The Scientist : NewsBlog Print: NIH and NASA ready for take-off
The Scientist: NewsBlog:
NIH and NASA ready for take-off
Posted by Edyta Zielinska
[Entry posted at 9th April 2009 07:31 PM GMT]

After a couple years of discussion, NIH and NASA are teaming up to send your biomedical experiments into space.

The two agencies are accepting proposals for a two-phased 5-year grants that would first give investigators $150,000 to make their lab experiments feasible in space, and then provide a follow-on $300,000 for the "flight phase." Nine NIH institutes will be participating in the grant.

Experiments in space have already studied bone and muscle deterioration in micro-gravity, as well as topics related to infectious disease and cancer, according to an NIH press release. Last year, the space shuttle Discovery carried on board an experiment meant to explore the production of a Salmonella vaccine in space.

Doing science in space can be a bit of a tricky operation. Astronauts without laboratory training have to be able to execute all aspects of the experiment with ease. If your experiments require too much technical expertise, you might be out of luck. The first space biotech company, Astrotech Corporation (formerly SPACEHAB), for example, used containers with a handle that astronauts simply had to crank. One turn of the handle combined one compartment containing C. elegans to another containing an infectious agent. Another turn released a fixative into the solution -- halting the disease reaction for analysis back home.

To help scientists figure out how to make their experiments space-worthy, the NIH and NASA are holding a pre-application meeting in Houston, Texas, on June 16th, ahead of the application due date on September 30th. The meeting, which can be accessed by teleconference, will give researchers a primer on International Space Station equipment and introduce them to hardware developers that would help design appropriate experimental chambers.

Applicants will get the yea or nay from the agency after May 2010 and the first experiments will take flight in 2011.

Editor's Note (9th April 2009): This story has been updated from a previous version.


Related stories:
  • NIH in space?
    [24th July 2007]
  • Salmonella vaccine lift-off
    [2nd June 2008]
  • Biotech in space?
    [Sep 2008]




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    Biosatellite 2 (1968)
    by Robert Von Borstel

    [Comment posted 2009-04-10 19:11:02]
    I was one of the scientists who had organisms on Biosatellite 2, which the National Academy of Science had suggested to find out how weightlessness and radiation might respond. They had not thought of the pogo vibrations from the empty rockets that had about 30 vibrations per second. These also had effects on organisms.

    There were some strange results which have never been repeated in further flights. Some kinds of cells and tissues are extraordinarily sensitive to the radiation and weightlessness, and some were not affected at all by a Strontium source of radiation that was used as a control. It was as though the oogonia were immune to radiation, weightlessnesss, and the pogo vibrations.

    Some of these experiments should have been repeated, but NASA was in a hurry to send a monkey into outer space in Biosatellite 3, which returned with a dead monkey on board, probably because he was welded to his seat before lift-off.

    There is still a lot to be learned.




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