StarTalk Podcast_ The Right Stuff with Astronaut Scott Kelly and Dr. Chris Mason

This is StarTalk Sports Edition. The right stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, I said it.

The right stuff. That's what we're going to explore today. And I got with me, of course, my co-host, Chuck Nice.

Chuck. Hey, Neil. What's happening?

Stand-up comedian. And I got Gary O'Reilly.

Hey, Neil.

Nice to be here again.

Okay.

I have to tell in more than one of these episodes that we've got a There's a wiki page on you out there that I just stumbled on and you're looking good, I just want to say. All right, I must be breathing in. Is that what it takes? So, today's topic, the right stuff. You've generally heard that apply to astronauts and in fact, we have a real live authentic astronaut on this show because we want to explore what commonalities there might be for training to go into space.

and how that might impact the future of training for athletics. Just basically understanding what the human body is capable of. And who is that astronaut? But the one and only Scott Kelly. Scott, he's an old friend. Scott, welcome. Welcome to StarTalk.

Thanks for having me, Neil.

Yeah.

And some of you, if you don't know who Scott Kelly is, he's one of a twin. And one twin went into space, this twin. And the other twin stayed on earth.

And the other one went, and the other one went to market.

Also known as the.

U S Senate.

Very good.

So you're retired now, retired, uh, astronaut engineer, Naval aviator. I got the whole list here. You commanded the international space station and you recorded a full year in space. And that was consecutive, right? Not just in bits and pieces. And you wrote a book, A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery.

I like that.

And let me name tag your brother. His name is Mark, Mark Kelly, and a current U.S. Senator from Arizona. John McCain's state, Arizona.

John McCain's old seat, actually.

His actual seat. His actual seat. Interesting.

He's actually sitting at John McCain's desk.

Desk, yeah.

Dang that's pretty wild is he drinking the beer that he had in the fridge um so scott how did you prepare on earth to go into space.

Well there's a lot of uh preparation i think more you're focused on the physical part of it since this is you know how does this relate to uh to sports um You know, we just keep active, keep healthy. The astronaut office has a workout facility with really good trainers to instruct us. They also teach us how to use all the exercise equipment, which the equipment that we're going to use in space, which is pretty important because it's somewhat complicated and takes some good technique to use. But, you know, mostly for a space flight, what we're, you know, our pre-flight preparation with regard, you know, physical activity is more just about staying healthy. And being able to do the job, you know, which means being in space for

a long time and the stressors that puts on your body. And also to do spacewalks, which is a pretty challenging thing to do.

So can you compare what we all saw in the movie, The Right Stuff, with whatever you might have gone through? Because the original Mercury 7, it looked like, no, I don't want to go through that. You know, with the centrifuge and the survival and this and. So how how soft are you compared with the original seven?

I'm not sure.

You know, I'm a little older than they were when they they started, not older than they are now, of course, because that was very much before my time. But, you know, regarding the book, the right stuff, the movie, you mentioned the movie. I think I maybe maybe saw it once.

Really, they're right.

The book was much more significant part of my life, really what's inspired me. to become a better student and to go on and fly in the Navy and then later at NASA. So, yeah, the type of stuff you saw in the movie and that's related well in the book, a lot of that stuff is the astronaut selection part, you know, some of the uncomfortableness of it.

And, yeah, we have to go through that.

You know, the different, you know, exams you have to go through from, you know, Just a very thorough eye examination to make sure your vision's good, which in some ways is a little bit uncomfortable, believe it or not, all the way through your gastrointestinal system, cardiovascularly, all that stuff.

They test us for claustrophobia.

And how do they do that?

They put you in a rubber bag.

You kind of crawl up into a ball, this thick rubber bag with a... very heavy zipper, they put electrodes on you and push you into a closet and don't tell you how long you're gonna be there.

So, give you that claustrophobia.

I wanna scream right now. Just listening to that. Just listening to that, I feel like calling for help for some reason right now.

And they told you that was a test. That just sounds like a bunch of bullies playing a prank on you.

Yeah, that's after they gave you the wedgies. That would actually happen there, Scott.

Well, you wouldn't want to have claustrophobia and get into a spacesuit and figure it out when you're doing a spacewalk.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know, when you're in low Earth orbit, it might be a little late to figure that out. Hey, guys, guys, can somebody get me down?

I know several astronauts were previous athletes, like Buzz Aldrin. I knew he was a track and field athlete. Even did the pole vault, I think it was. So did you do any sports when you were in college?

I was a pole vaulter in high school.

Not a very good one. I was the captain of my swim team. I'm a decent swimmer, but I shouldn't have been the captain. It's just our team was so bad.

Wait, wait, Scott, you won the pole vault contest because you ended up in space.

Eventually. You sailed over every height.

Everyone on the team, including my brother, who was also a pole vaulter, And the reason I sailed over him is because I went on one of those Hubble missions, which is much higher than he ever went.

Oh, it's a higher orbit than the space station.

That's right. That's right. About 100 miles or so, I think.

Sibling rivalry. Scott, I'm interested because going into space for a year, and we know, and I'll hold my hand up, astronauts are elite athletes. You've got amazing... cognitive skills, high IQ, and strength and conditioning that is as good as anything you find on an NFL field or anywhere else for that matter.

Except for curling.

Well, they're just, Chuck, you've gone to the top of Mount Olympus there. But we're going to be speaking to Dr. Mason a little bit later on in this podcast. So, you know, stick around for that, please, all our listeners. He said to us that you said when you were in space, it felt like your bones were melting. And to back that up, the blood work and the urine samples proved that you were draining calcium.

Now, we're all told about.

Athletes who can feel and intuitively know their own body. How did you come to that conclusion?

I never said that.

Oh, busted.

That my bones were melting and I... doubt very much that Dr. Mason said that either.

All right.

Certainly, we lose a lot of bone mass in space, you know, 1% a month if you didn't do anything to prevent it. But we do. Fortunately, we do a lot of exercise, resistive exercise specifically helps with that. And I did lose some bone mass. And, you know, that does show up in your urine samples.

Our bodies are really smart.

You Once you get to space, your physiology recognizes there's no more gravity, no more need for a skeleton to support it.

So it starts just getting rid of that stuff.

So you're en route to just becoming a pile of ectoplasm up there.

Like Gumby.

You're like Gumby, maybe.

So while all of this is going on in your body and your body's... Is there a point like when people we speak to who go... on vegan diet, say it takes a couple of weeks and then they kind of feel the whole thing working for them. Is it the same situation for a human body in space where you go over this bump in the road and after that you feel comfortable with things?

You know, there's all different levels of adaptation. You know, on a short-term flight, on a space shuttle, the process really goes, exists for, you know, it's like a few days where you might no longer be nauseous and you kind of feel you still don't feel great, but you feel good enough to do your job and then you come home. On a long duration flight, I found the milestones to be more like, you know, one at about a month in space and then where you can now kind of, you know, move around very efficiently.

You can think pretty clearly.

You don't feel as, you know, your digestive system and your you know, your head isn't as swollen as it is when you first get up there because, you know, our cardiovascular system, again, evolved to push blood against gravity. And without that, your head gets swollen. But I would say over the course of me being there for an entire year, I always felt better in every way. But I never felt like I was on earth. I always felt that my head was a little swollen. My sinuses were a little congested because of that. I always had, most of the time, a low-grade headache because of the carbon dioxide. But You know, I think maybe there is a point out there, some kind of inflection point, where if you stay in space long enough, you do feel like.

You're on Earth, perhaps.

Or rather, you feel like you're someplace else, and then when you go to Earth, Earth becomes completely weird, right? If you just completely physiologically adapt to where you are, then Earth becomes the outlier.

Yeah, gravity can give you a pretty good beatdown upon return.

Yeah. Speaking of the change and adaptation, so I read that when you returned upon inspection, when they got under the hood to see what was going on with your DNA, that 7% of your DNA actually saw some change. Now, I guess subsequently has it returned to its regular state or not? What happened with that, that 7%? And what exactly was the change? Did we find out exactly what the change was?

Well, Chuck, we know that it didn't make him regrow hair. That was a change that did not happen.

Ooh.

Which is great. You know why?

Because this is like the perfect hair for space. I hope to go back someday. But actually, you know, what changed for me was... My DNA, but also RNA and protein. So what changed was 7% of my gene expression. And gene expression is whether these things, if you think of them as a switch, they're turned on or off. And that expression controls our physiology, how our bodies react to things, how they behave.

This would be a better question for Chris Mason.

But in my case, 7% of that changed.

Over the course of the year.

Now, granted, you know, all of us are probably changing a little bit all the time, but I think this was more, uh, more, uh, interesting because it, how it, uh, changed compared to my brother with him on earth, 7% of mine changed, uh, relative to him, I think more so, uh, over the course of that year.

And then what does that, what is the implication?

What are the implications of that, um, for future space travelers and also myself for my.

Health going forward? And, you know, Hopefully I'll never find out.

Did they say that your, your chromosomes actually got longer and to, and here I am so, so advanced in my medical training, but that actually made you younger.

So, uh, what you're referring to as my telomeres are these like end caps on our chromosomes. And as we age, you know, cells divide, those get shorter and more frayed. So your telomeres are really an indication of your physical age and, the hypothesis was me being in space, all this radiation, the microgravity environment, the stress, you know, all these different factors would work together against my chromosomes to shorten them as compared.

To my brother.

And surprisingly, we found out that they actually improved. Now, initially, we thought, well, maybe that's due to the exercise. We do a ton of exercise on board. Maybe the diet, which is, you know, different than a terrestrial diet. It's more controlled by dieticians. Maybe that was helpful. So that's what they actually thought at first. But then, I don't know, it was six months or a year after I got back from space, we learned that the Japanese had this experiment on telomeres on the space station at the same time I was there on these small worms. And their telomeres got better. And I never once saw those guys working out on the treadmill.

Or the bicycle or anything.

So there's clearly more to this than meets the eye.

Wait, Scott, how many dangling variables were between you and Mark? So, for example, did they make Mark eat the same food you did? Did he exercise at the same times you did? So that you have localized the effect of being in space as the only difference between the two of you? Or was he partying and drinking and.

We're going with a letter, aren't we?

As a scientist, Neil, I think everyone realizes that, including yourself, clearly that, you know, the way you would normally do a scientific experiment is to control a lot of these external factors and variables and focus on, you know, like the one thing you're trying to investigate. So all things, you know, are basically equal. We actually talked about maybe my brother following the same diet, maybe following the same exercise protocol. But he had his own life.

He traveled.

He had to do work in different parts of the country. It really wasn't practical. So it's an experiment that involves some interesting information.

It's more of a.

Longitudinal kind of experiment, comparing me to my brother over a long period of time and other astronauts and not something where you're looking at A very specific, controlled, very large sample group as, you know, what you're comparing this, me, as the, you know, scientific subject to.

Yeah, because if you did, if you were to do that perfectly, you would lock him into a vessel the size of your space station module for a year as well. I mean, so that there'd be, the only difference is your zero G module. above Earth's atmosphere.

That would be the plastic bag scenario that Scott went through for claustrophobia. Lock him in the cupboard for a year. Okay, the one thing we get asked all the time, and Neil is brilliant with these sort of answers, is what if we did this sport on this planet, right? And I think we're talking to one of the few people who has come as close to anybody as doing sport off-world, even if it's exercise or two straws and a bead of water. Um, so it's, what did you think you could achieve in terms of sport whilst you're in space for a year?

Hmm.

Uh, you know, I think you would have to design a sport specifically for microgravity. It would be hard to translate, you know, sports that are conducted under gravity, uh, to microgravity and have them work the same way. Certainly, you know, we try things. in space for fun. I had a football up there and one time it took me a few months, but I was able to throw it from the front of the space station node two, all the way into the service module of the Russian segment, which is probably, I don't know, like maybe several hundred feet away.

And there was about that much space to, to get it through. It took me months. Um, But as far as, I don't know, maybe you could have wrestling. That would be pretty interesting.

Neil, you're in.

Two people wrestling in space. I don't know how you would pin somebody, though.

Yeah, so I think you're right. You have to sort of start from scratch and say, what are some zero-G athletic feats that we would– because, you know, faster, higher, stronger, whatever is the Olympic motto, they'd have to even adjust that– adjust it. Because strength– I don't know, takes on a different meaning in space because any force will send something into motion. And so, okay. So maybe that's a book I think you should write, Scott.

I'll tell you what, though.

I think the thing that would be competitive would be how you're able to very precisely maneuver your body around in zero gravity. Because, you know, over the course, the longer you're there, the better you get at it and And that's really a skill to learn. So there could be certain things like, you know, just being able to, you know, do like a flip in the middle of the module and see who can do it the longest without actually hitting anything. That would be, you could time that and that would be a good competition.

Without accidentally hitting the red eject button.

Yeah.

Space gymnastics.

Cracking yourself. Space gymnastics because everything they do on the floor exercises and things, you just do in space and you don't even have to touch back down.

I like that.

And how about synchronized swimming? If they had some swimming pool that was just a big blob of water and you sort of enter the blob of water and then you can have cameras from all directions, that'd be interesting too.

Probably drown. Be a short competition.

We've spoken a lot about the physical version of you. How about the mental version of you? Because I'm told that you took a gorilla suit into space. Is that another? I'm being told a whole load of fibs.

I did not take a gorilla suit.

Now, my brother sent me a gorilla suit, but I did not take it. I actually said, why are you sending me a gorilla suit? And he said, well, there's never been a gorilla suit in space, so I'm sending you one, and you have no control over it.

So then you've got to take a blurry photo of you, and then it would be like Bigfoot is in space, you know? Wouldn't that be cool?

These stories are getting lost in translation.

It's strange. Are you talking to the National Enquirer, Gary?

I cannot divulge my sources. You know the rules on this, Chuck. So guys, we got to take this break. But Scott Kelly's book is A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. Definitely check it out. And when we come back, we're going to introduce Christopher Mason. He's the medical doctor who conducted the experiments on Scott while he was in space for a year.

And it's his.

Test that gives us this glimpse into the effect of human spaceflight on human genetics.

So stay with us. We're back.

StarTalk Sports Edition. Building the right stuff. We just came out of a segment with one of the Kelly twins who's been in space for a year. And we found out that a lot of medical experiments were conducted trying to find out how his body compared with his twin's. Mark, who he left here on Earth. And we've got right now the doctor who analyzed him, Dr.

Christopher Mason. Chris, welcome to StarTalk.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, let me.

Get your title straight here. Associate Professor and Director, the World Quant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction.

Did I get that right?

That's right.

It's all there.

Yep, yep.

And you specialize in physiology and biophysics, one of my favorite fields. If I were not an astrophysicist, I'd be a biophysicist. So I'm totally... with you on that. And what is the Phile Family Brain and Mind Institute?

What is that?

Basically looking at cognitive traits in general for when you do large-scale studies, including like with astronauts, but then also looking for genes that are responsible for how the brain develops or responds to stress.

Okay, cool.

Diseases that run in families, yeah.

Okay, very interesting. And also the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at the Weill Cornell Hospital?

Medicine.

Medicine, okay.

Excellent.

You're the right guy for this. We have to let people know that you came 15 minutes late to this interview because you were like talking to the CDC and there's no excuse. Who raised you?

All right. We're your manners here.

Just a few mutated viruses floating around the population.

A few mutated COVID viruses.

That's not an excuse. All right.

So you're... the words associated with your profession. I got one here, epitranscriptome, metagenome, transcriptome, epigenome. What is all that?

By Aquadulu Alpha Disco Psycho Beta.

That was an old-timer joke right there, Chuck.

Oh, man. Just got to love some Parliament Funkadelic. Parliament Funkadelic.

So, Chris, what is all that?

I'm happy to clarify. So it is every layer of biology being studied sort of in its totality. So you think about, you probably, everyone probably remembers DNA and RNA and protein, kind of this idea of the central dogma of molecular biology, what happens in your cells and how do you go from, you know, one cell when you're an embryo, everyone here started as one cell, or at least you should have, if you didn't, please tell me later, we should do some experiments on you, but you should have been one cell when you started and all the instructions are there to become all the other cells in your body, which is one of the most beautiful things of genetics. But to make that happen, you need to control the DNA, the RNA, the protein at every stage

of development, and also when you go to space, for example. So the ohms, the genome is the DNA, the transcriptome is the RNA, the proteome is the proteins, and all the ohms in between are the totality of studying how those molecules interact in the body.

Okay, but the epigenome, it's something that happens later, correct? It's not something that you're born with? What's going on there?

The epi is Greek for on top of, so you still have your genome, your four letters of the genetic code, the A, C, Gs, and Ts that make sort of the recipe of how you make all your cells. You know, it's only a four letter alphabet that comprises the entire genetic code for.

All of life activities.

But then on top of that, their epigenome right on top of that are small chemical tweaks that change how and when and where something gets used. And so if you can package DNA and like make it so it's inaccessible and turn things off, or you can slightly sprinkle kind of like snow on these epigenetic marks that turn them on and turn them off.

So these epigenetic marks there, is it true or do you know, or has enough been done to study if indeed trauma over a period of time leads to a change in genetics down the line? So for instance, let's just say I'm, a survivor of, you know, homelessness, right? When I'm a little kid and I go through this terrible trauma and then I give birth to somebody, or better yet, my mom goes homeless while she's carrying me.

All right. So take those two scenarios. One, my mom is homeless, suffers that trauma. And then two, I am homeless, suffering the trauma. So one, I'm fathering a child. One, I'm giving birth to a child. Will it have indeed an effect?

An epigenetic, a transgenerational effect. So this is a big question. It's hotly debated in the field of genetics and epigenetics. We know In mice, the answer is definitely yes. And in worms, the answer is definitely yes. We can see evidence of multi-generational impacts where the genetic code is the same.

It's what's called an isogenic line. It's like a mouse line that is, they're all the same genetic background. There's no change in the genetics. It's only the epigenetics. And you can see it. You can see those small chemical tweaks in mice where essentially if you've been lean, you might have a better chance of being lean as a mouse later in generations or obese as well. You can switch it up.

And in C.

Elegans, there's even a case where a work by Odedra Chavez showed worms that have an antiviral response can pass on for up to three generations, but then it slowly fades away. So we know it's possible biologically, but in humans, it's hotly debated. The best example is that in World War II, a lot of the mothers that were famished because of a lot of restrictions, because they didn't have enough food, there were a lot of downstream health effects negative because of that.

And so there's.

Epidemiological evidence, but it's hard to do the same experiment in humans that you do with with mice, you can't force humans to have children with who you want to. I mean, you can kind of do with an app these days, but you can't do it in a controlled fashion.

The old Tinder control group.

You can kind of get closer, but you still can't.

So one thing you just blew past, and I just want to make sure we pause and reflect on that amazing fact, that in the world of experimental physiology, There are catalogs where you can order up any number of identical mice.

Oh, yeah.

That someone else had experimented on in some other country at another time that found some effect. So you can get that strain of mice and it's identical DNA to that other mouse so that now you can look for the sole variable to change.

Are you saying that they... They keep that line, that lineage going?

That's why, he just blew by it like everybody knows this. Okay, so it is the ideal experimental lab animal. Yeah, so did I get it right? Did I get that right, Chris?

That's spot on. And you can get ones with specific mutations, one that age faster, like progeria, or ones that have a higher propensity for diabetes or obesity or cancer. You can make almost any kind of mouse you want these days.

So now how do you guys do this? Do you have like a little mouse brothel? Chuck! What are you Chuck? That's a bunch of mouse pimps. What is going on? What is happening?

Chuck, behave. But what it does is makes Scott Kelly going to space with his genetically identical twin brother on Earth even more fantastic.

That's why Dr. Mason was the ideal person to study this stuff.

Thank you.

So here we have, okay, so we don't have whole colonies of identical Mark Kellys, but we had two, all right, brought to you by their mothers, their mother. So what were you looking for specifically? Did you know what questions you wanted to answer before it all began, or were you just going to sort of do a scatter experiment and see whatever shows up?

We had some hypotheses going in, but for the most part, we weren't sure. And NASA wasn't sure. Nobody was sure. What would be the facet of biology that would change the most?

Is it the DNA?

Is it the RNA? Is the protein? Is the microbiome, the microorganisms in your body? There's iron retinal damage that's been studied before. But we had no idea. So I think the best thing to do when you don't know where to look is to look everywhere you possibly can. So in this case, we basically took the whole kitchen sink of molecular biology and and biophysics and examined everything we could about everything that was going in their body and out of their body and some parts on their body as well, like the microbiome. And so we sequenced their genome, the genome of what was in their stool.

So we got some space poop and also some space skin samples to see what bacteria were changing and viruses. Because there's often herpes gets reactivated in a lot of astronauts, and about 40% of them, the immune system is a bit suppressed, and so herpes comes back.

Reactivated.

That means they had it.

Already yeah and wait a minute are we talking space herpes here are we actually talking.

Space i know it's early in the day but we're already there this interview.

Just began dude okay but wait a minute just you again you just blew by something i just got to pause you for a moment. So you not only concern yourself with the health and well-being of Scott Kelly, you also concerned yourself with the health and well-being of the bacterial stowaways that are in his gut and are on his skin.

Yeah. Yeah.

And exactly. I mean, basically, because biology is driven by human cells and microbial cells to be a good geneticist, you have to look at all kingdoms of life for every patient.

So now, oh, man, that makes for. OK, first of all. How do you handle all this data? I mean, seriously, just this one person in space, the tranche of data that comes back to you has got to be overwhelming. It's got to be huge, a tidal wave of just bits and bytes. And then you start talking about the microbial aspect of this. You're looking at a whole other universe inside of a human being that you're quantifying, measuring at the same time. How do you even do that?

Well, lots of sequencers. So, I mean, a lot of it's petabytes of data. It is, I mean, we have a laboratory, most laboratories these days, mine included, it's biology, it's genetics, but about 65, 70% of it is a dry lab. So it's all computational. There's people who just do programming, just do informatics. The other third of it is more the wet lab. And so the lab becomes kind of half wet, half dry, like a humidor lab.

or like an armpit, it depends on what day it feels like it is, but a little bit half wet, half dry.

So it has to be- I did not need to hear that about an armpit. Sorry. Oh wait, one other thing. I just got to make sure we're on the same page. You just went right through petabyte. So that's the next metric group of a thousand that follows gigabyte. So we have- Terabyte, terabyte. I'm sorry, terabyte. So gigabyte, terabyte, and then petabyte. So thank you. So this is way more data than even you ever be storing on your computer.

Right.

So Chris, Chris, how are you reacting to data in real time? Or is it a case of we'll deal with that when you get back? Can, I mean, as there might, I mean, I'm getting my facts so wrong on this show. It's actually, I'm going to break records.

I'm sure.

Um, is there a mini sequencer on the international space station or have I dreamt that as well?

There is, there is.

So a lot of that, when we sequence all the molecules, the DNA and the RNA, and you can even track these proteins with the, with the sequencers too. Normally these really big machines, these giant machines made by like Illumina or PacBio are some of the bigger companies in the space and their machines are big. But there's smaller ones made by a company called Oxford Nanopore out of the UK that makes their just literally the size of something you'd say half the size of your phone or, you know, even the size of your phone. They are, and you can do sequencing in space. We demonstrated this with Kate Rubins, who's up in the space station right now. And I was just emailing with her yesterday. She has the small,

she did it for the first time in 2016 and now it is a, standard flight hardware. You can sequence anything you want right up in space.

Oh, my God. That's so Gattaca, dude. That is so Gattaca.

It's happening in real time.

So you could kiss someone, quickly swab their mouth, and then sequence it and say, do I want to date this person anymore? It's like 23andMe and Tinder coming together.

It's finally happening.

Gattaca was a movie reference for those who are... younger than 40.

And by the way, if you haven't seen Gattaca, get a life. It's an important film. It's a great film.

And in fact, the letters in the title of the movie are your amino acid letters.

So can I just ask about this microbial? Because I'm just, when you think about the human gut and the fact that most of us, I mean, most of our insides is not us. Right? If you think about it, most of our insides is not us. So did you find anything that might either enhance our ability for long-term space travel or detract from our ability for long-term space travel?

Well, that's what I was thinking of Gary's question. What were you monitoring in real time? Like if you knew Scott Kelly was like dying from something, do you say, oh, we're not going to tell him we need the data?

Say just take this don't ask why just don't ask why we can see because a lot of the biochemistry the microbes contributes to our own biology and sort of vitamin levels for example vitamin b3 and b6 a lot of this made by the microbes in your gut so you can see is the composition changing in a way that's negative but also some of the microbes make something called the arachidonic acid which has some radio protective capabilities as well so there's some ongoing questions of Could you protect astronauts or at least give them good nutrition, but maybe give them even a little bit of radio protection, both inside and out, is ongoing research at NASA and in our lab.

When you say radio protection, you mean radiation from space, right?

Yeah.

Well, galactic cosmic rays will still kind of blow right through you. But if you think about lower radiation or sort of secondary radiation, it might help you with that.

Just clarifying that. Hey, so let me ask you this, Neil. How do you deal with, like, you know, the... barrage of radiation that you will experience uh once you are you know you're there's no magnetic field there's no what.

Do you do the urge to try to find a biological solution to this i think will end up futile relative to what engineers can design and so it doesn't take much thickness of water for example yeah to completely shield you from most of what's damaging from the sun So you can imagine enveloping the spacecraft. It's just a membrane, right? Yeah, some kind of fluid membrane. And that could be some of the recycled water that you use. So I'm not worried about that. Everyone says, oh, what about the radiation?

We've got clever engineers. That's the least of my worries.

Okay. That makes sense.

So Chris, what was the most interesting set of results you got? Maybe the most disturbing, but the same breadth. And the lessons we've actually picked up from Scott's year in space.

And where are you hiding the Andromeda string?

It's in the freezer.

Oh, wait, no.

Another movie.

Now you've got to be over 50 to know that movie. That's right.

So I think it was really surprising to see actually how plastic the body was. Many, many things changed that were stress responses in flight. And even when he landed, his whole body broke out into a rash and his ankles swelled up to the size of basketballs. But it went back to normal. So a lot of the body did return to normal. But we did see increased damage to his DNA. So we know he did get radiated.

So it's something to keep an eye on. Telomeres got a little bit longer, we could see, which was surprising. And one other thing that was really surprising is we could see his immune system. We could see which bacteria it was actually engaging with because we've also sequenced the walls of.

The space station.

So we can see the bacteria that his body's engaging with and the immune cells. You can actually see the T cells in his body becoming more active towards those specific microbes. That was kind of a really interesting result.

Okay, so it means you could not, upfront disentangle the effects of zero G versus a slightly lower pressurized environment versus the rate, the rated of exposure that he's getting. All of those are happening together. Cause when I think of microbes, do they really care how much gravity there is? Like they live in a whole other world where sort of the, you know, uh, other forces dominate what role gravity would play. So it sounds like most of what you're finding has nothing to do with zero G. Yeah, we think it's a lot of it's the stress on the body. Sometimes you get local hypoxia just because there's small clouds of CO2 because air doesn't move the.

Same way in space as it does here on Earth. It's actually the clouds can stay a little bit in front of your face. You can see some of that in the blood work even. So we think you see that, you see the, you know, essentially the radiation, the stress of the flight.

So you're not going to carry a fan with you wherever you go.

There's a lot of fans in the space station to make sure the air moves.

So Scott's in space for a year. That's not the record, is it?

No, the Russians have us beat, like with many things.

Okay.

That's why it's called a space race.

Well, that's because they punished somebody to put them up there.

No, what happened was, the Russians just beat us in everything in space. First satellite, first non-human animal, first human, first woman, first black person. They had everything. And then we landed on the moon. We say, we win.

So having said that, We will need to do experiments, as you did with Scott, for even longer periods of time with possibly even more sophistication.

Where are we?

Not in terms of the length of time, possibly, because, what is it, nine months to get to Mars, the projection?

Yeah, 67 months, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what sort of tests can you conduct? What sort of time can a human exist in space at this particular point in our technological evolution?

There are missions planned now for doing 18 months, and there's going to be a barrage of six and 12-month additional missions to follow up on the twin study. So by the time we send people to Mars, if you ask NASA, it's 2035. If you ask Elon Musk, it's 2026 or something.

If you ask me, it's never. So don't ask me. No, you don't think we're going to go?

That's a whole other thing. Don't get me started. Actually, you wrote a whole book on thinking about humans and the future the next 500 years. Why don't we take a break and we'll come back And just explore where that book goes and why and what you found and what your insights are as a medical professional.

We'll be right back on StarTalk.

We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We led off with Scott Kelly, one of the twins who went into space and got studied by our current guest. We've got Dr. Mason here, who's an expert on the human genome and the human physiology and biophysics. And he's the right guy. in the right place, doing the right thing. So again, thanks for being on our show. So let me ask you, did, what, anything we learned that we can apply to the rest of us, even if we're not going into space from what you studied with Mark Kelly's physiology? Yeah, I think because we studied- And let me be specific. Anything we can know about pandemics or anything? I got to sort of throw that in the mix.

Viruses? Viruses.

Yeah, their physiology or any response to stress, for example. So what's amazing is we, about a year ago, you know, we started getting a lot of samples from the hospital, New York Presbyterian, the COVID-19 patients coming in. We started sequencing them, applying some of the exact same molecular technologies that we did to the Kelly twins and other astronauts.

And we could actually see, for example, some things that look just like, that look like the stress of landing back from space, like interleukin-6 is basically a cytokine, an inflammatory signaling molecule, that really spiked up when he landed. So when he landed back on earth, it looked like his body basically was saying, oh crap, you know, I'm not breaking on rashes. I'm in a lot of pain.

And it was because you could see these cytokines, these pro and anti-inflammatory signals and molecules battling each other.

Wait, this is not.

Because he had landing anxiety. It's because the body was beginning to feel gravity once again. Exactly, exactly.

And so getting back to 1G, the body releases all these signals that are kind of an alarm bell to say, okay, we need to begin to use our muscles, rebuild our bones. Even though they work out on the space station and try to prevent as much of that as possible, it still is different. When you come back to a full 1G on your whole body the whole time, it hurts a little bit. And we could see some of those same signatures show up in COVID patients. So what's interesting is we published a paper last year saying, what's the list of possible medications that you could use when you land on gravity after you haven't been in gravity? A lot of them overlap with what are now being used for therapies for COVID-19, which we couldn't have predicted a

year ago. but now we can see it. And then even the sequencer we use, the little tiny sequencer we've used in space, that gives you sequence data, you know, within minutes, we now sequence coronaviruses on that same machine.

Wow.

Okay, you know, this sounds like some badass stuff. And we introduced you as associate professor. Why aren't you full professor? Oh, thanks for the lead. I just got promoted.

Okay.

Just now full professor.

Because if while Cornell didn't promote you, we would, okay? You are now knighted full professor. Keep this going, dude. For those who are unfamiliar with academia, full professor is really simply you have a higher salary, but all the other expectations are the same of you to stay badass in this because you've already had tenure, so that wasn't the threshold here.

So when you're looking at Scott and you're looking at his physiology, is there something that we can take away from that for like our daily exercise routines and things like that? Like I read somewhere that running, for instance, helps increase bone density. Like the pounding actually does something to tell your brain to strengthen your bones. Is there anything that we can take like that from your studies?

From these we've seen, when they run in space, there's actually, you know, they have to wear bungee cords to keep themselves down. But that hammering on your knees, and it tells your bones to really, you know, maintain this homeostasis. And there's also something called hormesis, which means when you kind of push yourself a little bit, if you ever lift weights a little bit and you push yourself hard, you're kind of sore that next day. But it's a good sore. And so we've seen some of that. You need to actually push yourself a little bit more if you can, not every time you work out. break a record every time, but it helps to do so now and again. And it's because it helps stimulate the body that way. So pushing yourself a little bit is one

simple thing they do actually with some of the exercise regimens in space. And also, and they're monitoring the body. You can actually see, Scott, when he talked about in his book that if he didn't work out every day, he could almost feel like his bones were dissolving, which is awful to think about. But then it's amazing, it's in the urine data, we could see the calcium coming out of his body. So He wasn't imagining it, it was actually happening. And if you don't have that, you know, consistent activation of your body's rebuilding, you know, you'll atrophy, your bones will slowly go away.

Now, Chris, I have to just correct something you said. You said that the bungee cords keep them down, but in space, there is no down. I'm just going to keep you honest here. Just because you got full professor doesn't mean.

There's no down in space.

Okay, so it keeps you pulled towards the running machine, wherever that running machine is.

Okay, so Scott's got a book out A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. But your book, Professor, The Next 500 Years.

Wait, Gary, say that with some drama, please. The Next 500 Years. Give me some emotion in that.

My gosh.

A spectacular read coming to you very shortly is The Next 500 Years.

All right.

By Professor Mason.

So what are you going to ask him?

All right, so if we go back 500 years. The discoverer Ferdinand Magellan discovers Guam. Now, that's ancient. That's like sailing ships and weird. In 100 years, 500 years time, are we going to be looking back at your work now, which is so exciting and think, that's ancient.

That's boring. Look how quaint.

Look at that.

That's my second grade homework. That's right. Exactly.

So, I mean, how are people going to view this?

And where is.

500 years, what can we do? There's a million questions to unravel.

And why do you think you know what happened in 500 years?

It's a treatise of hope, I guess, if you will. I put it together as what I think humanity can do and also should do and that we have a duty to do. So when you think of duty, most people immediately get sleepy. You think of a duty to what? To feed my cats? A duty to maybe your spouse? Maybe to your country? Maybe it's patriotic, but you'll hopefully have a duty to your kids, but even that is not guaranteed, right? Some people just completely forego that duty.

But there is one duty that we have as humans that as soon as you understand it is actually something you can control and that you can have influence on the universe is just being aware of extinction. We're the only species that we know of that is aware of extinction. So then we have a duty to prevent it, not only our own, but also any other species and life form that we come across. So We have kind of a duty to the universe that is actualized at the moment you realize that you understand what extinction is.

Wait, wait, do you have a duty to a species that would go extinct without us? Because the tree of life is, there's no end of extinction on it and it has nothing to do with us. And the fact that the dinosaurs went extinct, pried open an ecological niche that allowed us to rise up. So who are you to pass judgment on what life form should or should not go extinct if we have nothing to do with that extinction?

I it's even.

Independent of whether we cause it or not. It's just that life. So I start from the premise that, that life and actually self-aware life, that is life as aware of extinction is unique in the universe and, and any other life that doesn't have, it doesn't have this duty. So even extinct life, even if we didn't cause it, you can bring it back, but you have to do it carefully because what, if you bring it back, if you bring back dinosaurs, they probably would, rampage through and eat.

A lot of them.

So that's not necessarily advice. So, you know, I think we should start on an Island, a small Island, but what could go wrong?

Right.

You know, what could go wrong? No, but it, but it conceptually is there, there are species we've clearly caused their extinction. And I think we have a moral duty to try and even bring them back, especially there's with genetic technologies. We can do so some of those same technologies and allow us to make immunotherapies where you can engineer your T cells to go after cancer cells very exquisitely and So this idea of genome engineering and cellular engineering is already deployed in clinical trials around the world.

And some of that same technology lets us be sort of the safe guardians and shepherds of life and maybe even bring it back. But we're in no hurry to do that. That would be very slow.

I like that. So you're not some sci-fi guy thinking what new contraption we're going to have or what new spaceship. You're thinking of our duty to ourselves, to our civilization, and to the planet and our ecosystem. I think that's a noble cause.

Yeah.

In 500 years, if all goes as you want, what does it all look like?

So hopefully we would end up to Mars eventually, which is the first step on a stairwell towards preservation. Because every moral question becomes immediately clear when you put it out to a billion years. That's when the sun gets big enough to start to heat the Earth. And it's really going to be really hard to live here. If you go out five billion years, the sun's probably going to be at the surface of the Earth, like they're going to be touching and kissing. So no matter what we do, if we achieve perfect pieces of species... And perfect technological bliss. If we're still physically here, you know, really even in a billion years, then that's it for us.

And so I think we're worth preserving. And that means eventually we have to start going. So we have to start to go to the moon, to Mars. I think by 400 years from now, we might be able to get to have some people in Titan. And at the end of the book, at 500 years, I say we might have enough knowledge and understanding of physiology to be able to send people on what's called the generation ship, where people live and die for multiple generations on their way towards a new star.

So in the book, I put- in the service of this longevity and this insight?

Because I think we might need to. The other option, if you send humans to a planet that they've not evolved on, it's like, just say, good luck, and hopefully you survive. But if you have biochemical and genetic capacity to protect people, and we don't use it, that would actually be more unethical. So we could actually protect you from, assuming it works and it's safe, of course, which we have to prove.

So ethics is a big part of this book. So what about the ethics of sending a group of fertile people into space who then give birth to a next generation, a generational ship, And that generation is born only ever knowing that their job is to have another generation so that some generation down the line gets the prize. And so isn't that a form of prison or slavery? You know what?

I'm going to call that a form of early civilization here on Earth. Because honestly, that's all early civilization on Earth was. That's all it ever was. Here we are on this rock spinning around. And I'm going to have some babies in this new place. And the whole thing is, have some babies. We're stuck here. We've got to have more babies so that we can stay here. And now here we are where we are. Eight billion of us.

But human evolution has been migration, whether it's been north, south, east, west. Mainly east, west because of temperate zones and all the rest of it. So once we've kind of got to a point on this planet, the migration to another seems to be just another development of our story.

Humans being human.

Yeah. And I mean, at the moment, we've got Russia and China joining forces to go and build some sort of bases on the moon or around the moon. I mean, are we looking at this, Chris, as because of think of this problem Scott experienced coming back after a year in space physically. Would we use things like moon bases, call them that, as stepping stones back into 1G rather than just come straight back to Earth?

Absolutely.

It'd probably be easier. I mean, that's one sixth gravity there. And, you know, Mars is, you know, 38 percent gravity. So hopefully these will give you a little stepping stone. So it wouldn't be as bad. But then, you know, eventually, you know, think about people who just live, you know, think about what happened to the Australians when they left England.

They got a different accent. They get a different culture. You get you know, on a different planet, you'll get different physiology as well. So we would expect them to become different.

Plus the deer in Australia have pouches.

So I'm hopeful, you.

Know, I think, well, the great thing about the book, I guess at the end is that we've discovered all the new genes that we didn't know existed even 20 years ago. And we've discovered all these planets, exoplanets that we didn't even know 25 years ago. So I call them twin engines of discovery because Now we know what genes we can use to understand them and keep us safe potentially. And we know which planets we could eventually go to. So I hope 500 years from now, we would pick the best one or several and then send people there. And maybe we'd get some interesting sitcoms that get broadcast from this other new planet potentially.

I think it's brilliant to have this addition to the futurist's portfolio because it's usually some technologist, it's some fantasy writer, it's somebody imagining a future and you're coming at it physiologically. I think that's a brilliant... construct for a book and we'll look for it on the bestseller list if it's not already there because that's totally what we should all be thinking about rather than just the next two years or the next four years for an election is anyone thinking about the next century.

So let me ask you this how do you feel this is not related to anything that we're talking about I'm just interested in your opinion on the project to take 500 fertilized eggs and put them on the moon the same way we did with seeds in wherever we put the seeds. What was it? You mean to store them on the moon? To store them on the moon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Basically like a seed vault, but for humankind.

It would be, they'd have to be really well maintained up there. You know, tardigrades fell on the moon when the Israeli spacecraft crashed on there a year and a half ago. And I think those have all been probably irradiated and not useful. But I think If they're buried deep and they're.

Radiated and now they're large.

You didn't see.

The right movies, Chris.

When you get radiated, you become big.

Okay, duh.

And green, sometimes green.

And green, thank you.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think it's, I think preserving, you know, we can actually embed a lot of the genomes now in a digital code, right? So this is being done in something called the Genome Arc Project. sequencing as many genomes on Earth as possible as kind of a reservoir of human and biological diversity of everything we know on Earth. And so I think you can put it in digital form.

That might be simpler. Interesting.

Good point because, Chuck, I can write a book on engines and store the book. I don't have to store the engine.

Right.

Okay. You can read the book, the information about the engine, and then rebuild the engine. So we've got to land this plane at some point.

Wow. I know.

So, Chris, let me take us out with this final question to you. What have you genetically engineered in your basement? We won't tell anyone. Just what do you have? You can whisper it, okay?

We won't tell anybody.

Just a couple of things.

Just a couple of things. Just a couple of things.

We've got a butterfly that tastes like barbecue sauce. We do have one thing in the lab.

That's true.

Those we took genes from tardigrades that can resist radiation and put them into human cells. And now they have 80% more resistant to radiation. So that is something we have done with tardigrades. And now you can actually, you know, take some of these immune function genes and also put them in cells.

So we're, so it means you can go repair Chernobyl.

Yeah, potentially. I mean, I think any gene we see from any species on this planet or others can be essentially a part of the genetic toolbox of surviving.

Right, because nature already gave it to you. You're just rearranging them.

Right, right.

Very cool.

But safely and carefully and in one space and not releasing to the world.

Yes, yes.

Well, Chris, good luck with the book. It's a fascinating topic and I think is an underserved topic. And you're clearly the right person to put that out there. So thanks for being on StarTalk. We would totally want to have you back on again because if for no other reason, we'll find some reason to bring you back on because you do fascinating work. Congratulations on your promotion to professor.

Thank you, sir. And so that means you're old and gray, I think.

Yes. And it's a pipe you have to smoke. It's coming in.

It's coming in.

All right.

Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure.

Tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. Gary tweeting at my three left feet.

Is that it? Correct. Yes.

Yeah. Chris, do you have social media presence?

Yeah.

Just Mason underscore lab.

Mason lab.

Yep.

Mason lab. All right. On Twitter, I guess that is.

Yes.

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

All right.

We'll keep an eye on you. All right, everyone, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition, the right stuff. And as always, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up.

StarTalk Podcast_ The Right Stuff with Astronaut Scott Kelly and Dr. Chris Mason

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