us?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Yes, and so like better power, right? Cause you would need a lot of power and it would need to be sustainable because you can't take anything with you, right? So, I mean, you can't take the earth with you, but you, you, you can't come back to resupply.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's a movie called Wandering Earth where they do just that. They take earth with them to visit the other stars.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  I, I saw a Chinese language movie where they...

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  That's it? Okay, yeah, that was awesome. I loved that movie.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wandering Earth, the sequel, is the one where they actually turn on their rockets and move earth out of its orbit to the next star system. Because the sun, the sun was misbehaving and they said, and I just thought, they can't just fix, if you have enough power to move earth, surely you can just go in and fix the sun.

• 7:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, yeah, right?

• 7:19Speaker 03

  You have to suspend your disbelief for that. First, they stopped the rotation of the earth, then they put the rockets. And so all of the weather things that would have happened, it bothered me, but then you have to suspend.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's why it's called science fiction. Yes.

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  Right, yes. What bothers me is that we're taking everyone. That's the real problem.

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh, very nice way to see that, Chuck. So, so Project Starship is not just biomechanical or biological, it's also the physics of spacetime and how you're gonna, and of aerospace engineering.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  It's even textiles and clothing, right? So in the space station, I think it's like 900 pounds a year that, of laundry that they incinerate because they don't have laundry machines up there. So if you have to consider that, could you grow your own clothes and then just, instead of washing them, have them, I don't know, degrade and then grow some more? Or grow the materials to weave your own clothes?

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, Chuck, how long you been wearing your drawers?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 8:26Chuck Nice?

  Nah, I have an unfurnished basement, I'm sorry.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  So it's it's things that we don't think about, but that would help on Earth, too, because there's tons of of clothing that doesn't get recycled, that just gets thrown away, and that's sitting in landfills, so.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's a huge problem. Fast fashion, it's actually a very environmentally deleterious practice.

• 8:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Even the production of certain cottons is is toxic. But let's let's flick it back into your research, Professor. Healing wounds, building bone, growing organs.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yes, tissue engineering.

• 9:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you. What a great take. Tissue engineering, how pivotal, how vital would that be if we are to be literally starships in the future?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  If we're somewhere else and you suddenly find yourself needing a heart transplant, if I can grow you one, that's very important. If you burn yourself and you need skin grafting, and I can grow your skin. And particularly in microgravity, your wound healing is delayed, and it doesn't heal in the same way it does on Earth. And there are a lot of different theories about that. Some of them are that you have, I mean, we evolved in a gravity field and that the repair mechanisms require gravity to operate properly. But your immune system is affected, your microbiome is affected, pathogens become more virulent,

• 9:58Speaker 03

  and at the same time, your immune system is like, not today.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is all because we did not evolve in space.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. Kind of sounds to me like your real argument is we should stay home.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the final report to DARPA. Hundred-year spaceship, starship, stay home.

• 10:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, if you get ahead of a story before you get out into somewhere nowhere and go, oh, what do we do now? But if you if you think, okay, well, one immediate thing is the pharmaceutical. If you're a group of people on a spaceship traveling to another star, you don't just pop into CVS, do you? There's not one on the way.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:41Gary O'Reilly?

  You can't get it delivered. You've got to take it with it. Could you grow it? Can it be developed? As Professor was saying, that the delivery systems and mechanisms to get wounds to heal quicker because you're in a microgravity. If you're ahead of all of those issues, then you know, you've got the walking, talking room, Dr. McCoy, you know, you've got bones on board.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  So when you, when you talk about that, are you using cells? Like we saw this during the pandemic, we used met, you know, it's why it's called messenger RNA. Are you using cells as delivery systems for healing? And you know, you take the cell itself and make it kind of part of the, uh, the process of, of the healing or you put med, put med, put medicine inside of a cell?

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I have a better question. So, uh, Ronkey, how do you do it?

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  Ah, I know, I'm trying to figure it out. Hey, how do you do that?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  So the paradigm of tissue engineering is you're, you were getting there, there it's cells, it's some kind of a scaffold and it's bio factors. And so if you think about a building, when you're building a building, you put scaffolding down and then the construction workers, they lay down the building and then eventually they remove that scaffolding. And so in the same way, we tried to tell the body, we want you to grow this. This is one way to do it. Other ways to do it are in a bio reactor in an incubator. But one of the, the easier ways to do it is to convince your body to do it. And so I think maybe in the late turn of the century, you might've seen a rat with an ear on its back.

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I saw that.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  And so it's easier to have the body do it if you give it the right instructions.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, for those who did not see that picture, it was the cartilage of a human ear on the back of a rat.

• 12:40Chuck Nice?

  It was grown on the back of a lab rat.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Not a rat's ear on its back.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  No, there was a human ear.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  Human ear.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the rat didn't look too happy about that. I just thought I'd tell you.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  He dug in his ear a couple of times, I think. But, like, every time I saw that, I just wanted to say, "What?" Um, so, what we do is, with that scaffolding, we try to put these different biofactors that say, uh, "Build skin," or "Build cartilage," or "Build muscle." And those are the instructions that are like the plans that you would give the construction worker. And then, what you want is, you want the body to then degrade that scaffolding. And the scaffolding can be lots of different kinds of things. But degrade that scaffolding, and then you're left with just the tissue. So it's no longer artificial, it is that fully-formed tissue.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like the, like the stitches that dissolve in your body.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, but what you're telling me is, you're taking, you're taking a path that's not the one we had all imagined from decades ago. From decades ago, we imagined, "Oh, if neither new heart, I have this mechanical heart, I'll now put inside you." A mechanical organ. Everything would be, come from the engineering side of this, rather than from the biology side. So, what is better about a bio-organ if I can make a really good mechanical organ?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  We've learned so much about biomaterials, and when you have these mechanical organs, you have to be on blood thinners for the rest of your life, because they just like to form clots. They're also sites of bacterial infestation. You're constantly fighting all of these other things that are going on, because your body is trying to get it out. And it's this foreign thing, it's get out. One of the hugest complications in orthopedic implants is, if you get a bacterial, they'll form this biofilm, and the biofilm protects them from antibiotics. And so then, they have to take out the implant, because it's going to eventually kill you.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  If, instead, I could scrape some cells from the inside of your cheek, and then grow you a new heart, and then your body doesn't reject it, your body doesn't see anything wrong with it, it's not a site of infection.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome home, heart!

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yes, and, and we don't need donors anymore.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ronkey, I'm very disappointed, because this means you can't rebuild me better.

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  All you can do is rebuild me the same way I was.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  The goal with genetic and gene therapy is to maybe if you have the defective genes, we can replace those. And so gene therapy, some tissue engineering uses gene therapy in that it can tell the cells what to do by, you know, genetically modifying cells that would normally do something else. You tell them, I want you to do this instead. Uh, or you can do gene therapy to try to eliminate a deadly disease in people.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:17Gary O'Reilly?

  So why don't we do that to anybody and everybody that gets on Starship? And give them this genetic upgrade, guessing as much as we can what they're likely to come across from here to there. And as Neil said, build them better. Is that viable?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  We're not there yet. It's not perfect. Gene therapy has had tragedies along the way. And so you want to be, you want to be.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, let's don't, you're burying the lead. Let's get to some of these tragedies. What, what are you talking about here, Ronkey?

• 16:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Just a drama junkie.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  I just, I need to know what these tragedies are. I have not heard about the tragedies of gene therapy. It's always heralded. Bring it on, Ronkey.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  So I can't remember the disease that he had, but it was this young 18 year old and he had this disease. It was non-fatal, but it, it caused problems in his life. And the goal of it was to change this defective gene. And when they injected, I believe what happened was there was no response. And then they went over what the protocol said for the injection of the virus. And so he had a massive immune response because you have an immune response to virus particles. And so even if the virus itself doesn't, it's non-replicating and it can't kill you.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  If you give a high enough dose, it's kind of like having an extreme allergic reaction. Your body goes berserk trying to attack those things.

• 17:55Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that the cytokine? Is that the what?

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, like it's a cascade. It's an immune.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Most symptoms that we experience is the body's response to the pathogen.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Yes. And when you give that much and they went off. And I, I think they found that, um, one of the trainees, the postdoc was fabricating data. Like it, it was this big scandal in the world of gene therapy and people remember and don't want a repeat of that in everything that they do. So people want to be certain before they do anything that the same thing can't happen again.

• 18:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So regrowing organs is clearly an important ability to have on a generational starship. No doubt about it. But how about the ordinary everyday injury that people might suffer? Scraped knee, you, you cut the tomato too quickly and you cut yourself. Have you been able to influence the rate at which someone heals relative to what biology would do all by itself?

• 18:59Speaker 03

  My group developed a system that can heal wounds like three times faster and it healed without scar. And so we want to move that forward because.

• 19:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you just say it heals without scars?

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it healed without scab or scar formation. And so

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  We want to move it up forward and examine that and see if that works like in people in the same way.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How could you say that just so casually?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Because. You should be jumping, guess what we've my group found. Because nobody believes it until you do it in a person. And but you can't do it in a person until you establish it in smaller animal models, unfortunately.

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 19:43Gary O'Reilly?

  So Professor, are you are you talking about superficial scarring on the surface? Or the internal scar tissue? There was no scar tissue internally?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  There was no scar tissue in the entire dermis of the skin.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  And so we were like, this could transform. Plastic surgery, you wouldn't have to hide your scars up in, you know. In your hairline. The hairline.

• 20:06Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  But not just like for people who want to look better, for people who have been terribly burned. For people who have been disfigured in car accidents. For people who have any kind of scar that they are self-conscious about. If we could like excise it and then put this on it and it would work. That's what we're trying to do. So we're using tissue engineering approaches to wound healing.

• 20:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's not just it's not just a cosmetic side of it. I've had spinal surgery, I've had three spinal surgeries. And I have a foot long scar. It's great. You've got miles and miles of scar tissue.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Gary, I always knew you were spineless at some level there.

• 20:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, shut up.

• 20:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Unless you work really, really hard to kind of break it up. Just stops the mobility and people have had orthopedic surgeries. And don't not are are not able. To do anything about it are going to be rigid and their mobility is really going to be compromised. So. When you said no scar tissue, my eyes light. That would be amazing.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a terrible contractures that particularly burn patients get. And it's it it's life changing where the some can't lift their heads. Um, some can't move their arms anymore. It depends on the burn. One of the things that inspired me was a just a devastating picture of a mother and daughter who had been burned. And I like, I want to help those people.

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me add one more question before we go to our Q and A because Gary and Chuck have assembled questions from our Patreon fan base. And we value them highly. But I just want to give a little pop culture reference here. We've seen from the in the Marvel Universe that Wolverine.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And more recently, he's done a film with Deadpool. I think they both have some uncommon ability to regenerate from injury.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  So, but it's different. So, um, there's, there's regeneration and there's healing. Wolverine heals Deadpool regenerates. Cause like when you watch it, it grows like it's a baby leg first.

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Where as Wolverine is, so it's kinda cool.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so that's, so that's a difference I had not appreciated. So, cause we've seen Wolverine get shot and then the bullet just sort of comes out of him. He heals over and there's no scar at all. So it's just healing on some superhero level. And Deadpool, you're saying, uh, is like what a newt would do.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tail comes off, he just grows another tail.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he, he grows it in the same way that development. So embryonic development, that, that kinda thing. He grows it from baby sized leg to human, to adult male. Whereas Wolverine, whatever was there before, just.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  Comes back.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly the way it was.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so how, so how does that differ from what you do?

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Mine in particular, I'm trying to do healing. And so regeneration is something that others in the field are, are trying to do. But I'm also trying to do de novo stuff and so I can grow bone in patterns.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you just say grow a bone in a pattern?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, we did that. It was very cool. We used seashells.

• 23:31Chuck Nice?

  Now, now exactly how close to Thanos are you is what I wanna know.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, uh, that, that bugged me. I was like, just make more food.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, just.

• 23:45Chuck Nice?

  Excellent, right?

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just feed people, dude.

• 23:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the answers are out there.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It seems to me, newts already regrow legs and tails in nature. Nature has already figured out how to do that. So, how hard could that be to emulate that in human physiology?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  So, people are trying. People are trying to understand what's happening there. The thing about newts, I believe they don't achieve an adult form as well. And so it's like, they're constantly doing embryogenesis type thing.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, embryogenesis, that's what it's called, okay.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  I'm not an expert in this, so I can't really speak to the... But I do remember reading a paper where they detected electrical activity in the growing bud. And it's just really cool stuff that we don't do. I think they tried to replicate it in a lizard that didn't have the regeneration abilities. And they tried to replicate using electrical stimulation. And I think they got more than they did. And when you do electrically stimulate certain parts of the body, you get better healing. Like bone, bone is piece of electric, which is kinda cool.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So before we get to Q and A, just, Runkay, tell us right now, I want you to commit, between Deadpool and Wolverine, which of them has more biomechanical authenticity?

• 25:17Speaker 03

  I mean, neither.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neither.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Those are not good choices.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  The way humans heal, Wolverine is more like a rapidly healing person. Whereas Deadpool is more, his physiology is like more like a newt. But Wolverine would have scars. So, the lack of scars is not authentic. And the growing new buds of embryonic-like limbs is also not... No, both are no. Both are a big no, but they're fun.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a total cop out.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  No, they're both no. I'm not choosing. I don't know.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying if he's embryonic, embryogenesis, if you do it and Deadpool does it, it sounds like Deadpool is the, is the natural winner here, except unless Wolverine got your no scarring formula from your lab. There it is.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Well, okay, it depends. If you're, if, if you're going to, to rate it, if we give it a rating scale, and so we give the scale on speed, the speed of healing, then Deadpool is more authentic. If you, you do it on the type of healing, then Wolverine would probably get like an 80% because it's more like the way humans heal, but it's without scars. So he doesn't get a hundred percent of that.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He used your no scarring method.

• 26:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. He, he rated your lab.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  It's too, it's too fast.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I got you.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's too good.

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  Got you. Okay.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, Gary, give me some questions from our people.

• 27:23Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's, let's start with David Klingbeal. Oh, by the way, these are all our Patreon listeners and thank you for your curiosity, by the way. Dave's in Power Heights, Ohio. Could we, I'm guessing he doesn't include me, bioengineer people to function in both 1G and microgravity without harm from either environment? Or do we not know enough about the effects of microgravity on the body to answer that question, professor?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  So the latter, we don't know enough that one of the things that people are trying to figure out why it happens is something called SANS, which is Space Flight Associated Neuroocular Syndrome.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SANS, okay.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  SANS. It affects the vision and they're still debating on what causes that. And so astronauts are coming back nearsighted. When you look at the back of the eye, it's distended, there's different, there's different levels of impact on the back of the eye. Right now, it seems to affect men more than women, but there are not enough women to say for sure. So, how do you treat something if you don't know what's causing it?

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm curious because it can't be because they're in space necessarily. It has to be because they're in zero G, right?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The air pressure around them is a little lower than typical, but if, if this was a symptom of air pressure, you'd find people living at high altitudes that have this, the same symptoms, but you don't. Is that correct?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  And they used to, it used to be called something else, uh, IPS or something like that. They used to think that it was intra, like vision intraocular or intracranial pressure syndrome.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just wouldn't think that my eyeballs would care which way the gravity vector goes, or if there's a gravity vector at all. Because my eyeballs work when I'm laying down, they work when I'm upside down, they work when I'm doing chin ups.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  But you're not upside down for months, right?

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  And so one of the things that happens is you have this headward fluid shift. Like, think about the human as a giant balloon, right? So all of our blood vessels, we've got, they're, they're kind of elastic and the gravity is pulling down the blood to, towards your feet. Um, when you go into space, it's not pulling down that blood and you've got the muscles pumping everything up. And so in the same way, if I were to hold a balloon that was filled with water like this, it would be like a teardrop. But if I drop it in free fall and I watch it, it's gonna, the elastic will make it return to a round shape.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because all the water inside the balloon becomes weightless while it is falling.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that weightlessness then changes the shape of the balloon.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  The weightlessness allows the tension in the balloon

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The balloon's surface.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  To pull equally, and so then it becomes a sphere.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  So, in the same way, when we're standing on Earth, we've got more, more of our blood pulled at our feet, and then we go up into space and then all of the elasticity of our vessels pushes that blood to a different space.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should send only far sighted astronauts into space. Yeah. Because there's a short sightedness, uh, force operating on it, and they could come back with regular vision. Oh, yeah.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't quite work like that. Spaceflight isn't the Lasik surgery for far sighted people?

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  The most expensive Lasik surgery ever.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be for sure. Uh, Gary, what do you have?

• 31:13Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Vincent Zimmerman, who's from Pennsylvania, says hello Neil Chuck and myself. My question is, could we bioengineer astronauts to be more resistant to radiation?

• 31:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 31:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm, from what I understand, radiation is a concern.

• 31:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And so. A big one.

• 31:29Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go. That's the nub of the question, and he says, loves the show.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  So, okay, a lot of people are asking about bioengineering people, and that's really not, for the most part, what most researchers do. Um, now, that having been said, like, what we're looking at is we're looking at bioengineering certain things to get you back to your normal state, not bioengineering you to give you superpowers. That having been said, right now, there is a bioengineered form of melanin on the ISS, and it can withstand certain kinds of radiation that regular melanin cannot. And if you don't remember what melanin is, it's what makes me brown.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Um, they believe that because there are so many different kinds of melanin, that maybe somewhere on Earth, this kind of melanin exists. I believe it has like silica in it instead of what, I don't remember, but it is a paper that I read, and it's, they're looking at ways to use that. And the goal, I believe, was to use it as kind of a lotion. So the way we have sunscreen, this would be like. Cosmic radiation screen, but again, when you're talking about cosmic radiation, some of them, those particles, you just, nothing stops.

• 32:55Chuck Nice?

  Well, listen here, Tim Johnson, it's great to have you aboard the space program. Some good news and some, and some maybe better news. The, the good news is you're accepted. The different news is you're gonna have to be black. So, we need you to put this cream on.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's also true, and I think we've known for a while. For example, when fighter pilots go into tight G turns and the blood leaves their head and goes into their legs. The, the question was, do we create some kind of medicine, a pill for them to take, where the brain retains its oxygen, even though blood is going down, retains with little oxygen it has, even though the blood is going to the foot. The solution to that was pressure.

• 33:42Chuck Nice?

  Squeeze their legs.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Squeeze the leg. That was, it was an engineering solution to the biophysiological problem. So, for me, the damaging radiation question is easily solved by shields.

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  Shield, make a radiation shield on the ship itself.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the ship itself.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, so that way you don't have to.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good high-energy absorber of energy. You, the water could have a, a skin that's filled with water. And you cycle water in and out of it. I mean, that could work too. I'm just saying.

• 34:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  I mean, you would have to have, I think they calculate as a foot to make sure you block everything.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  A foot of water.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  A foot of water around the ship. And which is extremely expensive.

• 34:28Chuck Nice?

  Maybe it's a jacket the, the, the ship puts on once it's already in space. You know, you have to.

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  It's like you go to, you get to a dock and you slip into your little spaceship jacket and then you move.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it's.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well-proof jacket, alright.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  It's funny, I talked to a fighter pilot, a captain, and he said, women are G monsters. Right, and he said, all the women do better than the men at what's. Standing the high G's because our blood vessels are smaller and more resistant. And so it takes more for the water. And in the same way, in many ways, women do better in space. Uh, for multiple reasons like that, but you bring up that. One of the things to reverse the headward fluid shifts is a lower body negative pressure suit where they essentially. Try to suck your lower half of your body to keep the blood from going up into your brain. And causing all kinds of problems.

• 35:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Like a compression suit or part of a suit.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  The reverse.

• 35:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  It sucks. It's a vacuum.

• 35:37Gary O'Reilly?

  I keep the questions coming. What do you have, Chuck?

• 35:39Chuck Nice?

  This is Zach Kellah. Greetings, Dr. Tyson, Ron K., Chuck, Gary, Zach here from Springfield, Missouri. My question is regarding the cell therapy at the Olabisi lab. Is it a plan to use cell therapy to assist in sustaining and building bone density that astronauts lose in space travel? Especially in the future extended space travel. Thank you for all that you do. So when they get back and they're all atrophied, do you have, would you be able to use cell therapy to? Help them along the way and when they return, or is there preventative things that you can do? Well, exactly. I mean, that's a real problem. What he talks about is bone density for a long time in space.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  It's a really interesting question. It's a. What happens? And this is, this is why it's so hard to study. So what happens? You've got these bone building cells called osteoblasts. And you can remember osteo is bone, blast is build. And you've got these bone cleaving cells called osteoclasts and they eat away your bone. Now imagine, this is really, I think it's Llewellyn Starks is a perfect example of this. He was a high jumper and he just broke his leg right in the middle of a long jump. And if you think about how I think everybody here has taken a soda can and bent the tap back and forth until it broke, right? Absolutely. So you are fatiguing that metal. And once that metal is fatigued, it just breaks. Yes.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  No matter how old you are, your skeleton is at most 10 years old. Because otherwise, just daily living, you would be fatiguing your skeleton. And so those osteoclasts go in and they cleave out those tiny micro fractures. And the osteoblasts come in and they put new bone in. And so there's slow turnover, but over time, everything is replaced. Now, when you go into space, what happens is that the osteoclasts are still like, yeah, I'm doing my job, but the osteoblasts are like, not here, we're not needed. And so this is part of the reason that, you know, astronauts are susceptible to kidney stones. Everything in your body relies on calcium.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Your muscles cannot function, including your heart, without calcium, right? And so calcium is stored in your bones. And when you degrade your bones, you're dumping a lot of calcium into your bloodstream. And then you get things like kidney stones and, you know, all, all kinds of problems. But one of the things that they can't figure out, because if we put these bone cells in a Petri dish, they don't act the same way as they do in the body. And so we can't study it that way. We can only study living beings. And when you try to stop this, this process, you can't encourage the osteoblasts to continue doing their job.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  What you can do is you can stop the osteoclasts from cleaving the bone, right? Wow. And so you're, you're stopping them from cleaving the bone and you get, it does work. And these bisphosphonates, they've tried in women who are getting osteoporosis. And it works great, but in 5% of them, what happens is that same thing that happens to the soda can. Without that turnover, they'll be walking and they'll be like, my leg is a little sore and then snap. Snap. Yeah. Wow. And there's these terrible breaks. And then you have to stop.

• 39:10Chuck Nice?

  Is there a way to stimulate the osteoblast while they're in space so not chemically or even?

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Exercise.

• 39:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, just like some kind of pounding or stimulation that you could. Cause one of the things that they tell you to do, like if you want to create bone density here on earth, like jump rope or you know, do something that gives some slight stress to the bone itself.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so that's, that's why they, they exercise like two to four hours a day on those treadmills with the bungee cords.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you just moot if we rotated the space station. Then you have this ring of one G and then it's no longer a variable.

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  Uh, you don't care because now you're on earth the whole time that you're traveling.

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  There was supposed to be a module where they tested that. Um, and I think the module got scrapped because they couldn't figure out. It wasn't intended for the whole space station to rotate. Uh, it was intended for just a module to rotate and people could go in it. And I think it's on display in Japan because it got partially built, but they couldn't figure out how to keep it for vibrating the rest of the station. And we're worried that it could be catastrophic. So to, to go back to his, his question, one of the things that they do is they kill the, the osteoclasts. One of the things that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to encourage the osteoblast by using

• 40:36Speaker 03

  the seashell stuff where we did it in patterns and we can use, um, antibodies to go to the sites where the osteoclasts are killing everything and attract the osteoblast to go back to those sites. So that that's what we're trying to do.

• 40:53Chuck Nice?

  Bone wars. Yeah.

• 40:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, you just said seashells. Is that the?

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:59Gary O'Reilly?

  The, in, in some of your work, you use mother of Poe?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Explain that a bit more because seashells is just you two brushing over the surface there, I'm sure.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  So it's really, really, really cool. And it goes back to like, uh, seventh century B.C. with the Maya. I'm sure you've heard about like tooth implants and how people are getting tooth implants. And maybe you know somebody whose tooth implant failed. Well, they found this portion of a Maya skull where in the jaw. Initially, they thought that the three mother pearl teeth that were there were put in for the funeral so that they would, you know, their corpse would look pretty. But then this dentist was like, can I x-ray that? Cause he saw it in a museum. And they let him x-ray it and it showed that it had been implanted during life and that it had stayed that it had

• 41:52Speaker 03

  grown bone into the implants. And so that person had functional teeth that last longer than what we can do because it's lasted like thousands of years after the person is only now a piece of a jaw. Right? And so when this was discovered, it sparked a lot of interest in research into, uh, mother pearl as a biomedical implant. And this one group, it was really cool. They took these, uh, osteoblasts, the bone cells. And they put them in a Petri dish and they took a chunk of bone on one side and a chunk of nacre on one, uh, the other side. And the nacre side, little mineralization that looked like nacre started growing towards the bone. And on the bone side,

• 42:35Speaker 03

  little mineralization that looked like bone started growing towards the nacre and they met in the middle.

• 42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's how you know it's an active biological process?

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think, I think archaeologists discover this in, in bone remains. They know if the bone had healed. From an earlier fracture.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause cavemen were breaking their stuff all the time. Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. And like, a whole lot of research sparked out of this and people identified that it was certain proteins within the seashell that were responsible. And so, my group took those proteins and we put them in microscopic patterns to see if we could make osteoblasts do what we want. And we could. That was cool.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my goodness. Is there anything you can't do? I know, she's Frankenstein, right? Oh my goodness!

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The doctor.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Teleport. I want to teleport. I would go to space and hang out.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right on. Teleport. We'll get you some wormholes. I'll trade you a wormhole for your human-making machine.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Deal.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, we've got time for one last question.

• 43:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, let's go to Greece. This time's in Athens. We're gonna get a question from Elias Siametis. Hi everyone, um, let me see if you can pronounce that Chuck. So, I did it for Chuck.

• 43:56Gary O'Reilly?

  "We can't go faster than light and we can't hibernate, hence for extended space travel, we'll most likely live through it to some form of synthetic in- integration. While I find it to be a plausible scenario, how can we marry biology to synthetic materials in a way that our cells are either replaced completely by inorganic ones or revitalized in a way that they don't decay, which I kinda think borrows back into that Lance Astor you were giving with Mather of Pulse. So, please professor."

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause, cause if you freeze, if you freeze a T-bone steak,

• 44:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, after three years, it's really different from what you first put in the package. Like, the, the, the proteins are degrading, it's dehydrating, there's things going on inside of it, even though it's in a deep-frozen state. So, if you can preserve a human body so that it can pop open and wake up at the end, what are you doing to it, if that's even possible at all?

• 44:56Speaker 03

  So, we can freeze cells, uh, fairly easily. I think the record for somebody defrosting an embryo is 20 years and they became healthy babies.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Uh, we use something-

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a job. Came out with a job. Twenty-year-old embryo, came out with a job, like.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or he went to college.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  But yeah, that's the dimethyl sulfoxide, DMSO, we use. Um, I think they use something different for embryos, but we use that because it kind of acts like an antifreeze. And then you freeze it slowly and then you use liquid nitrogen to really, really minus 165 degrees Celsius. Keep that quote. But in his question are several assumptions. So there are researchers who are working on warp drives and they're, they're getting successful and interesting results. There are people who are working on torpor, which is a kind of um, hibernation. And they're trying to make uh, non-hibernating animals hibernate.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  And so like when we talk about suspended animation, we're really just using science fiction words for torpor and hibernation. But there are researchers who are trying to do that because the benefits to having somebody in surgery under torpor, then maybe you don't need to use uh, ECMO machine, which is a heart lung bypass, which you know, affects people differently. Maybe you just put them in hibernation and then you can do the surgery and then you can wake them up and you, you never needed to run their blood through. And ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation device. The things that we're trying to do,

• 46:51Speaker 03

  people are trying to create cells from just the raw chemicals, like living cells. And the reason is, is because they want to understand how life began. And so at that point, I don't know that people are trying to use those cells and replace body cells. What people are considering doing, and this is how we immortalize ourselves. So I actually have cells that are kind of like. More like Highlander than like Wolverine. And so, like, we use immortalized cells and immortalized cells, you have

• 47:32Speaker 03

  things called telomeres and the telomeres are kind of like a fuse on the cell. And it can replicate itself until that fuse runs out and each replication that fuse gets shorter. And that is the senescence of the cell. And people have linked the length of the telomeres to aging. And people who don't age as quickly seem to have longer telomeres in their cells.

• 47:59Chuck Nice?

  There can be only one.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's not causal. And so, we don't know the correlation. It's a correlation, but we don't know that it's causal, I should say. And when we use these cells that we're doing our experiments on, we don't want cells that are going to be no good after like 50 times that we replicate them. So, we modify these cells so that they can replicate indefinitely. And this is called immortalized. So, we use immortalized cells. So, they won't die from replicating themselves. They won't achieve senescence. But we can kill them by like pouring bleach on them. That kills them very quickly.

• 48:37Chuck Nice?

  If only you could have done that to Highlander.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  You can kill a Highlander, but otherwise they're immortal.

• 48:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you gotta cut their head off though.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:44Chuck Nice?

  A little bleach would have been a lot easier.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Well, bleach is decapitation for cells.

• 48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  President Trump wanted you to put bleach in your body to get rid of the.

• 48:53Chuck Nice?

  There, there can be only one, only one. That's what I'm saying.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  It will kill your cells before it kills anything else.

• 49:00Chuck Nice?

  Right? It's better to burn out than it is to fade away. Okay.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've only just begun to plum this topic. This is, and you know, every next interview we have with you, Ronke, I, I, it makes me wonder. We want to meet your husband and like poke him, make sure he's next time. Okay?

• 49:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. I wanna, I wanna see if he has those immortalized cells. That's what I'm looking for.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ronke, thanks for, for doing yet another Star Talk with us.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 49:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna come back for more, for sure. And just, if anything, to find out what the latest is coming out of the lab. That's what we, you know, come up to the lab and see what's on the.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Horizon?

• 49:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab. Ah. I see you shiver with anticip- Tatory quivers. Okay.

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Professor, we'll come and find you again. Yeah. Thank you so much. Gary, always good to have you. Chuck? Thank you, Neil. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson here with another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. As always, keep looking up.