Their findings could affect health care for women not only on Earth, but on missions to Mars. At right are two Bioreactors culturing breast tissue specimens. We are culturing noncancerous mammary cells hoping to learn what guides their growth, and how we might use that knowledge to thwart malignancies before they are created. The type of mammary cells we are growing comes from an individual susceptible to breast cancer, and that susceptibility is likely driven by damage caused by ionizing radiation. Space exploration will involve slightly increased exposures of crew members to radiation, so what we learn from these cells could help help justify methods of female crew selection, and help manage breast cancer in the national population at the same time.
Cancer research is typically a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort.
In this regard, Richmond was connected with a breast cancer susceptible donor of the mammary tissue now used in his laboratory by Dr. Mike Swift of the Medical College of New York, Hawthorne, N.Y. Drs. A perpetual challenge for the experimental study of these phenomena has been simulating the conditions of space so that complete laboratory studies can be done by numerous investigators on Earth. The simulated growth of mammalian cells in tissue culture needed to duplicate the quiet conditions of orbital free-fall in a way that allowed for maintaining fresh media and oxygenation. As the bioreactor turns, the cells continually fall through the medium yet never hit bottom. Eventually, on Earth, the clusters become too large to fall slowly and research has to be continued in the true weightlessness of space.