BETWEEN THE ATOM AND THE STAR

[Music] there are moments in the history of science when the invention of a tool suddenly accelerates the accumulation of knowledge magnification revealed world bernard work and worlds within worlds but these worlds of the atom and the star have always been separated by a vast gulf waiting for another tool that could bring them together with the flights of the Bayeux satellite biologists will have the unprecedented opportunity of studying some of the forces which influence every form of life from single cells and through plants and primates but which cannot be entirely studied on the ground for the bio satellite is a very special kind of biological laboratory in space where man's presence is represented by instrumentation since the acceleration of the orbiting bio satellite equals the acceleration of gravity of the earth it will be weightless now why is this important because weightlessness is a vital factor in any study of the influence of gravity on living organisms birth in its entire history probably has known only what we call a 1g environment this means that an acceleration of about 32 feet per second per second is constantly pulling everything toward the center of the earth [Music] all living forms have evolved under 1g naturally we're not especially aware of it because such a condition is normal in our lives by substituting centrifugal force for acceleration we can study most of the effects of gravity from 1g are not the scale right here on earth so the question can legitimately be asked what if life on earth were to experience some other gravitational unit from 1g down to zero would it have any profound effect on its development where then can we find out what will happen to living organisms if we were to remove gravity completely even out in space there is some gravity actually at the distance the bio satellite will be orbiting there's still 95% of the Earth's gravity it is the free fall of the satellite that gives us the weightless laboratory we need here then in the bio satellite biologists can conduct experiments on living organisms in the weightless State and then by recovering specimens and comparing their findings to the immense amount of data they have already collected on earth find out just what the effects are the information they get will shed light on the fundamental processes of life and have vital applications to the field of manned spaceflight now the basic objective in doing this kind of a program is to ask questions some of the leading biologists in our country have submitted experiments to NASA they are being selected by NASA on the recommendation about standing biologists serving on NASA's own advisory committees and those of the National Academy of Sciences these men examine each proposed experiment to see if it is a valid experiment and equally important if it is capable of being conducted in flight chairing the meeting is the director of the NASA bio science program dr. or events and our purpose of this meeting is to review the experiments that have been selected and proposed for the bio satellite flight series here then at this meeting in the University of Colorado we'll hear a few of the questions that are being asked about life on every level of organization the first of these questions is going to be presented to us by dr. Richard young of Ames Research Center the question we're asking is primarily whether gravitational field or the absence of gravitational field has a fundamental effect on the ability of a cell to divide normally we're using two experimental tools with which to ask this question namely the Frog egg and the sea urchin egg we feel that a cell is fundamentally a cell it really doesn't matter for the purposes of this question whether it comes from a human being frog or a sea urchin the basic cellular phenomenon we're studying here are essentially the same under normal conditions when an egg is fertilized and very dynamic events take place in a very precise manner after a certain period of time depending on the temperature fertilized egg divides in two cells those 2 into 4 and 4 into 8 and so forth for many hours all the cells remain basically the same after a certain period of time they're going to change some will become differentiated into nerve cells some of the skeletal cells or muscle cells now there's a lot we don't know about what causes these changes we'd like to know if these significant events are altered in any way by gravity so we start out with a simple and experimental concept as you can possibly come up with is the sperm which is a biological entity in itself capable of fertilizing an egg another biological entity in the absence of a gravitational field does the egg once it's fertilized proceed to divide normally without gravity or is 1g which is all life on earth ever experiences necessary for normal development we use a sea urchin egg for one part of the experiment because we have a lot of background information on it and it can be very easily handled in the laboratory we can fertilize the eggs they behave in a very precise and clock-like fashion provided the environment that kept the same the sea urchin egg has no known specific response to gravity we turn it over and it develops it was still developed normally so we expect to see no profound effect caused by zero-g the second part of the experiment is to use another biological system the frog egg here we're asking the same question but unlike the sea urchin egg the frog egg requires very specific orientation with respect to gravity in order for it to divide normally you see in nature of the Frog egg sits on a mass of jelly once you fertilize it it will immediately orient itself with respect to gravity now if you take this egg and turn it over so it's upside-down it'll simply roll over again and reorient itself keep it upside-down however and while the egg is developing something happens the egg continues to divide but forms abnormal twins or other malformations so we have two systems with a very different response to a gravitational field on earth we want to compare these two systems and their response to gravity and to know gravity the experiment is designed very simply during the zero-g phase of the flight when the bio satellite is experiencing no gravity a simple device will inject sperm into a chamber containing the eggs and water if the eggs are fertilized at all some will be allowed to continue to develop throughout three-day flight others however according to plan will be killed and fixed so that later upon recovering we'll study the results under the microscope we of course are interested in many more questions of ourselves including cells and higher plants and animals our experiment is an attempt to answer the question how does a plant grow in the state of weightlessness we know that the growth and development of higher plants is gravity dependent that is a plant root grows in the downward direction the stem or shrews grows upward somehow the plant is able to sense the gravitational vector and to use this information as a guide to its growth and development we do not fully understand how the plant senses gravity and we know even less about the way in which it uses the information to guide it's more for genetic development in some organisms we know rather clearly how gravity is sensed because these creatures have special organs to accomplish this in many invertebrates there is a sac in which there is a small stony ball the ball is acted on by gravity and stimulates the size of the sac sensory hairs ourselves a crayfish for example finds a pebble which he places into a hole in his head and uses it as a gravity sensor in this way plants do not have structures of this sort at least not on a macroscopic scale but within individual plant cells there must be some kind of gravity sensor and we would like to know what these are the experiment was designed by dr. gall in University of Minnesota and myself the experimental plant is called Arab adopts as' it is small and has a very short life cycle the experiment consists of a series of chambers in which plants will be grown each chamber having appropriate life-support system and the plants will be started at different stages they will be followed by time-lapse photography during the course of the flight and after recovery these plants will be taken back to the laboratory and analyzed microscopically so that the internal anatomy can be revealed will then be able to compare the plants which were grown during the zero-g experience in bio satellite with plants grown in the laboratory in a normal gravitational field under exactly the same conditions another factor which we know of that produces abnormalities is radiation many times greater in local areas than you would expect these solar flares emit particles which have extremely high energy and constitute a hazard for manned space flight now if you put these two factors together radiation and weightlessness you may get a combined or synergistic effect one which is even greater than you would expect one group of bio satellite experiments will be looking for genetic or heredity damage caused by weightlessness combined with radiation another group will be looking for somatic or non inheritable effects on living organisms since Solar Flare radiation unfortunately is not under our control it was decided to provide an artificial radiation source onboard of the satellite the solar and cosmic radiation will of course be measured in addition but it is expected to be low since the satellite will be flying at relatively low altitude and geomagnetic latitude during orbit the radiation from our source will be directed onto some of these specimens this will give us the effects of radiation combined with weightlessness other specimens will be shielded from the radiation they will show the effects of weightlessness alone while the living system that we work with is a very very interesting one this is the flower people a little insect maybe three millimeters long called it our volume confusion but this little beetle will live in dry flour a few cubic inches of air and dry flour keeps it very happy for weeks on end my colleague dr. John Slater is in charge of this experiment he has found this animal has many interesting properties and a very complicated developmental cycle first it lays eggs the eggs will produce larval stages and then they go into the pupil stage finally we finished insect emerges techniques have been developed to separate and harvest each stage by using light and screens of different sizes it's the pupae we are interested in these pupae of the C volume are definitely gravity oriented though they don't have any no gravity sensors if you tip them over in 10 minutes they all will be back in a normal position if they experience radiation the pupae are very sensitive to developmental damage that is later abnormalities developed in the wing of the adults and elsewhere so here we have an insect with a quantitatively measurable defect one that will occur in the course of development as a result of radiation on the ground will these radiation abnormalities be worse when we combine them with faithlessness my own interest is in the daily rhythms which all organisms show in their activity I'm interested in questions about the control and the precision of these rhythms and the extent to which they play an essential role in the physiological well-being of organisms all of these questions are of considerable interest for the space program as I hope to show you the most familiar of these rhythms is that of sleeping and waking less obvious is a similar ethnicity and body temperature than the details of much of the chemistry of cells and tissues in general in constant conditions of light and temperature the period of these rhythms is only an approximation to that of the day we call them circadian meaning about a day their nature the daily light cycle controls their period to precisely 24 we know these rhythms to be innate to the living material most biologists in fact regard their precision and stability as also of internal origin but a few others believe these remarkable features are due to controlled by some so far unidentified 24-hour cycle in the Earth's environment acting as a sort of pacemaker [Music] we should be able to settle this question of an external pacemaker or not by the satellite experiment if the precision and stability of the rhythms do not depend on inputs with a 24-hour period a city they will persist normally in the 90 minute Earth orbit if they do depend on them the rhythm will be drastically affected by the conditions of the flight the test we have in mind will consist of studying the circadian rhythms of locomotion and body temperature in a hamster or a pocket Mouse during 21 days of orbital flight both the locomotion and body temperature will be recorded every 10 minutes and stored on tape for later analysis in a computer the question at stake is simply this does the rhythm persist with the precision and stability that characterizes it on the ground there are other features of circadian rhythms of interest to space engineers if we suppress these circadian rhythms in some organisms if we keep tomato plants for example in constant light and temperature they get sick but the resulting damage is promptly repaired when they are again allowed to see a light or a temperature cycle the implication here is clear normal physiological functioning at least for tomatoes depends on the normal functioning of the rhythmic system if this is also true for man the further implication is equally clear for the tasks of engineering prolonged space flights for man as you know some results have already materialized from the short duration flights made by astronauts which have serious implications some of these are loss of calcium changes in blood pressure and changes in the degree of alertness or attention clearly it must be determined before man is subjected to any prolonged space journey what the toll of the space environment may be yes so far with the astronauts what measurements have been made have been rather limited in scope particularly in terms of the circulatory and biochemical reflection of the effects of weightlessness or on the electrical level unless we can curl at these with the previous findings that have been made so extensively in animals particularly in the monkey exactly and these measurements will permit us to interpret the otherwise limited findings that have been made on the astronauts to date now the aim of our experiment is very simple we want to see what happens to the blood circulation during weightlessness and equally important what happens to it again when the force of gravity is reapplied for example during reentry and recovery now an individual five-and-a-half to six feet tall such as the astronauts has quite a column of fluid represented from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet to keep the blood circulating the heart has to pump against this hydrostatic head of pressure when the individual lies down of course he reduces his head of hydrostatic pressure to a matter of a few inches instead of several feet the system no longer has to cope with the load of gravity now it's been known for many years that if you take even healthy people and put them to bed for a period of a few days or more that the blood circulation resets itself but in a way that we don't quite understand when an individual goes into a weightless state a comparable thing apparently happens this whole hydrostatic head of pressure all of this weight load on the circulation is removed and now we have an individual in this condition for a matter of weeks or even months then there's another factor compounding the problem from the same bedrest studies and from reports of the short flights by astronauts we know that they will be losing calcium too perhaps because they've not been using the general weight-bearing components of the body their skeleton and much of their musculature which they usually need to support themselves in a 1g environment so now the astronauts bones are possibly more porous and brittle and he becomes less able to withstand weight the possibility of fracture becomes quite real particularly when subjected to high g-forces of reentry when he's exposed to a very heavy and severe g-load how weak will is bones be can his circulatory function now cope with this added burden we don't know and we must find out so that's what we'll try to do to make some quantitative measurements to see what happens to the blood circulation in a fully conscious primate will measure the usual things heart rate blood pressure but that's not enough we also want to measure the quantity of blood the heart pumps out per minute the actual volume flow of blood and we'll collect all of the urine that the monkey produces during this period of time analyze it and make a judgment as to the kind of biochemical adjustments that have occurred for instance we'll be able to measure its calcium loss and determine exactly what has happened to the skeletal system well another area that we must investigate is the effect of weightlessness on the central nervous system and this is particularly true where weightlessness is combined in the spacecraft with isolation and confinement we already know from work that we've done that the effect of isolation alone is very profound on judgment and judgment capability and when isolation is combined with weightlessness and with confinement the effects on the central nervous system may be so profound that we must investigate these problems specifically now the astronaut doesn't have to have very much all he has to do is not to be able to think very fast and he's lost a partner detachment at the time of reentry is of the gravest concern the man may not recognize that anything unusual has happened at all this is one of the most serious dangers because the changes in his degree of alertness are very subtle the attention of physiologists in the last 30 years has been intensively two aspects of focusing of attention the performance of learn tasks and the ability to remember from a behavioristic point of view then we will give the animal a task to perform during the flight such as for example pressing a lever to get his food or coordinating his eye and hand movements in grasping a pellet from a moving window we will carefully test this coordination between eye and hand movements it is something which in a weightless state is likely to undergo quite significant deterioration and may not necessarily recover well if he doesn't press the lever at all you can make assumptions that he has forgotten how to work the panel but he might be in some unconscious state due to some environmental change if the animal is not conscious we want to know why and without brain activity being recorded we would never know we plan a very rigorous analysis of the best possible portions of the data during the flight from the most representative areas of the brain and this data will be fed into a computer which will give us a continuous microscopic look at the brainwaves over a period of 30 days you may be wondering just how we can keep these animals alive for as long as 30 days and then recover them well as you know designing the spacecraft to last 30 days is a no problem but keeping them alive up there for 30 days of course is the problem now let's go to the key in our minds and look at the emission profile to see what phases of the journey may give us trouble we're going to be putting the bio satellite into a circular orbit around the earth very close to the equator and we're using an extremely high portion of flight proven techniques and equipment throughout the project we'll be using the improved thrust augmented Delta launch vehicle remember there's one major requirement here to keep the spacecraft at zero-g for 95% of the time the effective gravitational force shall not exceed one 100,000 of the Jeep well with these animals we're going to have to know exactly how they feel and do it all with instruments and we've got to do more than merely keep them alive we have to keep the total environment up there just the same as it was in the control experiment on the ground to do this we've designed the spacecraft in two basic sections one section is the adapter it contains all the equipment required to keep the specimens alive and to keep the spacecraft in operation before reentry we drop the adapter off in space after the retrofire aerodynamic forces take over and point the heatshield toward the line of flight [Music] what is effective changes in gravity on the processes of living organisms wool cell divide and differentiate normally how will weightlessness affect plant growth the irradiation combined with three plus thus produce unanticipated hazards for manned spaceflight is it true after all that the precision and the stability of circadian rhythms in fact depend on inputs which we do not understand that associated with the Earth's rotation after 30 days of weightlessness a week will a man get how much calcium will he lose well it affect his judgment these are only a few of the questions and this little bio satellite capsule only 40 inches in its diameter cone base with an overall length 33 inches is expected to get the answers answers in the form of data facts for new biological theories that will help to bridge the worlds between the atom and the storm [Music]