Engineering Humans for Deep Space with Ronke Olabisi

0:00Guys, Dr. Ronke Olabisi is still at it., she's doing tissue engineering, she's making people.

0:14she's generating organs this is this is her laboratory yeah 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 StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your 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.

1:04Yes. Your community of soccer players shares you with us, and I want to thank them for it. I'm sure they don'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. 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?

1:56Let'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 100-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 Runke Olabesi right here in the StarTalk house. Professor, welcome back to StarTalk.

2:44Thank 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? so let's be clear about that yeah that would be us living tissue living tissue over 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 and so that would help get the space dimension of this biomechanical engineering off the ground.

3:34Like 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 prefer, Professor, remind us, if you would, about the 100-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. So it's the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, and it was initiated by DARPA in order to kind of inject an enthusiasm for space travel and spaceflight. If you look back at what the Apollo missions did for not just the economy, but for technology that we're still using today, it really transformed our world to the point that we're living in the space age.

4:27So 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 do we need? Well, we need, you know, to go fast. But wait, just to be clear, you're talking about traveling to the stars. To another star. Yes, interstellar.

5:10Right 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.

6:01and 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 plead out so that they don't die right there or maybe you just really need a good nap yeah suspended animation

6:22so what you what you've done is ask yourself what are the questions that we haven't yet thought to wall. Yes. And so like better power, right? Cause you would need a lot of power and it would need to be sustainable because you can't take anything with you. Right. So, I mean, you can't take the earth with you, but you, you, you can't come back to resupply. 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 saw a Chinese language movie where they... That's it. That's it? Okay. Yeah, that was awesome. I loved that movie.

7:00The 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. That's why it's called science fiction. Yes. What bothers me is that we're taking everyone.

7:37That's a very nice way to see that, Chuck. So Project Starship is not just biomechanical or biological. It's also the physics of space time and how you're going to 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 that of laundry that they incinerate because they don't have laundry machines up there. So if you have to consider that, could you grow your own clothes and then just instead of washing them, have them, I don't know, degrade and then grow some more or grow the materials to weave your own clothes? Wait, Chuck, how long have you been wearing your drawers?

8:24Right? Exactly. Now I have an unfurnished basement. I'm sorry.

8:31so it's it's things that we don't think about but that would help on earth too because there's tons of of clothing that doesn't get recycled that just gets thrown away and that's sitting in landfills so yeah so here's from fast fashion it's actually a very environmentally deleterious practice even the production of certain cottons is is uh toxic But let's flick it back into your research, Professor. Healing wounds, building bone, growing organs. Yes, tissue engineering. Thank you. What a great time. Tissue engineering. How pivotal, how vital will that be if we are to be literally starships in the future?

9:15If we're somewhere else and you suddenly find yourself needing a heart transplant, if I can grow you one, that's very important. if you burn yourself and you need skin grafting and i can grow 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 years spaceship and 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?

10:27But 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. 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 and mechanisms to get wounds to heal quicker because you're in a microgravity. If you're ahead of all of those issues, then, you know, you've got the walking, talking real Dr. McCoy, you know, you've got bones on board. Yeah. So when you talk about that, are you using cells?

11:07Like we saw this during the pandemic, we use, you know, it's why it's called messenger RNA. are you using cells as delivery systems for healing and you know you take the cell itself and make it kind of part of the uh the process of of the healing or you put med put medicine inside of a cell and then send it 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 sells 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 bioreactor in an incubator.

12:10But 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. But just to be clear, for those who did not see that picture, it was the cartilage of a human ear on the back of a rat. It was grown on the back of a lab rat. Right. Not a rat's ear on its back. It was a human ear. Human ear. And a 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.

12:56But every time I saw that, I just wanted to say, what? um so what we do is with that scaffolding we try to put these different biofactors that say 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.

13:38Exactly. 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. So what is better about a bio organ if I can make a really good mechanical organ? We've learned so much about biomaterials. And when you have these mechanical organs, you have to be on blood thinners for the rest of your life because they just like to form clots.

14:24There 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.

15:08Welcome home, heart. Yes, and we don't need donors anymore. Ronke, 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

16:01I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

16:16so 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 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 on monkey so i can't remember the disease that he had, but it was this young 18 year old and he had this disease.

17:10It 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 the cytokine? Yeah, like it's a cascade.

17:59It's an immune. Yeah, most symptoms that we experience is the body's response to the pathogen. Yes. And when you give that much and they went off. And I think they found that one of the trainees, the postdoc, was fabricating data. Like 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?

18:48Scraped 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 we want to move that forward and examine that and see if that works 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?

19:31Because nobody believes it until you do it in a person. 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 and 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 unless you work really really hard to kind of break it up just stops the mobility and people have had orthopedic surgeries and do not are are not able to do anything about it are going to be rigid and their mobility is really going to be compromised so when you said no scar tissue my eyes light that would be amazing yeah there's uh 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 a just a devastating picture of a mother and daughter who had been burned.

21:32And 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 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.

22:20Yeah. As Wolverine is, so it's kind of cool. Oh, so that's a difference I had not appreciated. So we've seen Wolverine get shot, and then the bullet just sort of comes out of him, heals over, and there's no scar at all. So it's just healing on some superhero level. And Deadpool, you're saying, is like what a newt would do. Yes. The tail comes off, he just grows another tail. Yeah, and 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.

23:15And so regeneration is something that others in the field 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, exactly how close to Thanos are you is what I want to know. Well, I mean, that bugged me. I was like, just make more food right right just that's like right power to 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.

24:10People are trying to understand what's happening there. The thing about newts, I believe they don't achieve an adult form as well. And so it's like they're constantly doing embryogenesis type thing. 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.

24:51And when you do electrically stimulate certain parts of the body, you get better healing, like bone. Bone is piece of electric, which is kind of cool. So before we get to Q &A, just, Runke, tell us right now, I want you to commit, between Deadpool and Wolverine, which of them has more biomechanical authenticity?

25:16I mean, neither. Neither. Those are not good choices. The way humans heal, Wolverine is more like a rapidly healing person, whereas Deadpool pool 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 fine 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 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.

26:34If 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 rated your lab. it's too it's too fast okay i got you it's too good that's it okay

27:19all right chuck gary give me some questions from our people All right, let's start with David Klingbeal. Oh, by the way, these are all our Patreon listeners, and thank you for your curiosity, by the way. Dave's in 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 SANS, which is spaceflight associated neuroocular syndrome.

28:06SANS. OK. SANS. It affects the vision and they're still debating on what causes that. And so astronauts are coming back nearsighted. When you look at the back of the eye, it's distended. There's different 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.

28:50But if this was a symptom of air pressure, you'd find people living at high altitudes that have these same symptoms. But you don't. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. And it used to be called something else, Bips or something like that. They used to think that it was 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?

29:33Oh, yeah. 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 kind of elastic. And the gravity is pulling down the blood towards your feet. 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, 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.

30:16Exactly. And that weightlessness then changes the shape of the balloon. The weightlessness allows the tension in the balloon to pull equally, and so then it becomes a sphere. So in the same way, when we're standing on Earth, we've got 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. 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 far-sighted people.