A conversation with Lynn Harper, who leads emerging commercial space efforts for the Space Portal office here at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and Monsi Roman, who manages NASA’s Centennial Challenges program at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Transcript
Kimberly Minafra: You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley episode 95. I’m Kimberly Minafra, and this week our guests are Lynn Harper, who leads emerging commercial space efforts for the Space Portal office, here at NASA Ames, and Monsi Roman, who manages NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lynn and Monsi are talking about NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge. This challenge is open, and since we recorded this conversation more teams have signed on. As of now we have twelve teams competing for the prize.
Now, let’s listen to the conversation with Lynn Harper and Monsi Roman.
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Host (Matthew Buffington): This is a little bit different, just because it’s not just NASA Silicon Valley, it’s NASA Ames here, and we also have Monsi over at Marshall [NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center] listening in and talking with us.
But Lynn, I was just wondering if you could start off with, how did you end up in NASA to begin with?
Lynn Harper:I actually got into NASA through the Boy Scouts.
Host:How interesting.
Lynn Harper:Believe it. I was doing recombinant DNA research at Stanford. My grandmother had gotten sick, and I had returned home to Connecticut and I needed a job. So, I got a job with the Fairfield County Council Boy Scouts of America, and I had always been a secret space cadet, but I’m a fireman’s daughter from Bridgeport, Connecticut, and we were far from the space program.
And I was on the job one week, and I read explorers can propose experiments for the space shuttle. And I got on the phone, and this remarkable man by the name of Fred Wolfe, who had been the director of the tracking station in Santiago, Chile, returned from duty, discovered that private citizens could buy five cubic feet of space on the space shuttle and wrote a check. And then, brought that home and told his wife that he had just bought a piece of the sky. And she said, what are you going to do with it? And so, he donated it to the Boy Scouts.
Host:Really?
Lynn Harper:Yeah, so I had a strong biology background, but these were actually the first flight programs I ever did. There was a nationwide competition, I worked with the kids, we set up explorer posts, and we got ready to fly. There were machining companies that brought the kids in. So, they did all the work themselves, they designed all of the science themselves. And when the competition occurred, there were 100 proposals. 10 were selected for flight, and five was from my group.
So then I got married, and I moved to Washington, D.C. And I wanted to work for NASA, and NASA Headquarters was there. And it took me all day to get up my courage, and so I called up at 4:30 in the afternoon. And clearly it was meant to be, because the only person that was there – I didn’t discover this until later – was the director of the life sciences division at NASA Headquarters. And I went through, you know, that I had worked with the PSTAR project, that was the name of it, and I had a background in biology, and I was looking for a job. And he asked me if I could write. His name was Gerry Soffin, by the way, asked me if I could write. I said, yes.
And so, they hired me across the street at Bionetics, and I became technical manager for there. And then I started working with the other programs. And when there was a vacancy in life sciences in 1986, they hired me as the program executive for advanced missions and special projects.
Host:And how long did that take until you ended up moving, going cross-country, heading over here?
Lynn Harper:I moved to Ames in 1989. So, I got hired in ’86, I was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence program manager, and did the architecture of getting it through Congress, as well as about six other new initiatives. And moved to Ames in ’89, because I got married again.Host:As so life goes. How about you, Monsi? Was it through the Boy Scouts? Did you join NASA through the Boy Scouts as well?
Monsi Roman: No. I do have Boy Scouts, I actually have Eagle Scouts in my house, but no. My story’s a little bit different. My husband got a job at NASA, so we moved from Puerto Rico – I’m from Puerto Rico – to Huntsville, Alabama, for him to start working for NASA. I had a bachelor’s degree in biology, and applied to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and was accepted to do a master’s degree in microbiology. And when I was there while I was doing my master’s, a position in microbiology opened at Marshall Space Flight Center. I applied and got the position. That was in 1989.
Host:Hey, look at that.
Monsi Roman:Long time ago.
Host:Little did we know.
Monsi Roman:Yes, and it was for this very crazy project at that time, that sounded so out there, because in ’89, we would have a crew in space, in the [space shuttle] orbiter, for up to 14 days. And I was part of a group that was given the task of designing the air and water systems for a space station that didn’t exist. And so basically, they told us you’re going to be designing systems that can regenerate, basically recycling systems for water, and to keep a crew alive for six months or longer. So we all looked at each other like, “Uh-huh.” And actually, it worked. They’re breathing and they’re drinking good water up there, so we did good.
Host:I’m going to guess back in 1989, you guys didn’t know each other? There’s no singular cohort.
Lynn Harper:No, although we worked on similar things, because in 1990, I became the division chief for advanced life support. So, our paths probably crossed in emails.
Monsi Roman:I’m sure they did.
Host:Back in 1990, it’s this weird Prodigy, or some early precursors of email.
ynn Harper:Oh, yeah, they were bad. Although, I do have to say, it was so exciting, we were there for the first time email came about. And it was thrilling. It’s like, wow, that’s at least 160 RAM.
Monsi Roman:I remember having to go to the library to do research on what chemicals are in urine. I mean, now you go and do a Google search, you can get that in 10 seconds. Back then, my goodness, you would have to get books after books, and there were not many of them.
Host:Well, I remember when I first started working, we were lucky to have the one terminal that had an internet connection, and the whole office had to share that one. So, if you wanted the internet, I had to go over there and do it.
Host:Lynn and I go way back from here at Ames, sitting over at the space portal. And we have a previous episode with Gary Martin where he talks about the space portal a little bit, and some of the stuff they’re working on, but Monsi, I met Monsi a couple months ago, I think it was one of the small satellite Centennial Challenges.
Monsi Roman:Cube Quest.
Host:Cube Quest, exactly. So, maybe talk about, for people who have no idea, they hear Centennial Challenge, what does that even mean? Or, what is that?
Monsi Roman:Well, Centennial Challenges has a very curious name because it’s called “Centennial Challenges” because the first one was designed to commemorate 100 years of the flight of the Wright brothers. But the time the actual program started was in 2005, which is a little bit later. And so, it’s maintained the name anyway. And, the objective of the program is to invite the public. Everybody’s invited to come and bring solutions to very hard technical challenges that NASA has, with the understanding that sometimes an old solution might become in a different application, might be what we’re looking for.
So, we are targeting a multidisciplinary, diverse team of people that can come and solve all kinds of problems, really hard ones. And we have been amazed of what we have been able to get from the public.
Host:And there’s different versions of these.
Lynn Harper:There is. And one of the things that really strikes me about the Centennial Challenge, and that I just love, is it taps into the genius of America regardless of where it’s located. I have a story on Centennial Challenges, in that when I was chief of advanced life support in the ’90s, we tried to develop an astronaut glove. And the challenge is, it’s like trying to have a flexible glove made of balloons, where your hands are inside the balloons. And we weren’t successful. And Centennial Challenges, this was done by an out-of-work engineer in upstate New York using his wife’s sewing machine. And it was an absolutely brilliant solution, and completely unexpected. He beat out the companies and the groups that you would think would normally have won this. And that’s been happening in the Centennial Challenges.
We did another one here, the lunar regolith challenge, to move I think it was a ton of regolith, Monsi – correct me if I’m wrong, because I was peripheral to it.
Monsi Roman:Yeah, that is what makes the program so cool. The people that have been able – one of the last challenges we had was to provide software for a humanoid to improve manipulation, perception and manipulation. And the winner of that challenge was a stay-at-home dad. And he beat a bunch of teams. So, it is incredible what the community brings to the table as part of their solutions. And it’s just innovative.
We pose a problem out there. Anybody – they have to pay for it. We don’t pay them. We only pay them if they bring a solution. And it is incredible to see the ways that people can come up with solutions.
Host:It’s fascinating, because you think of NASA, and we have our scientists, we have engineers, all these people working on cool things. But a huge part of that is taking advantage of the scientific community – taking academics, students, any random groups, people who have interests – it’s like trying to bring those people together, and it’s almost like you’re crowd-sourcing science.
Monsi Roman:That’s exactly what it is, crowd-sourcing science. And in my opinion, even bigger beauty of it is that you don’t have to be an engineer or a scientist to be part of this. We have had teams that have included artists and all kinds of backgrounds. And for this, you don’t have to have a credential in those areas to be able to participate and be successful.
Host:Because at the end of the day, the best idea wins.
Lynn Harper:That’s exactly what it is. It’s the fairest, most level playing field I’ve ever seen in any technical program.
Monsi Roman:And we actually want to encourage the thoughts of outside our environment of scientists and engineers, because sometimes we kind of, the thoughts are the same, because we have the same, most of us have the same kind of barriers to our thoughts. The public doesn’t have those barriers. They haven’t been in the process of information that we have had throughout our career. So, when they come up with a solution, they don’t know their boundaries. So, sometimes that is the best way of tackling those problems.
Host:It’s like anytime you work with a group of people, there’s the idea, the typical management term of synergy. But it’s a true thing, where there’s ideas I’ll come up with and the ideas Lynn will come up with and Monsi comes up with, but when you play off of each other and off the collective, you start coming up with things you would’ve never even thought of.
Monsi Roman:That is correct.
Lynn Harper:When I looked at the astronaut glove challenge, I got interested in Centennial Challenges, started looking into it more and more. There are students that have won it and beaten out major aerospace companies. Paul’s Robotics, for example, was a group of students in a garage in upstate New York – upstate New York has got a lot of talent on this, by the way.
And I think that it brought home something that I hadn’t fully appreciated, that there’s a lot more genius in America that we can tap into, and that when we open the doors like that, these guys do out-of-the-box thinking because they’ve never been in the box.
Host:They don’t even know if they’re in a box.
Monsi Roman:That’s right.
Host:Then, help me walk through that, and maybe use vascular tissue as an example. How do these challenges work? I’m guessing there’s an initial proposal or somebody comes up with an idea, then there’s a proposal – or, there’s a concept that people in NASA come up with, then you put it out, and then there’s a time period where you take ideas. Just walk me through what is it.
Lynn Harper:Okay, I’m going to need to defer to Monsi on this, because I came in after that had already happened.
Monsi Roman:For us, each of the challenges, we currently have four active, and these are like a different child, and they all have a different way of coming into a challenge. In particular, the one with vascular tissue was brought up to us. We have an open request for proposals for any organization in the United States to propose to us potential areas for a challenge.
That one in particular was brought to us by a foundation called Methuselah Foundation. Methuselah was interested in the process of vascularizing tissue for other reasons, and so they brought it in as an area of interest. NASA took the idea with them and started the conversations with them, NASA personnel. So we needed – all our challenges have a tie to a NASA need. They’re aligned with NASA missions.
Host:And I can’t let the Methuselah reference just slide, because people like, what is Methuselah – a Biblical reference, right?
Lynn Harper:It is for long life.
Host:Exactly. He’s like the oldest living person or something.
Lynn Harper:What they are trying to do is, it’s an organization, multi-organizational collaborative to promote life-giving technology, specifically organs. So, they work on organ transplant, new organs, engineered organs, and also better ways or preserving organs today.
And so, their entire goal – and it’s because, and I checked this before we started today. I actually looked at the Department of Health and Human Services website, and anybody else can too. But as of today at 11:30 AM, California time exactly, every 10 minutes someone is added to the National Transplant Waiting List. And so right now, there’s more than 115,000 people waiting for a transplant, and there’s less than 15,000 donors.
The other thing is, 20 people a day die waiting for that transplant. So, that’s what the Methuselah Foundation was addressing, that particular issue. And our piece of it came in because there was research that was done – well, first of all, as astronauts go further and further from earth, they need to be autonomous related to their medical care. When they go all the way to Mars, there’s just no way of returning quickly. They’re going to need to deal with everything there.
The tissues we’re trying to engineer through the vascular tissue challenge can do two things. One is, they can provide new research tools in order to help the biomedical research on the space crews, as well as once they get to the stage where new organs are developed, they can be developed from the patient’s own body, so there’s no rejection issues.
That’s the ultimate goal of this research, but it’s at such a beginning phase that we’re going for one cubic centimeter of tissue. That’s about 10 billion cells. Because right now, we can only do about two millimeters. So, it’s a 10-time improvement just in the size of tissues we can maintain.
Monsi Roman:And from our side, we are very interested from the NASA mission side also on the potential of using these kind of technologies to test methods to minimize the effects of radiation, for example, to humans. So, we could send a lot of these experiments to deep space with all kinds of different mitigation strategies, and then check which tissue did best. So instead of using humans to test these things, we can do lots and lots of them in a small space, and then choose the best one, to keep our crews safe in a long mission to Mars.
Lynn Harper:And there’s also another piece to it, which is that the National Space Act directs NASA specifically to support bioengineering research, development, and demonstration programs designed to alleviate and minimize the effect of disability. So, we’re addressing that directly in this.
And there’s another piece of the story that gets interesting, which is that Dr. David Wolf, who was a physician/astronaut, invented a device called bioreactor. And that was in ’89ish, ’89-’90 timeframe. And what he found is that it was the best 3D tissue culture system in the world for certain types of tissues. And when the tissues were grown in space, there was also an improvement in the size and the medical quality of some of the tissues that had flown.
But the problem is, big tissues by themselves is not enough, because without vascularization, which by the way is blood supply – vascularization are the blood vessels, the veins, the arteries, the capillaries, the arterioles, and so forth, that make up and feed your entire body with nutrients, and remove the wastes. And if you just develop tissues that don’t have that blood vessel system, they’ll die from the inside-out. They won’t work.
So once we get the vascularization part, we can bring these to space. And that’s actually part of the vascular tissue challenge, is to bring them to space. CASIS, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, is offering both $200k, $200,000 to the winners, as well as a ride to the space station to conduct the research to start extending that one centimeter into larger and larger tissues.
Monsi Roman:We’re really excited about that possibility actually, because if this works, this is going to be revolutionary for earth.
Lynn Harper:It is, because okay, people ask why tissue cultures? Because you have 75 trillion cells in your body, and if you’re trying to find out what the cause of a disease is – and the reason you want to know that exquisitely well is that you can interrupt the disease process with no side effects. So, the better you know it, the more accurate you are in this, the more opportunities you have for developing medical interventions with minimum side effects.
So the problem is that once you take the cells out of the body, they no longer behave like they do in the body. They’re medically misleading. So, the conditions for winning the vascular tissue challenge is, they have to be functional tissues. In other words, we’re going for heart, lung, kidney, liver, and muscle. And they have to act as those organs. They have to behave as cells in those organs. And in addition, they have to have the blood supply. And using that blood supply, the teams need to maintain the tissues in an artificial environment for at least 30 days.
Once you have that, if you have a good tissue culture that behaves as it does in the body, you can accelerate the discovery of the causes of a disease by years and decades sooner, and save millions of billions of dollars in the process. But if they’re medically misleading, you start wandering down nonproductive courses. That’s why this particular challenge articulated the way that it was.
And I’m just going to say something – I hope Monsi doesn’t get mad at me.
Host:We’ll see.
Lynn Harper:But my job jar was pretty full when she asked me to do this. So, I wasn’t exactly volunteering. And now, I just feel it’s a real privilege, because other things have happened as a result of this. One of them is the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Veterans Administration, Department of Defense, they all came to the workshop, along with some of the top tissue engineering labs in the country. And they all said one interesting thing, that there were very few opportunities they had to get together and find out where the barriers are collectively as a group, and discuss it. And it was an absolutely thrilling experience to be part of that.
Another thing is that Ames, Dr. Patricia Parsons-Wingerter, who’s here on a very complicated relationship. She actually is detailed here from the Glenn Research Center in Ohio to Ames. And she’s developed software with the Ames artificial intelligence group that basically develops branching rules for the blood vessels of the eye.
All right, so the question we’ve asked her is, can you determine the branching rules for all the rest of the organs of the body?
Host:Based off of that?
Lynn Harper:Because a lot of the teams are using 3D printing to print organs and tissues. And if you can give them the accurate information, then they can get the structure accurately.
Monsi Roman:This challenge in particular was a challenge to put together, and a challenge that was very hard for our team of managers at headquarters to understand, so when we started there was not a lot of hope of us having a lot of teams participating. In fact, we were thrilled when we got three that registered. And right now we have nine teams working toward this goal. So, this is obviously something that a lot of people – and it is a pretty diverse – there’s a lot of academia, but we also have outside of academia participating industries also. So, we’re really thrilled that more than just a few people are interested in this.
Host:And so, what are the next steps? Is there an announcement that comes, is there a big award thing, or what are the next steps?
Lynn Harper:Are you asking – okay, so right now, all the teams are researching to meet the conditions. They need to meet the conditions: that it has to have blood vessels, that’s the vascularization part; needs to be at least a centimeter, that’s 10 times more than the other tissues that have been available; needs to be sustained for at least 30 days. And once they do that, once they’re sure they can do that, they submit an application for trial to the Methuselah Foundation, who’s our implementing partner for this.
And then the judges, who come from DOD, VA, NIH, NASA, and other research institutions, will begin to evaluate how they’re going to judge this, because in other Centennial Challenges, these are big physical objects, usually, and an audience can get together and everybody’s going to see who won, it’s going to be really obvious.
Host:You’re not going to be rolling in organs in special incubators.
Monsi Roman:That’s an idea.
Lynn Harper: In this one, the judges are going to need to use microscopes and biochemical analyses to confirm the results, and it’s very tricky. We are so lucky to have the quality of judges that we do. These are some top guys, top folks in the field. And from, again, multiple organizations have come together, because this is so important to VA, for obvious reasons. If you don’t die of anything else, and you get older, you’re going to get kidney disease.
Host:At some point in time.
Lynn Harper:So, I did feel that the lives we save could be mine, because I’m 65, and I’m definitely heading toward all of the issues that we’re addressing in the vascular tissue challenge.
Monsi Roman:So, the challenge will be open for three years. It was opened last year. And so, it is basically the first team that can come up with an answer, and that can be verified by the team of super-cool, very qualified judges, and by our allied organization, which is Methuselah. Once all that is certified, the first team that can meet the requirements wins $200,000, which is not too shabby.
Host:Nice.
Monsi Roman:And then, the two other, up to two other teams can also win. So, once three teams have won money, the competition ends, or at the end of three years.
Lynn Harper:Or, we at least reevaluate, because one of the things to consider is, we’re looking at five different critical organs – heart, lungs, kidney, liver, and muscle. And three, there’d still be two left at the end of that. So, I might appeal to Monsi to continue the program if we can.
Host:So definitely at least at a minimum for the next three years, but more to come, more to discuss.
Lynn Harper:Yeah, and I want to make sure, because this is a podcast, I want to make sure to invite people to participate in this and to sign up. The nine teams that are here, we can add as many as there is interest. So, this goes all the way to September 30th, 2019, and any time before that, people are welcome to start participating and thinking about it. We’ll be having a bioengineering roadmapping summit in March, which is also open to researchers and those that are interested in the Vascular Tissue Challenge.
Monsi Roman:I also want to clarify to your audience, okay, this sounds like not something everybody, I mean, a housewife cannot just grow tissue in her house, or things like that. So, this is an example of one of the most complicated challenges that we have. But all our challenges have a piece that the community can come and get involved with. So, just want to make sure that you guys go to the NASA.gov/challenges, and look at what we have there, because we have a lot of – it is varied, and we have challenges in software, we have for humanoids, we have challenges in cube sats, we have challenges in 3D printing, habitats for Mars or Moon, and we’re going to be open possibly two very quick, very soon on biotechnology. So, there’s different grades of how we complicate the problem, and how the solutions can come to us.
Host:Excellent. And so, in our show notes and on our landing page for the podcast, we’ll add all those links, so everybody can hit those hyperlinks and move along. And for everybody who’s listening, we’re on all the majors of social media.
For folks who have questions for Monsi or for Lynn, we are using the #NASASiliconValley. Don’t hesitate to go ahead and give us a shoutout, and we can either implement it into a future episode, or as a callback when we do some of the intros. But Monsi, Lynn, thank you so much for coming on over.
Lynn Harper:It was really a pleasure. This was fun.
Monsi Roman:Anytime.
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Kimberly Minafra: You’ve been listening to the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast. If you have any questions, on Twitter, we’re @NASAAmes and we’re using #NASASiliconValley. Remember we are a NASA podcast, but we aren’t the only NASA podcast, so don’t forget to check out our friends at “Houston We Have a Podcast” and there’s also “Gravity Assist” and “This Week at NASA.” If you’re a music fan, don’t forget to check out “Third Rock Radio.” The best way to capture all of the content is to subscribe to our omnibus RSS feed called “NASACasts” or visit the NASA app on iOS, Android or anywhere you find your apps.
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