I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, David Livingstone's Space Show, who's introduced me to be extremely helpful to understand microgravity, Ben Roberts, an investor in microgravity.

I interrupted Ben, beg pardon, because I wanted to know, in addition to pharmaceutical companies, there looks to be some uses

that I hadn't come up with. We were speaking of accelerated aging studies, and then the 3D printed

cardiac tissue. I love this. 3D printing a heart to send to a Mars colony. Terrific idea.

All right, let's start with aging studies. What are they endeavoring to do, Ben?

Sure. And all this is still in the life sciences realm, but, you know, we've known for decades that

you could do really interesting bone and muscle loss studies in space because astronauts lose

bone and muscle at an accelerated rate. So it's good for studying osteoporosis.

Sadly for astronauts, but good for research,

I think just in the last few years,

we've discovered that the same thing is true for degenerative brain conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and MS.

So there's a number of researchers that are figuring out

how to take advantage of that.

And the essential idea is because those conditions

accelerate so rapidly in space, you can do certain types of research, clinical trials,

whatnot in space, whether it's using animals or brain organoids or whatnot. And something that might

take a year on the ground would only take two months in space.

So this is just sort of ramping up, but there's a number of high-end sort of brain researchers

that are planning to take advantage of this.

And I've even heard people talk about having to do like almost a whole life cycle model

of how the brain matures and ages, something that you really can't do on the ground

because that would take 50 years.

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