Cox News Service February 6, 2003
Space Shuttle Researchers Defend Their Science
By Jeff Nesmith
Lawrence DeLucas has about had it with the stories about how much scientific research in space costs and how little it achieves.
Such stories inevitably appear in the aftermath of a disaster like the Feb. 1 crash of the space shuttle Columbia, and they are based on the more or less undisputed fact that the experiments conducted by astronauts aboard the shuttle or the International Space Station could be carried out on unmanned satellites much more cheaply.
DeLucas, director of the Center for Biophysical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, flew on the Columbia in 1992 and has directed hundreds of shuttle flight experiments.
"For someone to say it's not worth it, well, they're missing the point," said DeLucas. Space flight, he said, "is not about the experiments we are doing. It is about exploration. It is about one day going and establishing a colony on Mars or even the moon." He said the research simply piggy-backs on the human drive to explore.
The Alabama center "grows" crystals of proteins. The resulting substance is used in a fairly new science called "crystallography," in which the precise molecular order of a large molecule can be figured out.
By bombarding the structure of such a substance with X-rays, then analyzing the angles at which the X-rays are bent by the atoms of the crystal, scientists can determine the actual shape of a protein. That shape often determines the biological role the substance plays.
No matter how carefully a laboratory worker controls the conditions in which crystals are grown, gravity will always stir things up, DeLucas said. As a result, the protein ultimately mapped by X-rays looks like a fuzzy picture.
Only in a weightless environment can crystals of some proteins be produced in a quality that makes them suitable for study by crystallographers. For this reason, the shuttle research could help lead to new pharmaceuticals.
The center's work is funded by pharmaceutical companies, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, as well as NASA.
"We would be wasting a wonderful opportunity to see how gravity affects every system on Earth if we did not do this kind of research," he said.
Science is largely coincidental in the U.S. space program, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.Org, a national security think tank.
"Human space flight is a way of demonstrating national greatness," he said.
Thus, it is the thrill of sending human beings into space that accounts for the public support that causes Congress to appropriate approximately $13 billion a year to NASA, not the hope of a new drug.
The "wonderful opportunity" that DeLucas and other researchers exploit would not be there otherwise.
Columbia's last flight, billed as a dedicated scientific mission, is said to have cost $500 million.
Most flights in recent years have been to service the space station, and Columbia's STS-107 was the first science mission in three years.
The shuttle carried 80 research projects, ranging from a study by scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel of how desert dust in the Middle East may influence the greenhouse effect to the efficacy of water mist to suppress fires.
The results of these studies, along with 1,008 canisters of protein crystals from the Birmingham center, were lost in the Columbia crash.
In addition to offering a unique environment for scientific experiments, DeLucas said, space forces science to look at problems that don't exist on Earth, sometimes with unexpected results.
Wheelchairs that respond to eye movements of the person riding them grew out of a design for a lunar rover built during the Apollo program, he said. Advanced gear for firefighters was developed around suits for space-walking astronauts.
"I know that $13 billion sounds like a lot of money," DeLucas said. "But we spend $16 billion a year on tobacco products in this country and $20 billion on alcohol you drink. We spend $6 billion on cosmetics."
In fact, in one Columbia experiment named "astroculture," researchers from International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. in New York had hoped to capture essential oils from space-grown flowers to produce a new fragrance for perfumes.
A perfume named Zen was developed in 2000 from a completely new scent created when a rose was grown in the shuttle's weightlessness.
Jeff Nesmith's e-mail address is jeffn(at)coxnews.com
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