Podcast Rewind: Defying Gravity: Astronaut Health and Your Genes

Robert Rountree (Intro):

This is The Thorne Podcast. The show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet supplements and lifestyle approaches to good health. I'm Dr. Robert Rountree, chief medical advisor at Thorne and functional medicine doctor. As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who express them and not the recommendations of Thorne. Statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Robert Rountree:

Hi everyone and welcome back to The Thorne Podcast. Joining me this week for another episode is Dr. Chris Mason, who's a professor, he's a scientist, he's an entrepreneur, and he's the author of the book The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. And on occasion, he's also an investigator for NASA with various missions. And we can talk about that. So for this episode, we're going to explore Dr. Mason's research into outer space and what awaits the human race. So to kick things off, tell us how your work with genetics led to collaborating with NASA and where you've been going with that.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, my pleasure, and thanks so much, Dr. Rountree. It's a pleasure to be here and I've had the great pleasure of actually, early days of the lab I started at Cornell was, I just got situated, I'm in an office, I'm by myself, I'm looking around, there's nobody there, because I haven't hired anyone. I just have an empty room in an empty lab. And I actually really, it's one of these great defining moments of you have a wonderful opportunity right on your lap and think, well, what do I build? What do I create? What do I, what do I study?

Chris Mason:

And even, of course, I had some proposals. That's how I got the job, but I really thought more and more about studying this cancer. Or you can study different infectious disease. You can study inherited diseases that get passed on through families. But the thing that I kept thinking more and more about is that the technology is changing so fast that genetics and genomics and sequencing is getting cheaper and cheaper. And then I really kept thinking about I want to understand really this, what are the humans that endure the most stress, the most unusual environments, that could we learn from them, kind of these built in outliers. And I also went to space camp when I was a kid, so I've always been...

Robert Rountree:

Oh, you did?

Chris Mason:

I did. I went twice actually. So I've always thought a lot about astronauts or going to space and love astronomy. So I have those two passions, genetics and space in me ever since I was a kid. And I thought, well let’s really combine these. I thought a great outlier humans are, astronauts when they go for these long missions, but huge amounts of radiation. They got a lot of stress. The fluidic shifts, the cognitive challenges, basically the model for osteoporosis and muscle atrophy. So it's really hard on the body.

Chris Mason:

And I actually wrote a proposal to NASA that said we should study the astronauts before, during, after flight to look at their DNA, their microbiome, look at all the changes in the proteins, everything that's happening in their body to understand where we could intervene and what we could actually monitor and then maybe even improve upon it. And when they wrote back, they said, well, we can't fund your study because we don't even have the samples you're describing, which would be viably banked cells that we could look at. And they said, but hang in there because we may have some solicitations or some opportunities soon where some of your ideas could be tried for some other missions. And then there's an announcement to do a year long mission space with Scott Kelly. And he had an identical twin that would stay on earth that we could study both in.

Robert Rountree:

How convenient.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, that's right. It was great. So we were one of the few labs that were selected to lead this mission and did this with NASA, it was our first mission with NASA back in 2014 that we started.

Robert Rountree:

Did you get to know the Kellys pretty well?

Chris Mason:

Very well. They're hilarious and great subjects. And Scott Kelly wrote a book about his year in space. So I wished every subject for every clinical trial I did that. They wrote a book about it, because we actually could look at when he had the most experience of pain or discomfort and match that to his molecular data. So again, this great real in depth first person view of his time as an astronaut in space. And his brother also is now Senator Kelly in Arizona. So they became famous. They're both famous originally. Now they're extra famous. And we also now have to get blood from Senator Kelly through the secret service, which is a little bit of paperwork, but we still get blood every year from them as well. And they're great sports and really contributing a lot through to the research that's ongoing to this day.

Robert Rountree:

Now I remember you talking in a lecture about Scott and one of the comments you made that surprised me a little bit is that he didn't necessarily feel great after all that time and space.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, he broke out in... Basically when he got back, his ankles swelled up to the size of, he said basketballs. So this huge inflammation, this big response, his cytokine levels spiked up really high, which are these signaling molecules in the blood that indicate a lot of stress. We saw spikes of mitochondrial DNA, basically pieces of his cells almost coming out in his bloodstream. Even the weight of clothing on his arm, if you look at your sort of sleeve or pant legs, that weight alone, he would break out into a rash because it was just too much weight for the skin to bear. He almost had to walk around nude for several days. Some people do this recreationally. He was doing it for just medical purposes to not be in pain and both these situations are, are fine for the record. It's to your own liking.

Chris Mason:

But I'd say eventually it went away, but there were several days where the inflammation levels were exceedingly high and also the swelling. And so what's interesting is his body. It wasn't so much that being in space career, that was so hard because his body had really adapted, but it was really returning to gravity that really disrupted his body and was hard on his system, his bones, his muscles, so that was definitely rough on his body.

Robert Rountree:

So it wasn't so much that space was harmful, but returning was stressful.

Chris Mason:

Yes, exactly right.

Robert Rountree:

Oh, okay.

Chris Mason:

Going to space is hard. Coming back to gravity is harder.

Robert Rountree:

Because the science fiction movies we all see, the Star Trek, The Expanse, one of my favorite shows they make it look like space is a piece of cake. Like the only real issue is whether you have gravity turned on or not. But it seems like there's a lot of things that could happen in space that would affect us in a lot of different ways, especially our genome.

Chris Mason:

Yeah. Many things change in space. So one of the really surprising things about the study is we saw his telomeres got longer in space. So telomeres, if your DNA in your cells is kind of like a book where you have the letters printed on the pages and that's your code of life, actually, the telomeres are the book ends basically the beginning and the end of the covers of the book. It kind of keeps it intact. And as we age, we normally age, they get shrinked, they get frayed over time, much like a book does, it gets frayed as you age, but in space they actually got longer.

Chris Mason:

It's as if you took an old book and the cover got shinier just sitting on a shelf, right. It was really surprising to see this. And so that was one of the big surprises, but we did see evidence of him being mutated, seeing mutations show up in his blood and his body responding to the mutation. So it was both good and bad, a sense that a little bit look younger by telomeres, but we could see more radiation being absorbed by his body, which was contributing to more potential mutation. So it was both good and bad, I guess I'd say.

Robert Rountree:

Is there anything we can do to help with that radiation issue? It doesn't sound like it's necessarily all bad, but that certainly comes up when we talk about people going to Mars, which would take, what, a year to get to Mars?

Chris Mason:

Yeah, so it depends on the orbital mechanics, but basically it's six to seven months to get there and you'd have to basically turn around immediately and come back because at that point the planets are farther apart. Or you wait on the surface for a little while, maybe about another year or so, and then start to come back towards earth. So it could be as long as three years of a mission and as short as about 14 months or so, but it's a long time, right. And so you'd have...

Robert Rountree:

Long time.

Chris Mason:

Wouldn't have gravity for most of that time, if you do the short mission and we know it's stressful on the body, we know that absent some artificial gravity system, like a rotating platform, we're going to have to figure out ways to deal with it. But we're not beholden to just hoping and crossing our fingers and toes. There's really amazingly new genetic technologies that let us turn on or turn off genes with these CRISPR methods that the way you can have clinical trials where you add in a gene to fix a disease, you can use some of the same technologies to turn on a gene, like for example, a gene for DNA repair or response to inflammation or swelling, you can start to tweak and control the genes in your own body as needed.

Robert Rountree:

So I think the term is genetic malleability that you've talked about. That's possible. It's not just possible. We're already starting to do that.

Chris Mason:

Exactly. And I talk about this a bit in my book The Next 500 Years, which is that a lot of it seems like science fiction, but it's already rolled out in clinical trials. We already have patients with beta thalassemia or a sickle cell disease, these diseases of hemoglobin in their blood which carry oxygen, where what's interesting is they have a defective gene in their adult hemoglobin, carries oxygen through the blood. But when we're all fetuses, we have something called fetal hemoglobin. And this actually turns off shortly after you're born, but it's like a fully different functional version of hemoglobin.

Chris Mason:

So what has been done in these trials is they've turned back on the gene that we used to use when we're a fetus, it's kind of like going back to the genes you used when you were young and then using them to cure a disease. But again, it's this idea of epigenetic control. So it's on top of the genome. So it's not genetic, you're not changing your genome. You're just changing what your genome is using in different cells and what genes are active. And so this plasticity literally is curing people on earth today and could enable people to survive in harsh environments like Mars in the future.

Robert Rountree:

So that brings up a really interesting point about genes being turned on and off. I think before we got down to the final work of figuring out exactly how many human genes there are, and I don't think we know exactly, but I remember the early talk was that we thought we had a hundred thousand genes, right. Or even more, and it turned out to be a fifth that amount, correct?

Chris Mason:

So yeah, a hundred thousand was the unit of... Some thought 120,000. And then we started to look at fruit flies and little worms, and they also looked like they had about 20,000 genes that made proteins. Now those are just genes that make the enzymes in your blood, or make hemoglobin, these other proteins in your body or hair, for example. But there are other genes that are called non-coding RNAs that don't make protein, but they're still active. And so we're still discovering new genes in the human genome. Actually the latest number is now back up to 60,000.

Robert Rountree:

Really?

Chris Mason:

Yeah, it is. So the official gene count, if you go to gencodegenes.org, it's an official group from the NIH, the National Institute of Health and Scientists who every year they say, how many genes are we really sure we validated, characterized and really confirmed in multiple cells and individuals? It's actually still going up. We're still discovering actually the fundamental facets of human biology and how cells become themselves and regulate each other. So it's an ongoing process, but the number of protein coding genes is still flat. It's about 20,000. That has stayed the same, and it's because there's not that many new versions of those genes that are out there actually.

Robert Rountree:

So just as an aside, if I wanted to go get my whole genome tested, say I was looking for some kind of abnormality, how many genes is a typical lab going to analyze in me?

Chris Mason:

Normally a lab will say they do a targeted panel and they'll look at something maybe a few dozen or a few hundred genes. But what we can do now is with these methods, we actually take a sample, break apart all the cells, grab every molecule of DNA and RNA and we can sequence all of them, right? So we can look at tens of thousands of genes and even hundreds of thousands of the variations of those genes when they slightly tweak themselves or do what's called splicing. So we now with more modern genetic methods have of vastly expanded repertoire of tools who not look at one or two genes at a time or even 10 or 20, we can look at all of them and also look at any genetic differences in them, do this even once a day. So it really opens up a lot of great new areas of research.

Robert Rountree:

And I remember again, in one of your presentations, talking about how the cost to do that used to be astronomical and that now it's getting to where it's pretty cheap. And then maybe we can do that on an iPhone?

Chris Mason:

That's right. It's amazing. So there is a chart that shows actually the cost of sequencing a genome from 2001, when the first human genome was completed, up till current day and it's plotted over the years because it used to be about a billion dollars to just sequence one human genome, to get basically these 3 billion letters of genetic code from a person and characterize them. And what's extraordinary is that today you can do it for about $500. And so that drop is orders and orders of magnitude is even faster than say Moore's Law, which is how computing speeds have gotten so fast over the past several decades. It is the fastest pace of technological change in human history. It's also why I tell everyone in our lab that every day is the best day ever to be a geneticist, because that speed of progress means we can sequence better, faster, cheaper, get more data every day. It is really unparalleled in terms of technological change in any discipline. So it's a euphoric time to be a geneticist, for sure.

Robert Rountree:

So I know I've seen numerous studies that would bring up an intervention, put somebody on a certain diet, and be able to see which genes are turned on and turned off, do an array. Is that going to be feasible for an astronaut to do a finger prick and actually see whether these technologies that are affecting genetic expression are working or not in space in real time? Is that possible?

Chris Mason:

Great question. That is literally the call I just came from earlier today is planning out this mission. We were trying to do it this year on the Polaris Dawn mission or on a mission with SpaceX next year called Axiom Two or the Polaris Dawn is also through the SpaceX Dragon. And so I'm flying out to Hawthorne next week to do consenting for the crew to talk about these protocols, these methods. We are now at that stage where you can actually draw your own blood, extract it, get the RNA, sequence it yourself, and look at the data and see if I'm modifying myself, how's it going? Or if I'm getting...

Robert Rountree:

How's it going!

Chris Mason:

We can see, or you can see yourself at some point. So it is an unusual democratization of the technology where anybody anywhere could grab the blood sample and take a look, right? So it of course has very trauma, but there's also risk of people misinterpreting or over over-interpreting or really misunderstanding the data. So we have to tread carefully, but it is an extraordinary period of access to technology on earth and in space.

Robert Rountree:

Well, I know that there's this whole field of biological age clocks that Steve Horvath kind of initiated or originated that looks at the methylation patterns, which basically tells you what genes are being turned on and off and use that to say, well, here's the actual age of your body. And then at first people said, well, what do you do with that information? You can't intervene and change that, but that seems to have been disproved, right? That you can... There are actually studies showing you could change your biological age with a dietary intervention or a lifestyle intervention.

Chris Mason:

Yeah. It was always thought that maybe you could nudge it a little bit or hope for the best, but we have multiple measures of this biological age now. And of course, one of them is of course sold by Thorne. It's something that we developed in house with Joel Dudley and Nathan Price and Bodi Zhang and a lot of the team and talking with Paul, our fearless CEO, this is something we've really been focused a lot on in the past few years because it gives us a new way to quantify the efficacy of a therapy, a probiotic, a prebiotic, a supplement, an exercise regimen. If you're doing body building, if you're really, if you're doing anything in your lifestyle sometimes you can just do it by how do you feel, but you want to have something that's really quantified and say, looking at your DNA, you're looking at your immune system, looking at metabolites, looking really at these really clear molecular changes that happen.

Chris Mason:

For example, like telomeres in space, there's these things that change and fluctuate. Some of them are much more malleable than others and some more than we thought, but other ones really can tell you, are you on your way towards being a little bit younger than you would expect or are you getting worse? Some things like being chronically inflamed make your biological age go higher, having diabetes, having a stroke, not surprisingly. So some of these real harsh diseases or insults to the body do affect it, but in the hopeful side, really good exercise regimens, again, good probiotics, eating well in general, having a good diet and even just getting sleep. These are all things that can help you do well and decrease your biological age.

Robert Rountree:

Is it possible that we could design a diet specifically for astronauts that would alter the genes that are being turned on and off? And if so, do you think somebody like SpaceX would be interested in doing that? And I bring that up because I still remember the days of Tang, right? What do astronauts drink, Tang, right?

Chris Mason:

Yeah, they love it. And it is tasty, but they are at the very beginning stages of this where you don't just want to have the probiotics for the astronauts so that they have good gut health, but you can also use them as miniature factories, right? The microbes in your gut make and process and produce variants of medicines we use, of molecules our body uses all the time. So you wouldn't even just have it for general health. You could use it as a little pharmacy and there's some great work in the field by [inaudible 00:18:24] and others.

Chris Mason:

And we have some synthetic yeast cells we've made in the lab that carry different proteins from other organisms, or we've even made human cells that have Tardigrade genes, Tardigradaes are these little water [inaudible 00:18:34] that can survive in the vacuum of space. So you can make chimeric cells that are part human, part Tardigrade and get some of the best of both worlds basically. So I think we have a real interesting opportunity to leverage any genetic tool from any organism that we've characterized and bring it to bear, whether it's a microbe or human cell or virus, really any of them.

Robert Rountree:

So I have to bring this up because I suspect there's some people listening to us that hear the term engineering life and immediately get nervous. We shouldn't be messing with this and how do we know we aren't going to create Frankensteins and go off on all kinds of unexpected directions? What would be your answer to people who are worried about this idea that we can somehow alter our genetic expression?

Chris Mason:

They should be concerned as you see when we roll out any new clinical protocol, any new technology, any new medicine, even a new probiotic or supplement, something that seems innocuous. You have to be careful and do it slowly and start with a few people start with then a larger group to look at efficacy. You want to roll them out bit by bit. And so I think even though it sounds as if you are doing something that could lead to a great cure for a disease as I've described with beta thalassemia, where you can turn back on the gene and cure the disease.

Chris Mason:

But it could lead to harm. It could turn something off that you didn't want off. And actually we did maybe a cancer, right? So nothing we're proposing here, we would suddenly roll out on thousands of people. We will do it very slowly with probably less than a dozen people first who fully consented, who understand the risk and where the benefits outweigh the risks. And then we do it in larger cohorts bit by bit. So it is just as cautious and careful as we would do with any other drug or therapy that we do for any other person or any therapy.

Robert Rountree:

Well, it seems to me that the case you're making is that if we are going to be able to explore space for any length of time, we need to do something, that we can't just go up in our current state in a ship and fly to another galaxy without knowing something about which genes are being turned on and off and something about how to affect that genetic expression and expect to be healthy, right? It seems like this is essential.

Chris Mason:

It just is. Simple things, like when you're dehydrated, it's just when you go to the bathroom, if you have very clear urine or it's very yellow, you're like, oh, if it's yellow, you think, oh, I should drink some more water. So simple readouts on the body just to give feedback of how you're doing. We can now do them at a very granular level down at the genetic level. And we would be foolish not to use them because they can help inform how we're doing, how we're responding and if we're being healthy or in any way dangerous.

Robert Rountree:

How close are we to the magic toilet that you sit on and a little readout tells you what you need to eat that day or what you should avoid that day.

Chris Mason:

Great question. I've been fan fictioning about this for like a decade now. There are some automated toilets that have been built by Jack Gilbert to basically make sampling of your microbes and stools so you can characterize them later, but the actual toilet that's magical that tells you what you need to do, or at least gives you a report on what you did might still be five or 10 years away. And it'll probably be really expensive when it comes out. But I can imagine cases in hospitals where people with really, really aggressive diarrhea or GI problems that they would probably sign up for it if it can help them diagnose or cure their ailment, they'll do it, right. So even if it comes in a few years and it's expensive, I still think there is a really great use for it.

Robert Rountree:

Well, I remember the toilets in the spaceships used to be millions of dollars just for basic flush model. So a million dollar toilet for a Mars mission might not be a bad idea.

Chris Mason:

If it keeps you alive on the red planet, then it's worth it.

Robert Rountree:

Then it's worth it. All right. So let's take a short break and then we'll be right back to answer some questions from our listeners.

Robert Rountree:

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Robert Rountree:

And we're back. So now it's time to answer some questions that have come in from our community. The first question this week comes from a listener who asks, how sterile are the inside of spaceships, and then kind of a corollary, is there such a thing as being too clean for astronauts? So I wonder, is there a hygiene hypothesis for astronauts, or do you worry about it being too sterile?

Chris Mason:

No. Great questions. So the environment is not sterile really at all. Because if you look at, for example, between your toes, it'd be the same as asking if it's sterile between my toes. It's definitely not, right? There's no shower on the current space station. The old Skylab did have a shower, but the only way the astronauts clean up is with basically a wet wipe, like you'd use for a baby's butt and that's it, right? So that's your shower. And so they carry up there with them their own microbiome, and then they exchange their microbiome with their crew mates.

Chris Mason:

They've become more genetically similar to each other at the microbiome level within a matter of actually even a few days. So they're kind of been a microbial soup. So it's definitely not sterile, but it actually wouldn't need to be because you do want to have a diverse microbial environment around you, both on earth and in space. So it's an engineered ecosystem like all built environments are. It has its own microbe, its own species, its own dynamics. But these are mostly good things because you want that diversity, your immune system requires it. It's generally healthier for you. So it's writ large a good thing.

Robert Rountree:

Is there anything actively that's done to alter the microbiome on the space station? I mean, do they spray it with sterilizers at some point to start out clean? Do they do anything at all or are they just tracking?

Chris Mason:

Before it goes up, it's very clean because they're worried about any potential pathogens and they also isolate the crew, all the crews quarantine usually for several days up to several weeks before they fly up to make sure they don't bring a cold up there or any other infections. So they do what they can for some basic preventative measures, but it is not completely sterile and it's not perfectly engineered yet, but it's a continual exchange. Because not only the crew, when you bring up supplies they basically try to make it so it's pretty sterile and they sometimes radiate food for example, but something can still survive and spores can still persist. So it's never a hundred percent.

Robert Rountree:

Is space itself sterile or are there microbes floating around on asteroid dust or anything like that? What do we know about space in general?

Chris Mason:

Well, so space is almost completely sterile, but we know at least since we've been out in orbit, it is no longer completely sterile because there are things that happen when you're in space. You eject matter out into the vacuum of space, but some of it doesn't make it back to earth, goes just out towards the stars.

Chris Mason:

Also space suits, you think of space suits being pretty tightly sealed, right? You have to contain all the air, you need it to survive, right? It's a space suit, but it turns out they actually continually can push their positive pressure or suits. And the reason they're built that way is that if you have a micro meteorite puncture your suit, you want it so that you don't just immediately deflate, right? So there's so much pressure in the suit that it's actually almost always leaking a little bit of the air in the suit into space. And so when people do these space walks like Peggy Woodson did 10 space walks, every time she went out there in space, there's kind of small mini jets of skin microbiomes shooting out into space. So it's probably not sterile anymore because we've been populating it for several decades with human skin microbiome.

Robert Rountree:

So what do you is the best show you've seen? What do you think is the best depiction that's accurate of what goes on in space? And this person specifically says, what's the best depiction of space nutrition? You don't really see people eating in science fiction shows of space, but is there one that you think is even close to what it's actually like?

Chris Mason:

Yeah, actually my favorite was probably The Expanse. It's a series by James Corey.

Robert Rountree:

Love that show.

Chris Mason:

Because actually the collaboratives, actually the pen name, because there's two authors who write it. But the show is really, I think, a great reflection of the possibility of humanity being seamlessly and readily moving back and forth between the inner planets and the outer planets and really become a space bearing species. But also I think what's really intriguing is that it still has all the same political trappings and interpersonal drama and strife and chaos that is kind of our today's world.

Robert Rountree:

We're still humans.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, we're still humans, which I find kind of sad. I thought, well maybe at that point... Star Trek universe is fairly optimistic that once you're at that point in humanity, there's no more war and there's all the resources you need and it's all kumbaya, but The Expanse is like, no, they're still human. They're still just as petty and bitter and mean and backstabbing and sometimes liars are out there and you got to watch out for all of them, right? So it's interesting to see that there wasn't really as fundamental a cultural shift as there was technological.

Robert Rountree:

One of the things I remember from I think the first or second episode is one of the captains of the ships basically goes nuts and he says we've conquered space, but why couldn't we have brought more light? If we were out there living on asteroids and we had all artificial light, do you think that's something humans can cope with?

Chris Mason:

I mean, I think a lot of people have experienced today where you just have LED lights and no one really likes them. You can actually have different versions of lighting. So we wouldn't be beholden to technologies that are just like LEDs. There are things called quantum dots, which you can attach that the lighting systems that give you a much broader frequency range of light can make it look much more, not just look like, but actually be like sunlight. So your skin is feeling the broad spectrum of light that you normally get when you're looking at the sun at the beach. So there's ways we could fix that. And I think the show, when they first started writing it more than 10 years ago, a lot of the technologies weren't out yet. So I think they just didn't know it at the time, but it would be... It's definitely very possible and would be doable, I think, to do these new technologies and not be so tortured by the light.

Robert Rountree:

So here's a question that kind of feeds off that, which is I understand people age at different rates in space. And you talked about Scott Kelly's telomeres getting actually longer, which might have indicated that he got younger, I don't know. A, is that true that people age at a different rate because they're in space and then B, are there things that they could take like nicotinamide ribocide is something that was asked about. Are there supplements people could take that will change how they age?

Chris Mason:

Yeah. And some of the ones that are also sold by Thorne, of course, this is a Thorne podcast. And nicotinamide ribocide is really used broadly in a lot of clinical trials. It's not yet being tried by astronauts, but we're talking about this for admission soon is to start to try some of these interesting options for really decreasing the accelerated aging that does happen in space. Basically, you get osteoporosis, you get muscle atrophy, your vision starts to go, you get brain fog, you get these cognitive declines, you get a lot of hallmarks of aging really quickly in space. And so there's a lot of, I think, really intriguing discussion. Can we do sort of N of one clinical trials, meaning just one person, but have many, many time points collected so we can see if there's any dynamics happening inside the body, we can track them exactly when they occur and to what degree and what tissues and use these kind of unique astronauts as really testing beds for some of these antiaging therapies or at least wellness therapies.

Robert Rountree:

It seems like in order to answer that question, we're also going to have good biomarkers that can indicate whether these things are working. I mean, we can't put people on a Mars mission where they're going to be up for a year and a half and say, well, we hope this will help. We'll obviously want to study this on earth and we'll want to be able to look at certain things in their blood or maybe their gut microbiome and be able to show that this does seem to be reversing some of these conditions you're talking about like sarcopenia or osteoporosis.

Chris Mason:

Yeah. There's a great point. So the markers are not just going to be, how do you feel, right? You want to say, what are some of the mitochondrial function in your blood? What do we see for cytokine markers, these molecules that signal between tissues in the body and show immune system activity, even looking at stem cell function, take the cells that are circulating that are early stage and stem cells and making sure they have the full range of plasticity that they should. So that everything from there to something called clonal hematopoiesis, we can see what's the present mutated clones in your blood. And we can also see that from a blood draw. So there's actually this broad tool set we can use from just a single blood draw these days. And one of the things we're also trying on the next mission is also the Drawbridge device, which Thorne acquired Drawbridge company last year.

Chris Mason:

And we're getting it flight approved as we speak actually, so we could fly that up in space. So you wouldn't even have to have a fresh phlebotomy done and brought back and frozen. You can put it on basically the dried Watman paper. So you can do a blood draw. It's easy as pushing a button. And then it's banked on that card and brought back for looking at metabolites or small peptides. They're looking at DNA and RNA. So we're looking broadly at all these biomarkers because we don't know yet which will be the most informative for seeing how well we're doing. But when you don't know where to look, the best way to look is everywhere you can, so you can make...

Robert Rountree:

Everywhere. Yeah. And as we talked about earlier, we're at the point now where we can use something like an iPhone to even tell which genes are being turned on and off. I've seen these, I don't know what you call those kind of diagrams that are tiny little squares that just show the whole array of genes that are lit up or not lit up or different colors. And it seems like that's got a lot of potential.

Chris Mason:

Yep. Yeah. There's there ways you can detect all genes being activated. So we do this now, a sequencing method, we take all the RNA molecules and you sequence as many of them as you can, right? So we don't get a hundred or even a few thousand genes. We get tens of thousands of genes plus you can always get these also called circulating RNAs or even circulating nucleic acids. Then these little tiny packages in your blood called exosomes, which carry DNA, RNA protein. And even there, we're pulling them out and looking at proteins and RNA inside of them. So we can look for these signals in almost any area of the body in any kind of area that we can grab a sample, basically.

Robert Rountree:

You don't have to say, some people think Thorne is a supplement company. They didn't realize that there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes here.

Chris Mason:

A of the work on using these methods for informing the clinical trials that we run or how we help patients. We've had a lot of these conversations with Paul as the CEO, is that really, the best way to test these out is to get it out into patients, monitor them, see how they're doing, get feedback, run some of these trials. And that's what we do.

Robert Rountree:

So what's your best guess? When are we going to Mars? And when we do, how are they going to be able to pack in all the nutrition they need for being out in space for a year and a half, man? I know in shows like The Expanse, they've got this kitchen and you see this lip tube with plants growing in it they've got Ganymede, right, that's got all the plant biology research going on.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, which is cool.

Robert Rountree:

When do you think we're going to do this? And if we can do it, what's the food going to be like? I hope it's going to be more Tang.

Chris Mason:

Yeah. I think we're all hoping for that. There are a lot of people working on the engineering of plants to get them to work under different gravity environments or even there's a guy Rob Furl who just grew plants in lunar soil that he tested from NASA. So trying to get plants to grow in soil that they'd never really had to use before, but all that work is on ongoing on the plant side. But there's also people making microbes that can make your drugs, make your foods. You kind of end up being a bit like a goop, but it will at least be very nutritious. So you probably want to blend that in with some other solid foods, but lettuce has been made in space. There's been peppers. You can have an espresso in space. So there's been some of the creature comforts that we like that have certainly been done in space, but it'll probably start pretty bland, I think for a while and eventually get better later.

Robert Rountree:

I see a question that actually is related to that, which is what have we learned from the space program about the value of supplements or health that would impact what astronauts do, and do astronauts take vitamin mineral supplements now?

Chris Mason:

Some of them do, and some don't. It's very individualized, but the thing that's most common is actually sleeping pills so they can just get a good night's sleep. And then also a lot of medication for the nausea and the puffiness and inflammation, but the supplements are widely varied. Some take a lot of probiotics, some take nothing at all, some take NAD precursors. It really varies as much as the person from what we've seen so far.

Robert Rountree:

Is it up to the individual astronaut what they want to take? Do they get a choice on that?

Chris Mason:

A little bit. So if it's something that's a supplement, that's just a dietary supplement, that's generally under their purview. They also get a personal package they can bring up with them, a little container that they can bring whatever they want so they can bring things up as they like. And it goes through the flight surgery and the medical ops crew to make sure it's nothing that would cause a harm or disruption. But as long as it's something over the counter, commonly available, it's just like aspirin so that they can pick what they want.

Robert Rountree:

And I imagine they're eating a lot of dehydrated food, is that?

Chris Mason:

Yeah.

Robert Rountree:

Are they still getting complete nutrients for, this is a question that came in. If you dehydrate it, does it lose its nutritional value?

Chris Mason:

It mostly does not. And it depends a bit on the plant and also the material, but it is rehydrated up in flight and the flavor is not great, but they also can't smell as well in space so they can't quite tell. But there's also tasting rooms that NASA has. If you live near Johnson Space Center, you can go and help taste the food before they give it to the astronauts to make sure it doesn't taste awful. So they do check the taste and the texture and the quality. And the nutritional content is very well regulated and tested. So it's good nutrition, actually. The thing that's interesting, though, is fresh food is still the best. When Kate Rubin, who is an astronaut, last year grew a lettuce in space, every one of the crew members, six people on the ISS, each one got about one leaf, maybe two, but they said it was the best lettuce they had ever had. Fresh food, if you can get it, even if it's only one leaf, that's heavenly.

Robert Rountree:

That makes me think of backpacking trips.

Chris Mason:

Yeah.

Robert Rountree:

Where you've got all the dehydrated food and then you've got the one, maybe you brought a steak for one night. It's the best steak you've ever eaten.

Chris Mason:

For sure.

Robert Rountree:

So one last question, which I think is very interesting is, do you think that we'll find a mineral in space that we could someday use for human health? And I know I've read that certain people are investing in land on the moon, thinking that someday we're going to do mining on the moon. Do you think there's any chance we'll find something that adds to the periodic table, that might be of benefit?

Chris Mason:

That's a great question. So I think anything's possible. We'll start there, but I think we it's like in Dune, like the spice or something like that.

Robert Rountree:

Yeah, that's exactly.

Chris Mason:

I think if we are alive long enough as a species and go to enough planets, the answer is going to more and more definitely yes. Right now there's no evidence that we've got anything that will help us now. But I think the universe is vast, there are literally trillions of galaxies, right. So if we start to go to even five of them, I think we'll start to find interesting things.

Robert Rountree:

I think in The Expanse there was Iridium or something like that. They found a planet that had this mineral that they said, oh, this is going to be revolutionary.

Chris Mason:

Yeah. And changes manufacturing and changes also a lot of what you can do for getting to the planet. So it was really... I think there's got to be something out there. We just need some brave explorers to jump in the spacecraft and head that way.

Robert Rountree:

And go look.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, that's right.

Robert Rountree:

So okay. I have to ask this. What do you think is the chance that there is life out there, intelligent life?

Chris Mason:

Yeah. So intelligent life. I think the answer is very likely zero. Life, I think it's very likely almost certainly some bacterial life, most of that's because the universe is only is not been around that long, right? So it's around 13.7 billion years. The earth, the universe took several billion years just to cool, just for atoms to form and to get molecules and the planets themselves, even earth, have not been that cool for that long, say a few billion years, but we've had enough time on this planet for life to form and get complex. But it's really been not that much time since the universe started for there to get more complex life. So I think eventually I think we'll probably get more intelligent life coming. I just think we might be the first ones at the party.

Robert Rountree:

Well, this has been a really awesome discussion, and I want to thank you so much for your time.

Chris Mason:

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks.

Robert Rountree:

If people want to follow your work, how would they do that? And again, can you name the books that you've written so that they can look them up if they want to read them?

Chris Mason:

Yeah, my pleasure. So the website is themasonlab.net, or just masonlab.net, is where a lot of work on the lab at Cornell is. We obviously post a lot on thorne.com for some of the work at longevity and the work in the company. Then there's my Twitter feed is @mason_lab. So mason_lab, and then Instagram is Christopher.e.mason. And the books are kind of a really collection of a lot of my hopes and dreams and beliefs of what we can and should do as a species, as well as stewards and really guardians for life itself. So that's called The Next 500 Years, and the subtitle is Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. And I also have another book coming out next year called The Age of Prediction, which is about AI and machines and how we use it in medicine to cure disease and also feel free to email me. The email is on the websites I've mentioned. And yeah, so thanks for having me.

Robert Rountree:

Terrific. So that's really excellent to hear. As always thank you everyone for tuning in and listening. We hope you've enjoyed the show and until next time.

Robert Rountree (Outro):

Thanks for listening to The Thorne Podcast. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. If you've got a health or wellness question you'd like answered, simply follow our Instagram and shoot a message to @thornehealth. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting thorne.com and checking out the latest news, videos, and stories on Thorne's Take Five daily blog. Once again, thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to join us next time for another episode of The Thorne Podcast.