Cosmic Queries – Humans in Space

Neil deGrasse Tyson answers fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about manned space exploration with NASA Twin Study principal investigator biologist and geneticist Chris Mason, PhD, and comic co-host Matt Kirshen.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, one of our favorite. And my guest co-host today is Matt Kirshen. Matt, good to have you back on.

• 0:26Matt Kirshen?

  It's lovely to be back on in these slightly strange circumstances.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I miss you.

• 0:31Matt Kirshen?

  I miss you too. I miss doing the show. I miss being in New York.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and remind me, your show is Almost Known Science? I always forget the title.

• 0:44Matt Kirshen?

  It almost feels like you're doing this on purpose, Neil. It's Probably Science is the show.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably Science. I had the right gist of it.

• 0:54Matt Kirshen?

  Occasionally Science. Sometimes Science sneaks in there.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Almost Known Science. Well, it's great to have you as my comedic co-host.

• 1:01Matt Kirshen?

  Lovely to be here.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And today's topic, we're going to focus on computational biology, in particular, ways in which that matters to genetics.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That just sounds diabolical. Like you want these people on your side going into the future.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've got Dr. Chris Mason on the line here. Chris, welcome to StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and you are a medical research professional at Cornell-Weill Medical Center down in New York City, correct?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  That's right. I have labs up in Manhattan. I live in Brooklyn. You know, it's the better borough of New York City, as some of us say here. But yeah, so in New York City and have a lab that's in genetics, computational biology, and a little bit of space genetics.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think most people, well, I certainly was new to the concept of computational biology. I know we have some at the museum, at the American Museum of Natural History. There's a lot of computational biology going on there, but... I don't think that's taught when you learn biology in high school. So give me like a one minute overview on what computational biology means relative to ordinary biology.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  What's interesting about biology is you think of it as cells and organisms, you know, wandering around the floor. If you see an ant on the floor or a bird in the sky. But more and more, all of biology is becoming what a lot of people say is systems biology. Or really, most of biology is best understood as a computational problem where you can model what's happening inside the cells. And if you do it well enough, you can actually predict what will happen as you perturb that system. If you add a drug to the system, say for a cancer treatment. Or if you add a gene, if you take a gene from one species and you try to move it to another one. Or even if you just, you know, stress something like, say, put it in space or give it a, you know, make it go for a run. And so these are all things that the computational tools that you model what's happening inside the cells and you predict what will happen. And then find new drug targets, model drugs, and even just better understand the DNA, the genome.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you are the futurists of biology.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Or just trying to build, you know, models of inside the biology. And Box once said, all models are wrong, some are just more useful. And this has been especially during the pandemic times where, you know, we're just trying to build models of what's happening.

• 3:15Matt Kirshen?

  So this, this might be an impossible question to answer, but how, how accurate are your models now? For like, if you were, how accurately can you predict what a particular chemical will do to a particular cell?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Great question. I think we're not as good as we'd like to be. So I can't say we're 99% accurate that if you tell me the structure of a molecule, I can tell you exactly where it's going to go in the body. There's an entire, actually, there's a field of computational chemistry. There's computational biology. There's a lot of, a lot of astrophysics, of course, is computational in terms of how you mine the data, what you're scanning for. For a little while, there was a, in the field, you know, how accurate can bioinformatics be as a, as a discipline? And generally, if you get above 99, 95%, which you can do for certain, you know, whether one protein will bind with another protein. Or whether one gene is an active gene or whether it's not active, they can do that over 99%. So it depends on the question, but it's getting better every year as we get more data.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How bad does it get?

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, don't tell me your hits and leave out the misses.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  So I think there, you know, there was this big push about the reproducibility crisis in all of all the sciences for a while, about 10 years ago. And that was because people would try and take the same, say, okay, a drug, I put this in these cells and I can predict that the cells won't grow as fast. So I think this could be a cancer drug, for example. And people tried to reproduce these studies and a lot of them were 50% reproducible or sometimes 20% reproducible were some of these eye-dropping headlines. But that's because biology is complicated. It depends on these cells that have been growing in dishes, in some cases for decades. And they're not even human cells anymore. These are cells that basically have mutated, have instead of 46 chromosomes, they might have 50 or 60 chromosomes. So if aliens came to Earth and said, I want to show, find me human cells, if they looked at these cells in most labs, they wouldn't remotely look like humans.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  So some of the problem of predictability is in the biology.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chris, what you're saying is there's a whole branch of biology that's almost science. And then Matt, you should go on.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  It's really cool.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go on Matt's show.

• 5:10Matt Kirshen?

  I got you. I got you covered. Neil, no more questions to Chris. Throw them this way, Chris. As we're outside of science, I'm in. I'm in.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Chris, since you're almost science.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  We're close, we're close.

• 5:27Matt Kirshen?

  As long as it's in the probably territory.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably science, we're good. I was very impressed to learn that in your resume included published research on the NASA twin study. These are the twin astronauts, one was sent into space, the other was not. And then you leave the guy in space for a long time and then they come back and you compare them. So this presumably was quite a treasure of data for you.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  It was a kind of a dream come true in terms of every molecule we could measure in the body, every change to the organ systems, the brain cognitive states. So it was, it was great. Also, I'm a geneticist, so I wish everyone had a twin that we could send one to do one thing and one to do the other. You know, I would love, or triplets even be great. I take what triplets, like, all I want to do is, is, you know, separate out twins and see what would happen. So it was a really unique opportunity that NASA had selected 10 labs to work together. You know, it was a really big team effort. I was the geneticist in the study, leading a lot of the, looking at DNA and the RNA, seeing what's happening as the body adapts to space. But it was a real team effort.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And we looked at every possible molecule we could, so DNA, RNA, proteins, small molecules, behavioral changes, telomeres we'll probably talk about as well, everything we could to try and understand, how does the body change when you go to space and can we prepare for Mars?

• 6:47Matt Kirshen?

  Were all of the different experiments like serious science ones, or was like one of them maybe, let's put different hats on them and see how they look?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  There were, there's a lot of experiments that are preliminary, you could say, not just in our study where you are trying things out for the first time, but even these kind of suction pants that Scott Kelly wore in space for a while, which basically it puts like a vacuum around his legs to try and pull the blood from his upper body down into his legs, just to relieve the pressure on him. So those are relatively new and they're kind of experimental, but the astronauts really like them because it just, it can feel better because they feel a little bit like they're back on Earth, at least for a little while.

• 7:23Matt Kirshen?

  So it sort of cheats the effect of gravity by, gravity would normally make blood flow more down than up, and this cheats that effect by, with a vacuum?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, like pulling it, I mean, we've evolved, you know, for hundreds of millions of years on this planet, you know, billions if you go back to the really early ancestors, and we're used to gravity. So suddenly it's gone, the body has not had that much time to really get used to it. And so these pants are one way to try and adapt to that. Other ways was we do pharmacological intervention to try and get rid of the stress on the body, a lot of the inflammation in the body is something else that we, you know, there's pharmacological interventions for. And then also sleep, it's hard for a lot of the astronauts to sleep, so they take all the time sleeping pills.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but wait, Chris, if, if, if we are perfect at compensating for being in space rather than on Earth, then you wouldn't have a job, because you're trying to find out what's different.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  We'd be done, that's it. We would just say, good luck, you know, it looks like you're all set. Yeah, actually, or even the, you know, the fact that we don't understand biology, I tell this to students and medical students sometimes, I say, listen, that's job security. If we don't know everything about biology, then we've got work to do. So it's actually, it's great.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you mentioned one of them, Scott Kelly, and I think Scott, he's been on Star Talk, and I asked, which of the twins are you? And he said, I'm the good-looking.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's how he identifies himself relative to his twin brother. And the name of his brother-

• 8:49Matt Kirshen?

  Was he good-looking before he went into space or not? Like, was there a noticeable change in attractiveness on either end of his flight?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  He did lose weight, actually. So he lost about 8% of his body weight. And he got a little bit taller, some because of the lack of compression on the spinal column. And because of relativity, he is slightly younger. He was moving closer to the speed of light for a year than his brother on Earth, or all of us here on Earth. And so you could say he got taller, younger, and a little bit, you know, lost some weight. So it's kind of, you know, it's kind of the best program ever, except you have to be in space getting irradiated the whole time. That's the only downside.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ignoring the radiation and all the rest of that.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  And the stress of it all. But he did, so that gets it. One of the things we did see in the study was, this work with Susan Bailey, was, you know, the telomeres got longer. And we looked in her lab and in our lab, we validated this. And now we're following up with additional studies. But it was really a surprising result because when you get irradiated, you're being blasted and effectively in a stressful and sort of really strenuous environment. We thought if anything, telomeres would get shorter because they normally get shorter as you age. So we thought we would just accelerate this process. We also looked at epigenetic age, which I can talk about in a little bit, which is, you know, how the DNA is packaged and how that looks older. But he didn't get older there either. So we looked at all these aging metrics. He actually looked a little bit younger. And that was surprising because we thought we'd see the opposite. It was one of the first big surprises of the study,

• 10:14Speaker 02

  where we all were scratching our head when we were getting the data, like, is this right? But it turns out, the more we thought about it and looked at the data, think about what he was doing up there. He was, you know, getting a good night's sleep almost every night, as best as you can in space, when you actually can see cosmic rays shooting through his eyelids. Scott Kelly talked about in his book that he wrote, that if you close your eyes, you can just see the streaks of light, basically as your retinal cells are being bombarded with radiation, which is kind of hard to sleep through probably for the very first time you're seeing that. But that notwithstanding, the radiation, your body eventually does to some degree adapt. You know, as telomeres got longer, he was getting a good night's sleep every night, getting a good meal, working out every morning, and there was no drinking. So if all of us lived that relatively healthy of a life, we probably would have some, you know, rejuvenation effects as well, we think. So it was a part of it.

• 10:59Matt Kirshen?

  So then, is he going to publish The Astronaut Diet, the Lifestyle Advice Book?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  He's published a photo book and a biography. He could do that next, actually.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we solicited questions from our fanbase and it's primarily focused on the twin study, but this field is so fascinating. I hope there's some spillage when we get there. So Matt, you have all the questions, right? I haven't seen any of them. I don't think.

• 11:20Matt Kirshen?

  I do. I've got them right here. The first one I was going to ask was actually about the telomeres and Chris answered it before we even got to it. So, thank you, Chris.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's hear it anyway.

• 11:29Matt Kirshen?

  That question was, is from JF1011 on Instagram. Who knows what that binary is? And says, hello, I'm wondering if there has been any research into possible effects of long-term 0G exposure on the telomeres in our chromosomes? I'm curious if living in space would alter the rate at which telomeres degrade and become shorter? Do we have any idea if long-term 0G exposure would speed up or slow down this natural process? In short, could living in space long-term change how we age physically?

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, the telomeres is an indicator on Earth for how old you are because they're shorter in older people than younger people in your genetic profile. Is that a fair characterization?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  That's right. So basically, they are a marker of how long your cells have been around and dividing. And, you know, they do shrink as we age. We also physically shrink as we age. Really, old people are shorter than they were when they were younger. You know, eventually, gravity takes its toll on the body. And telomeres at a cellular level inside your body are no different. They get shorter. And, you know, we thought it would accelerate in space. It turns out that actually, from everything we know, so Scott Kelly has the longest US mission. It's the fourth longest in human history because the Russians have got us beat a little bit on that. But from the data we have, it looks like it's actually the lifestyle in space, with the radiation notwithstanding, it looks like telomeres fair better. However, it goes back to normal when you get back to Earth.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  So this doesn't seem to be like a permanent shift. It seems to be a mixture. What we think it is a mixture of the environment and the lifestyle in space, which is ironically pretty healthy. At least it's regulated so well that, you know, it's not so bad. It could be a new kind of Earth-based diet and say, live like you're in space. You'll be younger in some ways. But the radiation may, to some degree, create some of these breaks and some of the other work we talk about in our papers that it looks like it could even just accelerate the killing of weaker cells is another factor that might be happening. So we did sordid cell populations to see which cells are having longer telomeres and some of the T-cells get it more than some of the B-cells and other, the whole blood samples have it less

• 13:36Speaker 02

  so. So it seems to be, like most things in biology, it's cell-specific or time-specific.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, there are two variables here. One of them is zero G and another is the fact that you are exposed to cosmic rays from space. So in principle, if you know the difference between one or the other, it wouldn't be simply zero G that extends your telomeres, it would be your exposure to that level of radiation. And if that's the case, we can create radiation rooms and stick you in it and simulate what Scott went through in space.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So we can test this. There's two examples of this where we see it. Interestingly, even Plasmodium felciprum, you know, which is a parasite, if you irradiate them on Earth, you can see they sometimes get longer telomeres. Same with little worms called C. elegans. And interestingly, you think about like, there's radiotherapy, we think of killing cancers, but there's a new clinical trial, it's actually at Wall Cornell, that's actually doing very subtle radiation to prime T-cells, to activate them in a way that they're kind of, they're senescent or they're quiet before. So, you know, radiation is, if you don't completely obliterate someone with radiation, some of the discussion is, what if you have just enough of it so you actually activate the cells or get rid of the weaker cells? That effect we can see is part of it as well.

• 14:44Matt Kirshen?

  See, this feels like one of these things that you don't really want that information to escape the lab yet because people are going to be selling, "Just stand in front of your microwave for three minutes a day and you'll get younger."

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know-

• 14:57Matt Kirshen?

  Just rub a balloon on your shirt and then hold it against your head and you'll live five years younger.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, we have time for one more before we got to take a quick break.

• 15:06Matt Kirshen?

  Awesome. Well, I love this, I love it when a question comes from someone's kids. This is from the eight-year-old son Mason of Patreon, Patreon Brian Simmer, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly, says, "Does zero gravity make it harder for the body to digest food or go to the bathroom? Because everything's just floating around in your belly and gravity isn't helping."

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We actually have to take a break. See what I did there? I teased to the next segment. I'm learning how to do that, see? So, we're going to find out, when we return, what effect zero G has on the food in your stomach. And whether it aids or disrupts your digestion on StarTalk.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. Computational genetics, the twin study that NASA did with two astronauts. One put in space, one stayed here on Earth. Dr. Chris Mason, thanks for being on StarTalk, for doing this. We left off. We last learned.

• 16:27Matt Kirshen?

  Yes, we were about to hear from Chris about the effects on the digestive system of zero gravity, answering a question from Patreon, Patreon Brian Simmer's eight-year-old son, Mason.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Well, it is different. Yeah, the eating in space and digesting in space and going to the bathroom in space are all, you know, a little bit different up there. And, you know, there is some indigestion that happens with astronauts. But in general, they're able to keep food down once they get used to the zero G space. You do have a sphincter that prevents food from coming back up unless something goes wrong. So it's the food stays down. But we did look at the microbiome in the gut as part of the study. And so with another researcher called Fred Turek, who actually, we looked to see, well, what species in the gut changed? And did they actually go in a good direction or a bad direction? We, we saw from the twin study that, you know, some of these kind of organisms are called

• 17:23Speaker 02

  firmicutes and bacteriotes, are these two big kinds of bugs in your gut. They, they went in a direction that is not as, is not as you'd like. It indicates sort of gut dysbiosis or problems. And Scott Kelly, you know, had a little bit of complaints, but mostly he was fine. But if you look at the molecular level and what's in the gut, we could see some things that looked like dysbiosis. But it went right back to normal as soon as he came back to Earth, was some good news. But going to the bathroom, I didn't get any specific complaints that he had any problems with, say, or at least in the medical logs, we didn't see significant dangers of diarrhea or anything awful. But just going to the bathroom is hard in space. You have to, you know, there's a vacuum pump, there's actually a clamp that kind of keeps you positioned

• 18:05Speaker 02

  on the toilet. You have to set out the vacuum and the cleaning supplies. It's a, you know, it's a long process. And so we did see in some cases, you know, dehydration show up and not just Scott, but other astronauts, because it's not pleasant to go to the bathroom. So they'll try to actually, they won't drink as much water, so they don't have to go to the bathroom as much. So some of it is just behavioral avoidance of the bathroom, which creates a little bit of maybe indigestion or digestive problems. But the species changing is gut as well, which we can see that from the stool. So we take stool samples and we can sequence the bugs.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chris, did I just learn a new word from you? Dysbiotic? Was that a word? That just means you have a problem.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yes, right. It's a fancy way of saying, something feels weird here. Yeah.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tummy ache. I have a tummy ache. You are dysbiotic.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Well, it's like if you add itis to any word on your body, it just means it's inflamed. Yeah. So it's a

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  So you could just throw that around. I've got eyeball itis.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get another question.

• 19:10Matt Kirshen?

  This is another Patreon patron. John Baker asks, what if any caveats are there in purposefully genetically engineering people to be able to withstand cosmic radiation that exists outside our sun's heliosphere? If this is correct, pertaining to the furthest boundary of our sun's influence. If not, what does our sun's influence protect us from while within our solar system? That sounds like it's a half Chris and half Neil question there.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be happy to lead off there and say that sun doesn't really protect you from anything. You know, when you cross the the the the edge of the sun's influence in the solar system, you're in intergalactic, you're interstellar space at that point. And there's a magnetic field there, there are some cosmic rays, but those cosmic rays can come straight on through down to earth. So, so you, when you're in the sun's influence, you are subjected to solar particles that themselves have issues, there's solar flares, this sort of thing. So, uh, no, in the solar heliosphere, you are worse than you'll ever be outside of it.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so maybe, maybe Chris's next mission is to send people beyond Pluto or beyond the heliosphere and then have them come back 100 years later and see if anything happened to them.

• 20:32Matt Kirshen?

  Right, see if there's been any aging effects.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I would love to do that study if, uh, actually, we did put on the lab's website a 500-year research plan of what I think should be happening. And a lot of the students who first looked joined the lab said, "Wait a minute, are you gonna be around for the 500 years?" I said, "No, no, of course not." But I wanna, it's a very human capability to plan for beyond your own lifespan. So I think everyone should have at least one plan that goes longer than their own life. Common manifestation is just to have kids to do that. But the, you know, I think, I would love to do that study, even if and even especially if I'm not around to see the end of it. It's actually a great trait of humanity. But, uh, but we did see, so actually Neil's right, the space station's protected by the magnetosphere, which actually gives you the most protection from the sun's radiation. But the cosmic rays come in, you know, from all over the place. And so they'll, they'll bombard you. We, we basically have, you know, the study was done on the space station.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  So I think what's really gonna be interesting is, you know, what happens when we get to the moon or get out to Mars, where it's much, you get much more the, the radiation from the sun and you have much less protection from the magnetosphere. Mars does not have a magnetosphere, so even if you get there, the best protection you'll have is that the planet will be under you for at least that half of the radiation. But it will be more radiation. And then if you engineered some cells to survive, I think we've published some papers about this and talk about it a bit. This is a big ethical question as to how and when you engineer and modify the human genome, especially for astronauts being sent far away. But I'd make the argument that it might be, we might be ethically bound to do so because if you have a genetic technology that can keep people safe and you don't use it for

• 22:06Speaker 02

  someone being sent to a place that has more radiation, is that unethical if you're putting them in a, if you're not protecting them when you could? Now, that presumes that the genetic technology is perfectly safe, integrates with no problems, and is maybe even removable. None of those things which we can guarantee today. But as a conceptual idea, those are, I think, things you could discuss, you know, and debate.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you said removable, you mean reversible?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, reversible, or even removable, because you can integrate chunks into the human genome. You can take all viruses and basically implant them into the genome. And in theory, you can take them back out with CRISPR-type methods, so you can cut them back out if you want to. Or you can even have artificial chromosomes. Like, you know, most humans have 46 chromosomes. What if you added a little bit, one extra? We've done this in cell culture in labs, so you can have little, little mobile elements that you can take in and out. So the technology to do this is eerily easily, easily done in a lot of labs.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just have a quick historical story here, that the history of thinking that we should modify ourselves biologically in order to withstand forces and stresses under situations that the rest of us don't experience, generally lends itself better to engineering solutions than biological solutions. Like, for example, in the early days of fighter pilots, they do tight rolls and the blood would leave their head and go to their feet and they'd pass out. They say, well, maybe we can give them some medicine or a pill that will, where the red blood cells will retain more oxygen so they don't pass out. And they just invented pressure suits to prevent the blood from going into the legs. It was that simple.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They went up and there's no biological change in the person at all.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, or you want to maintain the homeostasis in the body rather than trying to, you know, recreate a different homeostasis, yeah.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A different, yeah, yeah. So Matt, what else?

• 23:52Matt Kirshen?

  All right, so this is, I think, connected. So Andy Bracken on Facebook asks, "Has spending significant times in space altered the genetic makeup at all?" Greetings from Columbus, Ohio.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  So what we've seen is the, we looked at is there any DNA damage that happened because he was in space because, you know, there, we talked a bit about how radiation at very low levels can sometimes be helpful for, you know, priming cells, but generally it's bad. And we did see more breaks of the DNA, these sort of double strand breaks or, you know, fractures in the chromosomes. We could see that even after Scott got back to Earth. So the preliminary evidence is that it, you know, it's not like it went up 100 times. So suddenly he was, you know, as if he was someone who'd been completely irradiated, like a cancer patient, but it did go up. You know, you'd want it to stay flat or maybe go down, but we did see he had more mutations, basically, that you could see were broken DNA.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  And also we're looking at, you know, what, there's another aspect of aging that's actually called clonal hematopoiesis, which is a, which means a clone in your blood. The hemat is the hem in your blood and poiesis means to create something. So actually we could see in his blood, different clones were changing over time and we don't, we don't yet know if it's good or bad for the long-term health, but we can see these differences in the astronauts genetic makeup. And so these are things we're keeping an eye on, but we're not too worried about them yet.

• 25:15Matt Kirshen?

  All right. All right, man, what else you got? I like this question because it's sort of the opposite. Shant Esmeralda on Instagram, I hope I've got that correct, says, what would be the long-term effects of living on a planet with more gravitational force than Earth? Will our bones and muscles get stronger?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Almost certainly. From everything we've seen from the plasticity of the human body, it, you know, we know it loses a lot of the bone mass very quickly in space. You can actually see in the urine, the calcium coming out of the body from astronauts in space. So it's basically Scott even described it as if you don't, if you miss a morning when you work out, and other astronauts have said this too, is that you feel like your bones are dissolving while you're in the lack of gravity. So, and if you went to more gravity, the body's extraordinarily adaptive. It will really try and reach that homeostasis and try and get back to its normal state. Very quickly, and so you would expect stronger muscles, higher bone density. You could see, you know, we know certain mutations in genes like LRP5 will give you this greater bone density in advance.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  And so I think you'd almost certainly see that if you got, say, went to, you know, something with twice or three times the gravity. And it would be, and in theory, the body could do it. I don't know if it could do 10 times the gravity, but probably two or three times it would adapt.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the catalogs of exoplanets, we categorize the planets that are maybe twice the size of Earth or three times as still Earth-like, and we call them super-Earths. And if you calculate what their gravity would be, it would be maybe 50% more, something like that, within a factor of two. What I would wonder is, yeah, you'd be sluggish at first, and then your muscles get strong, but will your heart keep up with it? Your heart is now pumping against it. Is your heart sufficiently, it's not the kind of muscle where you let's just do it and it gets bigger and stronger, is it or not?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  You're right. I mean, parts of it can adapt, you know, it can get stronger as a function, like you can just see this in athletes who work out, but it's not like a bicep. So you can't suddenly go to two times the heart size just because you've been there for, you know, a couple of weeks, which is might be what, it might be what you'd need. So the cardiovascular stress is something, you can just see that for people who go live on the top of a mountain and start hiking around. It's low blood oxygen, it's already hard enough. So I think, you know, you'd ideally want to be, grow up there. You'd want to land there as an embryo and start surfing that way. It'd be tough if you went as a grown person.

• 27:37Matt Kirshen?

  And then come back to Earth and rip telephone books in half and generally be all kind of beast. Well, there is a question that's connected to that in terms of growing up. Again, it's one that's from both Patreon patron and, and the child. I said, aside, this is Ryan McNeil on Patreon, and his son Angus says, aside from bone density, muscle atrophy, and psychological issues, would there be any neurological or physiological effects from long-term space travel? My son Angus is curious as to how children may develop differently outside of Earth's atmosphere. And if their growth process would help them adapt to the environment better than adults, how would a human who'd spent their growth cycles in zero gravity live on a planet as an adult?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  It would probably be very difficult. If you just can't... So, there's never been a human baby born in space, as most people probably know. There's officially never been sex in space, at least between humans. They have taken... There's been pregnant mice that have been sent up into space. There's been some mouse mating that's been tried in space where, you know, when the mice get in zero G, they just kind of flop around. It's very kind of... There's a whole mouse cage on the ISS, so that's kind of funny to watch. You know, on the record, there's no sex in space, and there's been pregnant mice that have given birth, though. So, we know birth is possible in space. If you could grow up in zero G and then try and go to a planet, assuming that all works, it would probably be very, very difficult to maybe even survive.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  And so, I think you would get there, you'd be really pummeled and crushed by the gravity. You might not survive. So, you could argue that if you do let people grow up in zero G, have you given them a prison in space where they're never allowed to go to a surface? Or how could... Or maybe mechanically, you could supplement them somehow when they get there as an idea, like Neil was just saying, some way to save them. But it is, you know, it's a challenging idea that, you know, ideally, you'd have the most galactic freedom. You should be able to live anywhere you want, in theory, as an organism. But right now, we're not there. That's the ideal I'd strive for, but I think we're not there yet.

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, there's the film "The Space Between Us", which explored the first person ever born on another planet. And it was a boy born on Mars. And so, he's native Martian, basically. And then, when he comes to Earth, you know, because he can jump high and do things on Mars, and he comes to Earth, and he can't. And so, you... Part of it explores... And then, there's a love interest in this. You've got to have that. But for those who haven't seen it, just explores this idea of what happens when you cross gravitational boundaries and how do you adapt physiologically to it.

• 30:10Matt Kirshen?

  There is a sort of a connected question as well from Matt Dean on Facebook, who asks, "Biologically speaking, would it be more difficult to procreate in space? Would fertilization rates be similar?" Asking for a friend.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Asking for a friend.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  So we have, there's not been any good studies on sperm count yet, say for astronauts over the years. There is a longitude and health assessment study that NASA does and also the Russian space program has, but there, we don't yet know the big impact on, you know, what does it do sperm counter, or even just having fertilization work in space. The only, the only ones that have gotten it to work for are fruit flies. So we know it can be done for flies, which is great, but humans, you know, we don't, we don't know, humans are notoriously creative with their reproductive practices. So I'm sure they'd figure it out in space, but they, but it hasn't been tried yet. And the embryogenesis, you know, the only example we have is that we know a pregnant mouse gave birth in space.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  So the remaining parts of how you go from one cell to the trillions of cells, you know, that process is very delicate and complicated, but it seems to be, at least in some mouse samples, robust enough to finish the job. And so the big question is, can you start completely in zero G and go all the way through, you know, nine months of embryogenesis? And that's a big unknown. It's possible it would.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Chris, it's an unknown, but do you really classify it as a big unknown? Because the smaller you are, I mean, the smaller anything is, the less susceptible it is to the forces of gravity. And then it becomes just what's going on in the fluid you're contained in. It becomes a fluid thing, fluid dynamics, rather than gravity. So you're not completely ignorant about what, what a sperm fertilizing a cell, moving through a tube, you know, gravity is kind of irrelevant there, right?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  That's right. So I think the reason that the mouse experiment worked, it gives us, I think it's probably going to be okay. I would, it's a big risk though. I don't know how you get a, you know, a review board to say, yes, this sounds like an ethical experiment to start sending embryos in space. But, but at some point it might happen. If we really become an interplanetary species and start going back and forth, and if the trips are six to nine months, it might happen.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would also add that if you are going to be born in zero G, it would be ethical to train the person in a one G environment. We keep talking about zero G like that's the inevitable condition in space, but nothing's going to stop the future. We have rotating space stations and there's one G and then this conversation is moot.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt.

• 32:46Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One more question before we break.

• 32:48Matt Kirshen?

  Well, I like this one because it's more about the surroundings to the astronauts. Christine Tolman on Patreon says, "This is a very simple question." I'm not sure if it is. "What kind of things do support personnel consider when getting people missions ready? What do they consider to optimize the health of the astronauts?"

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good one. Well, again, I teased that. So we're going to take a quick break and come back and find out what the pre-launch prep, the biological pre-launch prep is going to be for these astronauts when we return.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Michael Gesner and Riam Samaray. Thank you so much, guys, for your support. Without you, there's no way we could do this show. And for anyone listening who would like their own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. And we're talking about genetics in space. And genetic modification and what all that requires. And it's a cosmic queries. And Matt, we just had an emergency question just land in our lap.

• 34:22Matt Kirshen?

  We did.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moments ago. We gotta go there.

• 34:25Matt Kirshen?

  This feels strangely urgent.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Strangely urgent, so give it to us.

• 34:29Matt Kirshen?

  And it references a TV show on now made by the great Amanda Yenucci. It's from Itai Mandelovich on Facebook asks, "On the show Avenue 5, the engineers who built the ship used the sewage system as a shield, more like armor, around the ship, claiming that poo is the best and easiest radiation absorbent. Is this claim true?" And then Itai says, "Later, there is an external rupture resulting in a poop ring around the ship, and the captain is sent on an EVA to patch the system."

• 35:01Matt Kirshen?

  Is this plausible and is this scientifically accurate, this comedy sci-fi show?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say mostly yes, actually, if you think, because you need some kind of radiation shielding. And if you had the sewage surrounding you, assuming it's contained, so it doesn't smell, you would actually have a liquid and the water would absorb some of the radiation that's coming from out in space. And then if it's just water, that's fine, but if it's water with all the bacteria and sort of small viruses and sort of organic matter, detritus that's in there, that gives you basically a biological plus, you know, small water-based shield around a ship that could give you a little bit of extra protection. And then you gotta put the waste somewhere anyway while you're recycling it, so you might as well put it on the outside. It's actually not that crazy of an idea.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  It sounds weird to be continually surrounded by circulating stool, but if you're being protected from radiation, I think people would be okay with it.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I gotta, I gotta pipe in here. I think most of the radiation is just absorbed by the water. And so if you had just a water shield that you would use for your food and digestion and all the rest of that, it accomplishes the same thing, and that's a lot of poop to have to completely encase. I mean, how much pooping are they doing in space? You gotta go up there preloaded with poop.

• 36:20Matt Kirshen?

  What else have you got to do up there? Once you've done your exercise bike, you've done your scientific experiments of the day, whatever.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  People get nervous in space.

• 36:30Matt Kirshen?

  You said yourself that it's a real mission to get onto the toilet. You might as well make the most of it when you're on there.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be fun if they color-coded the poop and you get to see whose poop was shielding you from what cosmic ray. That'd be...

• 36:43Matt Kirshen?

  Who had the beetroot salad?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  You can see, someone had carrots, two had carrots.

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, and who didn't digest these corn kernels?

• 36:51Matt Kirshen?

  Everyone, everyone didn't digest them.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Chris, it's interesting that you added the concept of a biological shield. Yes, whatever the water's doing, certainly if a dangerous ray hits a virus or anything else, that's a little extra protection. But what you don't want is for it to then mutate the microbes, and then they come back at you through the vents. And then that's like an alien rewritten, right there.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Hopefully, they wouldn't. They could be. I mean, it depends how you clean them at the end. But some bacteria that have been seen in space on the walls of the space station have changed their virulence profile, how much they resist antibiotics. That's been published. So you wouldn't want to make that worse at all, or in some way be attacked by aliens that you made around you, especially if they came from your own stool. Yeah. Some poetic justice there.

• 37:43Matt Kirshen?

  So before the break, we teased this question from Christine Tolman about what the support personnel have to consider to get astronauts ready for the health concerns they might face.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the biggest challenges is just getting the training, learning Russian, as well as knowing English, for example. You have to become not just a scientist or a pilot, but really an engineer in case anything gets broken. So the training, a lot of it's mental, and also be prepared for the isolation. And physiologically, a lot of us are staying in really good shape, making sure your nutrition is preserved. They do go into a quarantine before they go up. And so, for example, in Kazakhstan, most of the astronauts have a point where they have to say goodbye to their families or friends, and they can call them or video chat, but they can't physically see them just to keep it, so they don't pick up a virus before they go up. There is a cute little tradition where they actually urinate on one of the vans

• 38:33Speaker 02

  that takes them to the launch pad in Kazakhstan. So that's an old tradition started by Yuri Gergen, who did the first man in space. So I mean, you got to let it out before you go up. So that's a small but important step.

• 38:45Matt Kirshen?

  You're costing yourself some radiation shielding from what I now have.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 38:51Matt Kirshen?

  Some of that's now being wasted.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to be clear, it's not that they have to pee on the van. It's that Yuri Gagarin just had to pee. And if you're out there, if you're out there in the open, what's a guy gonna do? You're gonna pee on the wheel of the car, right? That's what, that's what you do. If there's not a tree around. Fascinating that that is, it became a tradition. That's very cool.

• 39:11Matt Kirshen?

  Well, there, there is a connected question. Everything you're talking about is strangely pertinent in our current situation. And there is a question from, again, I don't know how, Trotzki Westsiche? Wait, I don't know. Trotzki something on Instagram has asked, "What ideas are we working on to help prevent or at least minimize the effect of isolation on future astronauts and space explorers alike?"

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's actually, isolation is one of the, the five key hazards for spaceflight, for human spaceflight identified by NASA. You know, the other ones are the radiation, which we talked about. There's just the distance from Earth. You're, you're far away, so if something goes wrong, there's nothing you can do. There's no gravity and it's a hostile environment. There, you know, things go wrong often up there. But the isolation is one of the listed hazards and just being that far from friends, that far from your family with only six people. I don't know if you've ever been on a road trip and you're with the same, like four people for, say, four to five days. Some people go bananas just with that context. And so if you have, you know, six to nine months on your way to Mars with only three other people or five other people to talk to and look at, you know, you have to mentally prepare for that. A lot of that's the, the training.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  They, they select astronauts very carefully and they train them for that. But then also there's, there's entertainment up there now. So, you know, you can get emails from astronauts now. I've gotten many where people saying, hey, they're checking on a mission program or, we're running experiments up there. They're very, you can email with them and you can video chat and they can chat with their families. And if you think about it, you know, I think isolation was terrifying 10, 15, 20 years ago, but you can get everything that's on, you know, Netflix up in space. And so, you know, it's, I think for long-term spaceflight, it might not be that bad.

• 40:51Matt Kirshen?

  What, how, how good is their wifi up there? What, what speed is their internet connection these days?

• 40:56Speaker 02

  It's, it's close to broadband, but it's, it's, it's not, you know, they're not gonna do a high-def streaming quite yet for the space station.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, you know, I always remembered, I mean, I saw early episodes of Twilight Zone because I'm that old, and many of the episodes explored the psychological effects of isolation. And I'm thinking to myself, what? Then I thought, wow, that must be really serious. And then I thought to myself, I know people who don't ever want to talk to anyone ever. And there are times in my life where I feel the same. Just give me a book, give me a Netflix account, and I'm good state of hell out of my life. And so I thought maybe the concern about isolation was overplayed and over...

• 41:41Matt Kirshen?

  We're all kind of in this experiment right now. The entire planet is undergoing this mass experiment. There's a lot of both helpful and little bit smug articles that I've read by various astronauts, including the Kellys.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:55Matt Kirshen?

  About like, here's how we do it. So...

• 41:59Speaker 02

  I thought Scott's was good. It was...

• 42:01Matt Kirshen?

  Scott's was great. There's that sort of like, we've gone through this, this is how to do it. But there's also that slight like, and we're astronauts.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  And you're not.

• 42:13Matt Kirshen?

  Maybe that's just me reading it. Maybe that's just me putting my own prejudices onto it. Because I'm very aware that astronaut was my dream job when I was a kid before I realized how much work and ability was necessary to reach that point.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, were you the inadequate stuff?

• 42:28Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Instead of the right stuff?

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The right stuff?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  The wrong stuff.

• 42:37Matt Kirshen?

  The stuff that really didn't apply itself hard enough.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also, this notion of video chatting, I've had the privilege of being on Space Station Astronaut's email chain. So that was requested by NASA. NASA contacts me, would I agree? So that when they're passing overhead, we exchange some emails. Part of the normalcy, the normality efforts, you know, to have comfort food, this sort of thing. But here's Here's my point. As you go farther away from Earth, the idea of having a video chat with any repartee basically goes out the window because of the light travel time for the signal. So, anything beyond lunar orbit, you go to Mars, it's a 20-minute delay.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Hey, how you doing?" And that's 20 minutes there, and 20 minutes back, and 40 minutes later, "I'm fine. How are you?"

• 43:36Matt Kirshen?

  So that's quite remarkable. So, in a way, the more advanced the technology and the further away we can travel, the closer we get to how people would communicate hundreds of years ago, or even 100 years ago. It's more letter writing, it's sending long missives to each other.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very perceptive. Exactly.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Which is true. That was actually kind of romantic back then, because you got so excited when you get a full treatise of someone's thoughts and dreams and hopes. And maybe we'll come back to a more romantic species when it's longer messages.

• 44:07Matt Kirshen?

  Right. There's no just texting "you up."

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:15Matt Kirshen?

  And then you start having to get into like, "Well, what does 'up' really mean when you're in an orbit?"

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Very good. Very good. So Matt, you got more questions on this?

• 44:24Matt Kirshen?

  I do. Well, I do like this question. Again, it's a chance to feel marginally superior to astronauts. And Andrew Mathis on Facebook asks, "Say you were to stay on the ISS forever. Would you eventually turn into a floating flappy sack of organs? Could you survive that way if you were to stay there forever, just a floating bug?"

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it means you're there, but you don't go on any exercise machines?

• 44:53Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah. So you don't do... Or even if you do go on exercise machines, there has to be a limit. Because my understanding is, no matter how much they work with resistance-based machines, there is an element of muscle deterioration, whatever happens, right?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  That's right. You'll see some atrophy that is really unavoidable. As you can just tell when they get back to Earth, it takes days or even weeks to acclimate back. And Scott even said it, he felt like it took him six days. He said he didn't feel really normal until seven or eight months later, where he felt back to normal. And that's with the daily workouts. So, yeah, if you did none of those things... You know, that experiment's not been tried for obvious reasons because you could then, you'd be really hard to go anywhere. It'd be like the zero G children where you wouldn't be able to go to Earth. But I think most of your structure would stay in place, like the actual, I don't think the organs would suddenly float away out of your body, or you changed into a blob. But you would really, if anything, it would depend a bit on your nutrition because you already, you know, could lose weight. You might become just

• 45:55Speaker 02

  more bony and skinny. But if you eat a lot and don't move at all, you could become blobby and fat as well. We don't have any data on this, but I don't think you would like lose the structure of your organs and how they're related to each other, but you would become more blob-like.

• 46:09Matt Kirshen?

  Well, there's a connected question, I think, from Victoria Del Piano on Patreon, who says, "Do we know how the cerebellum and middle ear adapt to low or zero gravity? As they are organs that develop because and by gravity, has the twin that was in space been studied for this?" And then greetings from Chile.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Great question. So, we clearly evolved on this planet under this gravity, and the ear is a great way to maintain proprioception, which is the ability to sense your body in space, not just in space above space, but also here on Earth, how you are relative to other objects. There, you know, actually, you can tell that there is an acclimation period. There's also, when astronauts first get into space, there's something called, sort of, the puffy face they get, where there's so much fluid that goes into their upper body, they have trouble orienting themselves, trouble moving around. But amazingly, the body adapts usually within a few days, and they can maneuver quite well. You've seen people definitely jump around in zero G and look like they're having fun. Scott Kelly, at one point, had a bear suit on that he wandered around the space station with. So, you can, they get

• 47:12Speaker 02

  pretty used to it. And some of this is because a lot of the fluids are contained, you know, within small miniature organs and structures in the body that keep them in place. And the body has an amazing ability to adapt. You know, it's one of those examples where you think the body would do awful, but it can adapt after a few days, actually.

• 47:28Matt Kirshen?

  Well, I remember, I know there are psychological effects. I remember Chris Hadfield saying, one of the things he had to relearn how to do when he got back to Earth was to not just let go of things.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Oh, right, right. Because gravity, you know, you forget that things won't just quietly drift nearby, yeah.

• 47:47Matt Kirshen?

  You forget that a coffee cup, that if you release that, you now have coffee on the floor.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a hard thing to acclimate to, but they generally really enjoy it. And I think it's, you know, there's also pressure in the eyes that is also part of it. Like you think of the structures in the sinuses in the head, the change. The eyes experience a lot of pressure as well.

• 48:09Matt Kirshen?

  That was a question we actually got, yes, from Aaron Esti on Facebook says, I know the lack of gravity changes the shape of the eye. Is the effect permanent after the astronauts return to Earth?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  So for a lot of astronauts, it looks like it is. And so a lot of them end up wearing glasses when they come back to Earth. They basically, the pressure is on the eye, so much fluid goes up into the cranium, into your head, it pushes against the eye in ways that are not normally done. And this, as well as other just stresses of spaceflight, I thought to lead, something called SANS is Spaceflight Associated Neuroocular Syndrome, which just means eyeballitis. You know, my eyes hurt and something went wrong. And so it's a fancy way of saying it looks like your retina has problems or other folds. And so most of them, it looks like it's permanent. What's interesting is so far it seems to affect men slightly more than women. And so there's some discussion that maybe the first astronauts to Mars might be a mostly

• 49:00Speaker 02

  female crew because their eyes don't seem to be as affected. But the statistics are very low on this. We only have about 580 human beings that have ever left Earth and gone above 100 kilometers. So, you know, we can't say definitively these statistics, but it seems like, you know, there are differences between people where some people don't get affected, but most of them do.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, if we set, if the next ship is rotating and we simulate 1G, again, all of this is moot. It's moot. Then you don't have eyeballitis.

• 49:30Matt Kirshen?

  Is there any difference in how you would, this is a question from me rather than from any of our listeners, but is, would the body be able to tell the difference between a rotating spacecraft simulating 1G and being on Earth?

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you would, but in a very, in a very particular way. At the point, if you have ones, if you rotate it at the right speed, given the right radius, and you have 1G at the floor that you're walking on, sure. But since you're standing up, your head is at a different radius from the point of rotation than your feet are. So your head would feel a slightly different G than your feet would be.

• 50:09Matt Kirshen?

  So the larger the spacecraft, the less this effect would be, right? The larger the rotation.

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The less that effect would be. Correct, correct. Otherwise, your body would have no... Physical way to know the difference.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yes, we just need a spacecraft the size of a planet. And in fact, we should just turn Earth into a spacecraft. There was a movie about this, Wandering Earth. Like, you know, they made the Earth move to, I don't know if anyone saw this movie, but they put a bunch of engines on the Earth and moved it to another solar system because ours had gone kaput.

• 50:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  It was an interesting idea.

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta see that. Very cool. Yeah, yeah, so if it's big enough, then the difference between your head and your feet is small. But until then, that's an unstudied problem, actually.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, dude, we've actually run out of time. Ooh. But Chris, now, I know you're just right around the corner from us. They're Brooklyn in the house.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd love to get you back on and do more of this because you are on a biological frontier. And just talking about space is a tiny piece of this, as you know. We want to do a whole show just orbiting your research specialty, okay? And continuing that, if you, with your permission.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd be a pleasure to come back. There's lots of genes in the genome, there's lots of cells in the body, everyone has a story, so I'd be happy to talk about them. And some of them are being taken from one species, being put into another, some for radiation, all kinds of things, definitely. Be a pleasure.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you'll also tell us what's going on behind the locked doors of your lab, as well.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  That's tough. We'll have to sign a confidentiality agreement with all your listeners. Let me get it out.

• 51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What creature will crawl out of the door? So, Dr. Chris Mason, thank you for being on StarTalk. And Matt Cresson, sometimes science or maybe science?

• 51:52Matt Kirshen?

  It's probably science.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  It's my best, it's kind of science, it's on its ways.

• 51:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it half-baked science? Matt, we love you.

• 52:01Matt Kirshen?

  We'd love to get it as fully baked as half-baked.

• 52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thanks, guys, for being on StarTalk Cosmic Queries. And I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.