StarTalk Radio - Engineering Humans for Deep Space with Ronke Olabisi

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

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.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/engineering-humans-for-deep-space-with-ronke-olabisi/Thanks to our Patrons Micheal Morey, Kristoff Vidalis, Adir Buskila, Yanir Stein, Randombot38, James Komiensky, Richard Clark, Daniel Helwig, Kayleigh Sell, and KENNY SMART for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Guys, Dr. Ronke Olabisi is still at it. She's doing tissue engineering. She's making people. She's generating organs. This is her laboratory. Some might say she's playing God. I'm just saying. All right.

More on that coming up on star talk special edition welcome to star talk your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide star talk begins right now this is star talk 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. Hey, Neil. Former soccer pro and soccer announcer.

Yes. Your community of soccer players shares you with us, Neil. Former soccer pro and soccer announcer. Yes. Your community of soccer players shares you with us, and I want to thank them for it. I'm sure they won't care. Happy to get rid of me. 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, yeah. That's the best.

That is. That's a good subject. Gary, how'd you and your producers come up with that one well we thought it was about time we sort of delved into some biomedical engineering followed it with some regenerative medicine 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 14 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. So yes, our guest today, if not her first time, oh yeah, we have Professor Ronke Olabisi right here in the StarTalk house. Professor, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. Thank you for having me. 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. Ooh. Wow. So you're the ones who invented like the Terminator. Okay. Let's be clear about that. Yeah. That would be us.

Living tissue. Living tissue of an endoskeleton let me hear you say no we would never do that let me hear you say that i mean i would never do that but i am sure that somebody would be like that's cool okay and if they could would but we're so far away from that right now and you also have a degree in aeronautical engineering. Mm-hmm. And so that would help get the space dimension of this biomechanical engineering off the ground. Like I said, you were a previous guest on StarTalk.

So just welcome back. Thank you. And so, Gary, why don't you launch this rocket here? What do you have in mind? Okay. Ronke, if I can call you that, or if you professor remind us if you would about the hundred year starship project and your area of involvement in what was the overall outcome 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 space flight uh 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 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 well wait just a way to be clear, you're talking about traveling to the stars. To another star. Another star. Interstellar. Right now, we're jet setting around the solar system. That's like nothing. Yes. You know, a few years here and there.

So Starship was not just a poetic name. It's a destination. 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, how is that going to help on Earth? Well, maybe you can get somebody, there's some fields where there's only five people in the world who can perform that surgery. 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 or maybe you just really need a good nap yeah suspended animation so what you what you've done is ask yourself what are the questions that we haven't yet thought to yes and so like better power right because 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 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 i i saw a uh chinese language movie where they that's it that's it okay yeah that was

awesome i loved that movie earth the sequel is the one where they actually turn on the rockets and move earth out of its orbit to the next star system because 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 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 yeah that's why it's called science fiction yes okay yes what bothers me is that we're taking everyone that's yeah oh very nice way to see that jock yeah so project starship is not just bio mechanical or biological it's also the physics

of space time and how you're gonna and of aerospace engineering it's even textiles and clothing right so in the space station i think it's like 900 pounds a year 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? Wait, Chuck, how long have you been wearing your drawers? Right? Exactly. Now, I have an unfurnished basement. I'm sorry. So it's things that we don't think about,

but that would help on Earth, too, because there's tons of clothing that doesn't get recycled, that just gets thrown away, and that's sitting in landfills. Yeah, it's a huge problem. doesn't get recycled that just gets thrown away and that's sitting in landfills so yeah so here's problem fast fashion it's actually a very environmentally deleterious practice even the production of certain cottons is is uh toxic but let's let's break it back into your research professor healing wounds building bone growing organs yes tissue engineering thank you what a great tissue engineering how pivotal how vital will that be if we are to be literally starships in the future

if we're somewhere else and you suddenly find yourself needing a heart transplant if i can grow you one that's very important um if you burn yourself and you need uh skin grafting and i can grow you 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 uh 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 uh microbiome is affected pathogens become more virulent and at the same time your immune system is like uh not today this is all because we did not evolve in space yes yeah

yeah yeah kind of sounds to me like your real argument is we should stay home that's the final report to darpa 100 year spaceship starship stay home yeah 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 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. Right. You can't get it delivered.

You've got to take it with it. Could you grow it? Can it be developed? As the professor was saying, the delivery systems are mechanisms to get wounds to heal quicker because you're in a microgravity. If you're ahead of all of those issues, then you've got the walking, talking room, Dr. McCoy, you've got bones on board yeah 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 process of the healing or you put medicine inside of a cell and then send it? Wait, Chuck, I have a better question. So, Runky, how do you do it?

I know, I'm trying to figure it out. Hey, how do you do that? So the paradigm of tissue engineering is you were getting there. It's cells. It's some kind of a scaffold and it's biofactors. 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 try 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 papaya reactor in an incubator. But one of 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 have seen a rat with an ear on its back. Yes, I saw that and so it's easier to have the body do it if you give it the right instructions well 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 that was grown on the back of a lab rat right not not a rat's ear on its back. No, it was a human ear.

A human ear. And the rat didn't look too happy about that. I just thought I'd tell you. He dug in his ear a couple of times, I think. But every time I saw that, I just wanted to say, what? So what we do is with that scaffolding, we try to put these different biofactors that say 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. It's like the stitches that dissolve in your body. Exactly. All right, but what you're telling me is you're taking a path

that's not the one we had all imagined from decades ago. From decades ago, we imagined, oh, if you need a new heart, I have this mechanical heart I'll now put inside you. I have a mechanical organ. Everything would come from the engineering side of this rather than from the biology side. 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 we've learned so much about uh 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. There are 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 bacteria, 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. 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 welcome home heart yes and and we don't need donors anymore ronky i'm very disappointed because this means you can't rebuild me better all you can do is rebuild me the same way i was 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. Or you can do gene therapy to try to eliminate a deadly disease in people. I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. 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? We're not there yet. It's not perfect. Gene therapy has had tragedies along the way. And so you want to be... Wait a minute. You're burying the lead. Let's get to some of these tragedies along the way and so you want to be you want to be 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 just a drama junkie i just i need to know what these tragedies are i have not heard about the tragedies of gene therapy it's always heralded onki. 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 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 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 is that is that the cytokine is that the what yeah like it's a cascade uh it's an immune yeah most symptoms that we experience is the body's response to the pathogen yes okay 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. Wow. 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? A scraped knee, 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? 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 did you just say it heals without scars yeah it healed

without scab or scar formation and so wow we want to move it up forward and examine that and see if that works like in people in the same way how could you say that just so casually 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 so professor are you are you talking about superficial scarring on the surface or the internal scar tissue there was no scar tissue internally there was no scar tissue in the entire dermis of the skin wow 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

exactly 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 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 when i have a foot long scar it's great you've got miles and miles of scar tissue you know gary i always knew you were spineless at some level there. Neil, shut up.

Stop. Unless you work really, really hard to kind of break it up, just stops the mobility. And people who've had orthopedic surgeries and 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 yeah there's terrible contractures that particularly burn patients get and it's it it's life-changing where 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 just a devastating picture of a mother and daughter

who had been burned. And I want to help those people. Wow, that's amazing. Let me add one more question before we go to our Q&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 in the Marvel universe that Wolverine,

and more recently he's done a film with Deadpool, I think they both have some uncommon ability to regenerate from injury so but it's different so um there's there's regeneration and there's healing Wolverine heals Deadpool regenerates because like when you watch it it grows like it's a baby leg first yeah where as Wolverine is so it's kind of cool oh so that's so that's a difference i had not appreciated so because we've seen wolverine gets shot and then the bullet just sort of comes out of him it heals over and there's no scar at all so it's just healing on some uh superhero level and deadpool you're saying uh is like what a newt would do yes the tail comes off he just grows another tail yeah and he he

grows it in the same way that development so embryonic development that kind of thing he grows it from baby size leg to human to adult male whereas liverine whatever was there before just comes back yeah exactly the way it was right and so how so how does that differ from what you do 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 did you just say grow a bone in a pattern oh yeah we did that it was very cool we use seashells now now exactly how close to thanos are you is what i want to know well i mean uh that that bugged me i was like just make more food. Right, right. If you have that much power, just feed people, dude.

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

Oh, embryogenesis. That's what it's like they're constantly doing embryogenesis type thing. Oh, embryogenesis. That's what it's called. Okay. 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 bonus piece of electric which is kind of cool so before we get to q Q&A, just, Runke, tell us right now, I want you to commit, between Deadpool and Wolverine, which of them has more biomechanical authenticity? I mean, neither. Neither. Those are not good choices 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 if no both are no both are a big no but they're fun it's a total cop out all right no they're both no i'm not choosing i don't know i'm just saying if he's embryonic embryogenesis if yes do it and deadpole does it it sounds like deadpole is the is the natural winner here except unless wolverine got your no scarring formula from your lab there it is 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 scar.

So he doesn't get 100% of that. He used your no scarring method. Yes, exactly. He raided your lab. It's too fast. Okay, I got you. It's too good. Okay. all right chuck gary give me some questions from our people all right let's let's start with david

clingbeal oh by the way these are all our patreon listeners and thank you for your curiosity by the All right, Chuck, Gary, give me some questions from our people. All right, let's start with David Klingbeil. Oh, by the way, these are all our Patreon listeners. And thank you for your curiosity, by the way. Dave's in Palmer 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 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 uh sans which is space flight associated neuroocular syndrome sans okay 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 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?

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 correct 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 correct okay and they used to it used to be called something else uh bips or something like that it they used to think that it was intra like vision intraocular or intracranial pressure syndrome 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, but you're not upside down for months, right? 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 going to, the elastic will make it return to a round shape. That's because all the water inside the balloon becomes weightless while it is falling. Exactly. And that weightlessness then changes the shape of the balloon. The weightlessness allows the tension in the balloon the balloon surface to pull equally and so then it becomes a sphere right 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. We should send only farsighted astronauts into space. Yeah. Because there's a short-sightedness force operating on it, and they could come back with regular vision. Oh, yeah. It doesn't quite work like that.

Space flight isn't the LASIK surgery for farsighted people. The most expensive LASIK surgery ever lasik surgery ever that would be for sure uh gary what do you have all right vincent zimmerman who's from pennsylvania says hello neil chug and myself my question is could we bioengineer astronauts to be more resistant to radiation oh from what i understand radiation yeah and so big one there you go that's the nub of the question and he says loves the show 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

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 a 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 well listen here tim johnson it's uh great to have you aboard the space program uh some good news and some uh and some uh maybe better news uh. The good news is you're accepted. The different news is you're going to have to be black.

So we need you to put this cream on. 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 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 what little oxygen it has even though the blood is going to the foot. The solution to that was pressure pants. Squeeze their legs. Squeeze the leg. That was an engineering solution to the biophysiological problem. So for me, the damaging radiation question is easily solved by shields. Shield.

Make a radiation shield on the ship itself. On the ship itself. Right. So that way you don't have to. Water is a very good high energy absorber of energy. The water could have 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 oh i mean you would have to have i think they calculate as a foot to make sure you block everything um water a foot of water around the ship and which is extremely

expensive maybe it's a jacket the the the puts on once it's already in space you know you have it's like you go to it you get to a dock and you slip into your little spaceship jacket and then you move i mean it's a waterproof jacket all right it's funny i talked to a fighter pilot a captain and uh he said women are g monsters right and he said all the women do better than the men at withstanding 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 same way, in many ways, women do better in space for multiple reasons like that. But you bring up that one of the things to reverse the headward fluid ships 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 okay yeah like a compression suit or part of a suit the reverse yeah it sucks it's a vacuum

i keep the questions coming what do you have chuck this is zach kellogg greetings dr tyson ronke chuck g, 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, will 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. It's a really interesting question. It's what happens, and 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, and 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 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. 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 lot of calcium into your bloodstream and then you get things like kidney stones and you know 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 so we can't study it that way we can only only study living beings. And when you try to stop this process, you can't encourage the osteoblasts to continue doing their job. What you can do is you can stop the osteoclasts from cleaving the bone, right? And so, 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 five percent 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 is there a way to stimulate the osteoblasts while they're in space so not chemically or even exercise yeah just like some kind of pounding or stimulation that you could because 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 do something that gives some slight stress to the bone itself. Yeah. And so that's why they exercise like two to four hours a day on those treadmills with the bungee cords.

Yeah, of course. Most of this is moot. If we rotated the space station, then you have this ring of 1G, and then it's no longer a variable. You don't care, because now you're on Earth the whole time that you're traveling. There was supposed to be a module where they tested that, and I think the module got scrapped because they couldn't figure out. It wasn't intended for the whole space station to rotate. 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 were 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 osteoblasts by using the seashell stuff where we did it in patterns and we can use antibodies to go to the sites where the osteoclasts are killing everything and attract the osteoblasts to go back to those sites so that that's what we're trying to do bone wars yeah professor you just said seashells is that the yeah the in in some of your work you use mother of poe yeah explain that a bit more because seashells is just you brushing over the surface there, I'm sure.

So it's really, really, really cool. And it goes back to like 7th century BC 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 of pearl teeth that were there were put in for the funeral so that their corpse would look pretty. But then this dentist was like, can I x-ray that?

Because 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 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 and research into mother pearl as a biomedical implant and this one group it was really cool they took these 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 the other side and the nacre side little mineralization that

looked like nacre started growing towards the bone and on the bone side little mineralization that looked like bone started growing towards the nacre and they met in the middle and that's how you know it's an active biological process. Yes, yes. I think archaeologists discover this in bone remains. They know if the bone had healed from an earlier fracture. Because cavemen were breaking their stuff all the time. And 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. Oh, my goodness. Is there anything you can't do? I know. She's Frankenstein. Oh, my goodness. The there anything you can't do? I know, she's Frankenstein. Oh my goodness.

The doctor. Teleport. I want to teleport. I would go to space and hang out. Right on. Teleport. We'll get you some wormholes. I'll trade you a wormhole for your human-making machine.

Deal. Gary, we've got time for one last question. All right, let's go to Greece. This time in Athens, we're going to get a question from Elias Siametis. Hi, everyone. Let me see if you can pronounce that, Chuck. So I did it for Chuck.

We can't go faster than light and we can't hibernate. Hence, for extended space travel, we'll most likely live through it for some form of synthetic 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 kind of think borrows back into that Lance Arster you were giving with Mouth of a Pole. So please, Professor.

Because if you freeze a T-bone steak, you know, after three years, it's really different from what you first put in the package. Like 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? So we can freeze cells fairly easily.

I think the record for somebody defrosting an embryo is 20 years and they became healthy babies. Wow. With a job. Came out with a job. 20-year-old embryo came out with a job. Already went to college. 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 anti-freeze 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 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 a 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 an ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation device the things that we're trying to do 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 we use immortalized cells.

In immortalized cells, you have 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 there can be only one 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 if only you could have done that to highlander you can kill a highlander but otherwise they're immortal

yeah you got to cut their head off though yes a little bleach would have been a lot easier well bleach is decapitation for salt president trump wanted you to put bleach in your body to get rid of it there there can be only one only one that's what i'm saying it will kill your cells before it kills anything else okay it's better to burn out than it is to fade away okay we've only just begun yeah on this topic this is and you know every next interview we have with you runky i i it makes me wonder we want to meet your husband and like poke him make sure he's real next time. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. I want to see if he has those immortalized cells. That's what I'm looking for. Ronke, thanks for doing yet another Star Talk with us.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. We're going to 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 need. If anything, to find out what the latest is coming out of the lab. That's what we do. Come up to the lab and see what's on the... Horizon?

No. Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab. I slither, shiver with anticip... Victoria Quivers. Okay. All right, Professor, we'll come and find you again. Yes. 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.