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Marianne Sowa and Jack Miller Discuss Radiation Science Using GeneLab

Season 1Mar 9, 2018

A conversation with and Marianne Sowa, branch chief of the Space Biosciences Research branch at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and Jack Miller, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, about radiation science using GeneLab.

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A conversation with Marianne Sowa, branch chief of the Space Biosciences Research branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and Jack Miller, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, about radiation science using GeneLab.

Transcript

Abby Tabor: Welcome to NASA in Silicon Valley episode 81. This week, we’re talking to Marianne Sowa, the branch chief of the space biosciences research branch here at NASA Ames. We also have Jack Miller from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who’s a physicist doing research related to radiation biology, in collaboration with NASA.

From radiation exposure here on Earth, to the effects on the International Space Station, they discuss the really interdisciplinary nature of radiation science and how NASA’s GeneLab project is helping bring people together to answer some of the more subtle questions about radiation.

Next week, GeneLab and the BioData World West conference will be presenting a big data workshop here at NASA Ames. Participants will learn how people can use GeneLab’s tools and really diverse space biology datasets to understand the effects of long-term exposure to space conditions and how to transfer what we learn from NASA’s space-based research into healthcare here on Earth.

But, for now, let’s listen to our discussion with Marianne Sowa and Jack Miller.

[Music]

Host (Abby Tabor):Well thanks, Marianne and Jack, for joining me here today. We want to learn a little bit about you and how you work together. So, Marianne, how did you get to NASA? Tell us about your path here and what you’re doing today.

Marianne Sowa: It’s a very long story. And I’ll try to keep it short. Actually, I grew up in Alabama. And I always was interested in science. And I went to grad school actually in physical chemistry, which has nothing to do with what I do research on now. I would actually say I’m a radiation biologist. But as part of that, I have an undergraduate degree in biology. And at some point, I went to the National Lab – I was at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for 15 years of my career. And there, I got – I was actually hired to build a machine that could do single-cell radiations. And so, it was built on my skill as a physical scientist to actually build things and do ultra-high-vacuum type of work. And got me also engaged back in the biology side.

And as that, my career just kept going that route. And I got really interested in the radiation biology and radiation biophysics field. And as part of that, I spent about ten years doing systems biology as part of that research. Systems biology is really just looking at things – you could almost say, holistically. We look at the whole system and how everything integrates together. And how can we answer new questions in unbiased ways by looking at everything as a whole rather than looking just at the various details of interactions. And so, after all of that – just absolutely by chance – about two-and-a-half years ago, somebody had sent to my husband an ad for a job here. And I just said, “Oh, why not?”

Host: Why not?

Marianne Sowa: I was actually not looking for a job at the time. But it just – I came. I interviewed. And I just fell in love with the place and haven’t looked back.

Host: And the rest is history.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. It’s been a really wonderful experience.

Host: Awesome. I love these career paths that you couldn’t have really planned, you know? One thing leads to another.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. But again, working at NASA builds on all these interdisciplinary skills. Because you have the physical science, the chemical science, and also the biological science. And it’s completely integrated. And so, it’s just a natural fit for my background.

Host: Awesome. Very cool. So, Marianne, you work here at NASA Ames.

Marianne Sowa: Yes.

Host: And then Jack is a collaborator with NASA, right?

Jack Miller: Yes.

Host: So, can you tell us where you come from and how did you end up working alongside NASA?

Jack Miller: Well, I was born in New York. And I was actually a space kid. I really loved space. I’m dating myself. But I grew up in – I go all the way back to the Mercury era. And was one of those people who would watch every launch live – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo.

Being in front of the TV and watching the Saturn V light up was really – I get chills thinking about it even now. And I remember being in middle school when John Glenn flew. And how everybody – the teacher brought in a radio. Turned it on. And we listened to it. We listened to the flight when I was in school.

Host: What an awesome memory.

Jack Miller: So actually, I wanted to be an astronaut like a lot of kids did then. And I started out as an aeronautical engineering major at New York University. This was before the era of scientific astronaut, of mission specialists. So you had to have perfect eyesight. And as you can see, my eyesight is not perfect.

Host: You do have glasses on.

Jack Miller: I do have glasses on. So anyway, I started off in aeronautical engineering. And I thought I’d get into the space program one way or another. But I took a physics class – what they called “modern physics” which is quantum mechanics and relativity – and fell in love with physics. And became a physics major. And after a couple of detours, I wound up going to graduate school in nuclear physics. And what that translated into was research in smashing atoms. So, I did my thesis research on particle accelerators.

After I got my Ph.D., I took a postdoc with a gentleman named Walter Schimmerling who Marianne knows who’s an old NASA hand. And was doing physics research related to radiation biology for NASA. So, I wound up coming back full circle. And so, after I got my Ph.D., I was working for NASA. Getting to meet astronauts. Getting to learn what life was like up there, which was very cool. The application of that research – well, what we were working on – was trying to, as physicists, support the radiation biology research.

So, biologists would come in and irradiate samples. We would make physics measurements telling them what kind of radiation their – what kind of doses their samples were getting.

Host: Okay. Because they were studying the effects of radiation on biology?

Jack Miller: They were studying the effects of radiation. Yes. And alongside that, we also were working with a group at NASA Langley Research Center, who I still collaborate with on, studying the best way to shield astronauts against radiation.

Host: Yeah. That’s a big topic.

Jack Miller: So, they would send us hunks of material. And we would put them in the accelerator beam and pump a beam at it and see what came out the other side.

Host: Wow. Cool.

Jack Miller: Yeah.

Host: Do you think we could go back to basics here and talk a little bit about radiation? How does it work? Where does it come from?

Jack Miller: Yeah. Marianne, if you don’t mind, I’ll start.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. I think it’s better you start to talk about space radiation. And then I can talk about the biological effects.

Jack Miller: Well, it comes from very, very far away. There are two main types of radiation that astronauts are subjected to in low-Earth orbit or outside Earth orbit. They’re charged particles. We refer to them as heavy charged particles. What they are is atomic nuclei from the lightest – which is a proton hydrogen nucleus – to everything throughout the periodic table. And the protons come mostly from the sun. Everybody’s familiar with solar flares, solar storms. You see pictures of solar flares. When one of those flares erupts, it actually carries with it a lot of protons – high-energy charged particles.

And Marianne will talk about why those are bad for you. The heavier elements – so everything heavier than a proton – originate actually in supernova explosions.

Host: Okay. Exploding stars?

Jack Miller: Exploding stars. And all the elements in our body heavier than, say, helium, actually originated – they were cooked up in the insides of stars. And it turns out that everything up to iron – which has 26 protons and 30 neutrons – is cooked in the interiors of stars. When the stars explode, the stuff is blown out. And travels through the universe. And eventually gets here to our solar system. The heavier elements – the elements heavier than iron – are actually created in the explosion itself. So, space is suffused with every element in the periodic table. All these charged billiard balls zipping around.

And if you’re sitting in a spacecraft, they’re going to punch right through the spacecraft wall and into your body. The Earth’s magnetic field – when you’re in low-Earth orbit, the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field. And the Earth’s magnetic field shields against most of the heavier particles.

Host: All right. Like, deflects them?

Jack Miller: Pardon?

Host: It deflects them?

Jack Miller: It deflects them. Anybody who’s done an exper– you know the classic experiment where you have a bar magnet under a table and you pour iron filings on it and the iron filings line up?

Host: Yeah.

Jack Miller: Yeah. Well, the Earth has one of those fields around it.

Host: Okay. A magnetic field. Yeah.

Jack Miller: So, the particles come in and they kind of get deflected by this field. So astronauts in low-Earth orbit are subjected mainly to protons. Once you leave low-Earth orbit – so if you’re going on a mission to Mars, you’re going to be subjected to the heavier particles.

Host: Are they more powerful? Are they more harmful?

Jack Miller: They’re more powerful. Yeah. They’re more – in a couple of ways. They’re more penetrating, because they’re faster. So, they can penetrate most shielding – most practical spacecraft shielding. And once they hit the body, they deposit a lot of energy.

Host: What happens to that energy?

Jack Miller: I’m going to turn it over to Marianne.

Host: Okay.

Jack Miller: I could tell you. But she could tell you a lot better.

Host: All right. Take it away.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. Well, when you think about the radiation as it interacts, let’s just say, with a person, that energy gets deposited. And I guess with the space radiation, the important point is it gets deposited in a way that we call it “highly ionizing.” Which means that one particle creates many ionization events. And because of that, it can have a lot of effect on the biology. One of the easiest ways to think about it is that you could ionize a part of DNA to make a strand break. And then that would make DNA hard to replicate.

Or you could say you create what we say is an oxidative stress. So that you create basically an ionization in the water – which cells are primarily water –and that creates an imbalance in the cellular signaling et cetera that can be sustained over time and actually cause a cell to then change its behavior. A lot of these things are not so serious as inducing a mutation.

Host: No?

Marianne Sowa: No. Yes, radiation can induce mutation. But there’s two important things you have to think about with radiation. One is dose, and one is dose rate. And in space, the doses that are received from a single particle traversing – because you’re only usually getting a particle track in a day. You’re getting very little radiation exposure in a day.

Host: And that’s like an atom? Right?

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. But you’re – that track may have many ionization events along it.

Host: So that means it’s causing damage along the way as it’s traveling?

Marianne Sowa: It can be. But it could be damage that’s just – the body can handle, and it can repair. Or it could be that that’s actually causing basically a sustained stress. So maybe that’s creating an immune response. And part of the difficulty with space radiation is because it is inherently different than the radiation we’re exposed to normally in terrestrial radiation, we don’t know a lot about the responses. And that’s part of the reason to look at fundamental biology and try to understand the effect of radiation in space radiation on fundamental processes. And see how we can then predict from what we do know about more terrestrial types of radiation how that translates.

And so that we can understand health risk for astronauts. Or we can also understand things that could be applied to actually health benefits on Earth. Because I think many people would be aware, proton therapy is a big thing for cancer.

Host: Yeah. I’ve heard that. Yeah.

Marianne Sowa: And again, those are very high doses and a very acute dose rate – which means how fast you give the dose – versus what’s in space. But many of the effects you’re looking at are similar. And so, trying to understand that and understand in these different regimes of how you give the dose. How does that affect the biological system? And that’s part of what we’re looking at here.

Host: Yeah. That made me think of a bunch of questions I hope we get to later. But first of all, you’re talking about doing some experiments here on Earth. And I know there are experiments about this on the space station, aren’t there?

Marianne Sowa: Mm-hmm. Right. Doing these radiation experiments on Earth is difficult. NASA does fund a facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory which is called NSRL – the NASA Space Radiation Lab. And that is specifically designed to allow these energetic ions that Jack talked about to basically produce those ions and to look at fundamental biology using that type of source. There’s still limitations to what you can do. You can’t replicate the true complexity of what the field looks like in deep space. And it’s just challenging to do low dose rate. Because if you actually protract that exposure out of a very long time, it’s hard to use a facility that people want to share. You know? Just to have the time to do the experiments.

Host: Just logistically, it would take too long?

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. So, we’re able to do those types of experiments. But we’re always going to have some limitations. There is also another facility that is developed to look at some of the protractions. And that’s using neutrons. So, it’s a type of the radiation you would see in space. But –

Host: Can you explain protractions? I didn’t understand that.

Marianne Sowa: Protraction is just saying that rather than giving the dose all at one time, you’re giving the dose over a long time.

Host: Okay. I see. Which would be a realistic situation for an astronaut, for example? Being exposed over –

Marianne Sowa: Yes. What happens in space is that they’re exposed over a long time. Because the radiation is not just here. It is constantly on. But particles are very spread out in space, let’s say. And so, you’re not getting tracks or radiation events constantly. There are maybe one a day. Maybe multiples a day depending on which ion you’re exposed to.

Jack Miller: Repair processes factor in too, right?

Marianne Sowa: Yes. And cells repair. And cells – we have endogenous in our cells all the time. We do have the same type of stresses. And so, sometimes they can just deal with it.

Host: Okay. So, the cells are prepared for that.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. So, I think when we talk about – you know, I’ve spent my whole radiation career looking at very low-dose exposures. And the way I like to think of it is basically, you have homeostasis in the system. And if you give it too much of a stress, maybe you knock it out of that position where it can recover. And it may be very subtle. And so that’s where – and I think we can talk some about GeneLab here. That’s where we get a lot of power from these very large data sets. So, if we just collect all the information we can collect about a system or a process and then we can start asking very targeted questions about what really is happening.

Because it may be that only a certain part of a cell is responding. Or maybe several different pathways in a cell. Because you can think of what happens in a cell being like a network of highways. There may be several ways to get from A to B. And they may be interconnected. And so, we can start looking at questions of, “How do those interconnectivities actually affect the outcome of what the cell needs to do? And more largely, the tissue and the human.”

Host: Okay. Right. The subtle effects of radiation exposure.

Marianne Sowa:I think you’ve covered this in one of your previous podcasts. But here at NASA Ames, we actually have a – one of the projects we have is actually called GeneLab. And GeneLab is a repository for these large data sets. What’s important about these data sets is that they’re unbiased. So basically, it’s a case where you say, “I’m going to measure something. And I may have a very specific hypothesis when I did this experiment. But I’m going to make sure that I collect as much data as I can.” And so, GeneLab’s a way to take all those data and then start looking at them in an integrated way.

So maybe my colleague at Berkeley did a study and I did my own study. But now, I can look at the data that we each collected and try to see if I can ask new questions. And so, it’s very powerful. And it’s particular powerful for radiation studies because of this where I mentioned that we don’t have the terrestrial knowledge of space radiation. So, we don’t always know what the response is going to be. And we have to do a lot of hypothesizing what we think will happen in deep space exposures to –

Host: To the biology? To the –?

Marianne Sowa: To the human. To the biological system. So, whether it’s fundamental biology or health risk, we have to actually be looking at, “How do we predict what the responses or the risk might be?” And so, having these large data sets, we can start asking new questions. And what we say is we develop predictive hypotheses. So basically, I can go and say, “Well, I want to find out if this exposure to radiation caused regulation of this process.” And I can go and now interrogate this data and ask those questions. And so, GeneLab’s recently made a rather concerted effort to bring in more of the radiation data.

I think they currently have around 150 data sets related to radiation. About half of those are from spaceflight. And the others are from ground-based studies and –

Host: So, you can make that comparison then.

Marianne Sowa: Right. And it’s multiple organisms. There’s cell. There’s cellular studies. There’s animal studies. There’s different types of organisms – fruit fly, et cetera. And I think one of the things Jack’s been working on – which he can explain – is actually trying to now get the detailed dosimetry data for the space flight exposures to now be able to ask even more questions of that data. So, we’ve got a lot of power in what we’re going to be able to do with the data that’s there.

Host: Awesome. Yeah. And you mentioned the past episode which was about GeneLab with Sylvain Costes who’s the project manager, right?

Marianne Sowa: Yes.

Host: Yeah. And he talked about the power of all that data and different kinds of data. And you can make those comparisons. So how does Jack’s research come into play here? What are you working on exactly?

Jack Miller: Okay. Well, I left out the last part of my journey from space kid to GeneLab. Sylvain and I actually worked together when he was at Lawrence Berkeley Lab doing his thesis research. We go back about 20 years. Known each other a long time. And after he took the position down here at GeneLab, we just met for coffee just to catch up. And he was describing what GeneLab is, especially in relation to the biological data that GeneLab is accumulating from – or acquiring from space experiments. And I said, “Well, what are you doing about radiation?” And at the time, GeneLab didn’t have access to any of the radiation data.

And I need to backtrack a little and explain why that is. The space station is a big complex entity. And the people charged with measuring radiation, they focus on astronaut health as opposed to basic biological research. So they have many radiation dosimeters, detectors – flying up there. And the same thing is true with a space shuttle. But they weren’t geared toward being integrated with the biological experiments that were flying.

Host: Okay. To make that connection. That parallel.

Jack Miller: Right. So it’s a situation – for example, somebody has a biology experiment that’s flown in a particular rack in a particular module on space station. And if you want to know the radiation dose that those samples got, because there was no detector dedicated to those samples, you need to get the data from one of the other detectors. Or one of the radiation detectors that was flying monitoring the astronaut doses. And that comes from a different NASA center. From a different group that’s not focused on biology. So, one needs to map the radiation data from one branch of NASA onto the biology data from another branch of NASA.

Host: Okay. That makes sense.

Jack Miller: And that’s what I’m tasked to do for GeneLab.

Host: So that’s going to enhance the data that’s in GeneLab with extra information about –

Jack Miller: It’s going to add an extra dimension to the data in GeneLab.

Host: Yeah. Awesome.

Marianne Sowa: One of the greatest unknown risks for manned exploration or human exploration beyond the Van Allen Belt is radiation. And it’s because we don’t have the structural knowledge. And so, that again adds to the power of, “How do we take what we do know and ask more questions and understand more?” Because we don’t know how to directly – we can’t directly measure this risk. We don’t have the epidemiology data to actually know what the risk will be. And there are many, many risks. And there’s many things that affect this. But we have to understand this to be able to do these long-term missions.

And so, this is what drives NASA to study these questions. And it’s also just part of exploration, right? And so, we do have other projects that are looking at just radiation effects on basic biology as well. And so, we have a lot. We’re going to be gaining a lot of information going forward about these effects and being able to understand more what its impacts on health and biology are.

Jack Miller: It’s important to note that human beings evolved on Earth in an environment that contained radiation. Marianne mentioned that before. So because we evolved in this environment, our bodies do have mechanisms for compensating, for repair, for example.

Host: Yeah. Cells to repair.

Jack Miller: The radiation that we’re going to encounter once we leave the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field is different than anything that we evolved in.

Host: Okay. So our bodies were not equipped to deal with that.

Jack Miller: Right. So to quote a former government official, “There are the known unknowns and there are the unknown unknowns.” And there are a lot of unknown unknowns in biology. And what GeneLab is doing – hence my reference to big data earlier – is that, as you may know, there’s been a trend in science over the past decade or so to attack problems by looking at large data sets that might not seem that they’re obviously related. But looking for patterns. Looking for connections in those data.

And GeneLab is going to give a lot of investigators who haven’t had that ability before the power to do that by accumulating those data, systematizing them, organizing them, and making them accessible. Including to the general public. I think there’s part of – there’s a public access to some of GeneLab’s data, right?

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. All the data becomes publicly available once it’s been validated. It all becomes publicly available. So anyone could go in and interrogate that data.

Host: And I remember from Sylvain’s episode that GeneLab is creating visualization tools to see –

Marianne Sowa: Right. They are doing a lot of tool development. I can’t really speak to a lot of details on that. But yes, they’re trying to make it so that the data is organized and has an architecture where it’ll help the community to be able to work together collaboratively and interrogate the data. So yeah. They will have visualization tools, other tools of how to use this data in other programmatic platforms that people would want to use in the science community.

Jack Miller: Something I’ve noticed since I started in the relatively brief time I’ve been working with GeneLab is that the data scientists play as large a role as the biologists do. So just to take an example, when I get some data from Johnson Space Center from the radiation side and I feed it to GeneLab or transfer it to GeneLab, normally in physics, you take the data. Maybe you put it in Excel or some other program. You have a plot. You generate a plot. You put it in a paper and get your publication. What I discovered very quickly was that for GeneLab, the data scientists are very, very specific about how they want data formatted so it can be of most use to the broader community.

Host: Good. Yeah.

Jack Miller: Yeah. So, I’m learning. But I’ve actually been struck by how demanding the organizing big data – what a demanding task that is – organizing the data.

Host: Right. But that’s crucial, right? If it’s to be useful and have people come and make the best use of it, it needs to be organized that way.

Jack Miller: Yeah.

Host: Interesting. Yeah. So, in this story that you’ve shared so far today, we have been on the space station with astronauts exposed to a certain kind of radiation, but protected by Earth’s magnetic field. We’ve been out in deep space envisioning the future of human exploration. And also, on the ground simulating space radiation here. Where else will this take us? Can you imagine what you’re learning through these studies, and GeneLab, et cetera being used here on the Earth for medical applications? Is it that kind of radiation?

Marianne Sowa: There’s definitely a lot of therapeutic uses of the same type of radiation. I mentioned briefly before proton therapy. The way the energy gets deposited for this very energetic type of particles allows you to position the dose in a certain way. And so, it actually allows different therapeutic protocols so that you can really target the radiation to a tumor site. And so, it’s very effective to certain cancer therapies. But there’s also – as Jack was saying – the great unknowns. We don’t know all the effects, right? And so, there’s definitely going to be other benefits to doing this. One really great thing about radiation studies is there’s an on/off switch. You can turn radiation on. You can turn it on and off.

Host: Mm-hmm. In your experiments?

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. And so, if we think of it again as kind of a general stress response and telling us something about how the biology responds in general to stress – or it could even be immune response, et cetera – the fact that we can turn it on and off gives us a very targeted way to do our studies for fundamental research. And so that’s actually very powerful when we start to ask new questions. And so that’s again a place where you can generate your hypothesis and say, “How does this – how can I look at this effect?”

And I think that’s a place where when we look at low doses – where we’re not trying to kill a cell with radiation, which is what you’re trying to do in therapy – we can use it as a tool to help us understand much broader questions in terms of aging, general immune stress responses, oxidative stress. Many of these questions are actually things that the radiation community are interested in.

Host: Wow. Okay. So, radiation and so much more.

Marianne Sowa: Yeah.

Host: Interesting.

Jack Miller: Yeah. And I discovered when I joined the group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab that was working with NASA, I was interacting with biologists across all of those fields. And you mentioned aging, Marianne. There was one particular scientist who focuses only on aging. But she was using radiation as a tool. And I would never have guessed that there was a connection there.

Host: Yeah.

Jack Miller: Another colleague focuses on cataracts.

Host: Oh, really?

Jack Miller: Yeah. And pretty much everybody is going to get cataracts if they live long enough. A former colleague of mine used to tell his audiences, “I hope you all get cataracts,” because it’s a way of saying, “I hope you live a long time.” He had kind of an odd sense of humor. Some scientists use radiation as a way to kind of jumpstart the cataract process to try and study cataracts in a way that you wouldn’t be able to if you just waiting for normal aging.

Host: That’s interesting. And that makes me think of the space station, right? Because I understand that a lot of the biology studies in space are kind of using the conditions up there to accelerate the effects of aging on a fruit fly, for example. So, Jack’s comments about the data scientists being as important as the biologists in this and even your backgrounds make me think how interdisciplinary all of this work is. Is that something you’re finding more and more?

Marianne Sowa: Yeah. I think it’s very clear that in order to answer questions like this that we don’t have a lot of information on and that are very hard to answer just because of the, you know, ” Where do we find the place to do this experiment?” We don’t have a lot of experiments that go into deep space. But also, at very low doses where the effects are very subtle. So, the effects at the right dose for us are not going to be very obvious. And so, it turns out it’s a great place for team science. And it’s a great place for putting all different expertise into the same place. Radiation sciences is fortunate in many ways to actually be an interdisciplinary field by its nature.

We have the biologists and the physics. And most of us speak both languages because we have to. And now, looking with what happened with GeneLab and systems biology, that’s expanding that even further to say, “Yes. Now we’re integrating with the dosimetrist. We’re integrating with the data systems people that can do all the data handling. And now with visualization.” So, putting those teams together and have them talking together from the beginning. Not from, “Oh, now I suddenly need an answer.” That’s really where the subtle questions are going to get answered.

Host: Yeah, right. So that’s why you work among different groups at NASA and then also with researchers outside with their own specialties. Right?

Marianne Sowa: Right.

Host: Yeah. Interesting.

Jack Miller: Yeah. So, for example, a typical teleconference that I’d be involved in in this project, you’d have on the line nuclear physicists, high-energy physicists, radiation biologists, radiation biologists who started out as nuclear engineers, as Sylvain did, data scientists, people who are used to talking to the flight surgeons at Johnson Space Center. You’ll have people from multiple NASA centers. So, it is very much an expression of that interdisciplinary nature.

Host: That’s fascinating. This has all been very fascinating. Radiation is something we hear about a lot. But we don’t necessarily know all those details you got us today. Well, thank you very much for coming in, both of you.

Jack Miller: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.

Marianne Sowa: You’re welcome.

Host: And to our listeners, if you have questions about radiation biology and the data going into GeneLab, you can contact us and we’ll get your question to Marianne or Jack. You can find us at #NASASiliconValley. And if you want to see GeneLab yourself and see what it’s got to offer, the address is GeneLab.NASA.gov.

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