Prepared remarks of
The Honorable Daniel S. Goldin
NASA Administrator
First NASA /NCI Workshop on
Sensors for Bio-Molecular Signatures
June 2, 1999
Thank for being here today. Thank you for your kind introduction.
I want to salute Ed Stone for his strong leadership at JPL and Rick
Klausner for his vision and persistence at the helm of the National
Cancer Institute (NCI).
I am pleased to be here, because this meeting is the first of what I
hope will be an ongoing series of NASA/NCI workshops. NASA has
a great relationship with the NCI and entire National Institutes of
Health, and we plan to use our partnership to improve the lives of the
American people into the new millennium and beyond.
Through our partnerships, we will increase our understanding of
biological processes. In addition to the great implications this
understanding has for healthcare, a harnessing of biological forces
will dramatically improve all aspects of our space program.
Let me take you on a brief fantasy trip into a future where the power
of biology has begun to be felt.
The year is 2030. You still can't get good airline food and Stars Wars
Part 20 has just been released. Talk about great special effects
you can even feel the heat from the explosions and
smell the Wookies. But what has captured the public's
imagination is the launch of NASA's first interstellar probe that may
give us new clues to new life forms on planets in other solar systems.
It took NASA's dedication to using the fundamentals of biology,
bioinformatics and biomimetics to build this incredible machine. The
Coke can-sized spacecraft will reach and land on a passing asteroid
two years after it is launched from Earth.
Aboard the asteroid, the spacecraft will use its DNA-based
biomimetic system as a blueprint to evolve, adapt and grow into a
more complex exploring and thinking system. It will ride the asteroid
like a parasite until it transforms itself into its next evolvable state --
an intelligent interstellar probe. It will use the asteroid's native
resources to accomplish the first phase of its mission. This may
mean using the asteroid's iron, carbon and other materials to build its
structure, nervous system, and communications. This reconfigurable
hybrid system can adapt form and function to deal with changes and
unanticipated problems. Eventually it will leave its host carrier and
travel at a good fraction of the speed of light out to the stars and other
solar systems.
Such a spacecraft sounds like an ambitious dream, but it could be
possible if we effectively utilize biologically-inspired technologies.
So far, we have been limited to silicon microchips, aerospace
materials and designs that are beginning to emulate biological
functions. This is simply not good enough. In the future we want our
systems to be biologically based not just
act somewhat life-like.
The viewpoint of this workshop should one in which the basic building
blocks of future microdevices are "cells" rather than transistors,
neurons instead of wires and neuro-transmitters in place of electrons.
This does not mean we throw out the last 40 years of
microelectronics. It means that the systems we build in the future will
be based on biology as much as physics, but working side-by-side
with engineers. We will start with components, progress to
reconfigurable devices and arrays and eventually develop
biologically-based evolvable systems.
The greatest attribute that biological systems have over solid-state
systems is the ability to change on their own. This can be to adapt to
different operating environments, to accomplish different tasks or to
renew and repair themselves. A system shouldn't walk off a cliff
simply because someone in mission control sent it forward 10 paces,
or miss looking at a strange bluish liquid because we pointed it
toward a rock.
Think of the systems of the future as "bio-chips" incorporating the
speed of micro-electronics with the adaptability of biological systems,
and toss in some quantum mechanics and photonics for incredible
speed and simultaneous parallelism.
However, the core of these systems will be biological. The
architecture of the chip will not be fixed. The chip will be guided by
DNA-like structures that receive their directions from molecular
messengers. Today, when we build a sensor array we are stuck with
the one we first fabricate. In a biological chip the sensor elements
would be grown. They would also die when they were no longer
needed and be replaced by a new sensor.
When we needed an infrared sensor we would grow one. If it
becomes damaged, say by a cosmic ray, it would self repair. As the
spectral demands move toward the visible spectrum the sensor would
evolve toward the visible spectrum. When the need is for multi-
spectral data the sensor would respond.
Today we grow silicon-based photovoltaic arrays in high temperature
chambers. In the future we may grow them on the spot, and they
may not even look anything like today's solar arrays. The solar
energy conversion system of the future may be based more on
photosynthesis, and instead of flat panels of semi-conductor material,
we may have a "balloon" filled with energy absorbing cells.
Every computer we have built since the ENIAC has largely been
designed to do the same thing -- "crunch numbers". All of the logic
we build into modern computers is based on a fixed -- if complex --
set of rules implemented by comparing numbers. Over the past 4
decades our computers have gotten much faster, moving from a few
million operations per second to a few trillion operations per second
in the very advanced machines being developed by the Department
of Energy. Still, these are computational engines intended to fill the
gap in nuclear testing through calculations. While these are
fantastically powerful computing machines they are also fantastically
energy "hungry". They consume megawatts of power and are still
basically "dumb" machines by biological standards. What they are
designed to do they do very well. They are masters of binary
arithmetic. But they still cannot duplicate the mental processes of
creative thought.
Currently we are on an evolutionary path to reduce the power
consumption of these machines by a factor of about 1000, but this is
still about 1,000,000 times greater than the human brain, which is at
least 1,000,000 times more "intelligent". Simply put, if the brain were
made of the most efficient silicon chips we could possibly make within
the next 5 years, it would still be more than 1,000,000 times more
power hungry than our own biology requires.
How do we make truly intelligent systems in the future? Move from
the silicon paradigm to the "carbon" paradigm. Let the number
crunchers do what they do best and look to biology for true
intelligence. This will also take us into a world where there is no
distinction between hardware and software -- in fact there really is no
software at all.
Software has been a perpetual "nightmare" that all developers have
to deal with. Invariably, software is one of the single greatest causes
of mission failure. We are forced to take incredibly complex
processes and reduce them to enormously long lists of extremely
simple instructions to get even the most powerful computer to do our
bidding. Unfortunately, the more powerful the computer the greater
the risk we are taking. Even the tiniest error can be disastrous, and
no matter how hard we try we can never be sure everything is right.
We have made great strides in recent years to improve this situation
and will continue to do so. But until we develop systems that can truly
think for themselves, learn, follow high level direction, sense and
correct errors and not make stupid mistakes, we will be limited in the
reliability we can build into our missions. Many biological structures
contain these traits, so we must look to them for our inspiration.
Biological systems have the greatest untapped potential to
revolutionize how we design, build and use future space systems.
They are quite simply the most robust and efficient systems in the
universe. Every atom in every molecule and every molecule in every
cell has a specific purpose. Today we talk about systems with
physical features of a fraction of a micron -- the best
microprocessors have features .25 microns across -- and we look to
the day we have features a few nanometers across. But on the
biomolecular scale, a nanometer is huge.
It is in robustness, size and intelligence where the needs of NASA
and the National Cancer Institute converge. Our challenge is two-
fold. We both need to develop nano-scale sensors with sensitivities
and detection capabilities at the molecular level. And we need to
transmit the information we acquire to other systems outside the body
or inside our spacecraft.
NASA' s needs extend beyond human health care to looking for the
most minute signs of life -- past or present -- on other bodies in the
solar system. Because we may not know what their "molecular
fingerprints" might look like, our sensors must have the intelligence to
figure out for themselves whether they have found something
interesting. They must be able to take inventory of what they find and
gauge whether it is biological or geological. In the same way that
sophisticated sonar systems learn to distinguish fish from submarines
-- and even identify which submarine they have found our smart
biological sensors must probe the soil, atmosphere, and water
sources to find indications of life or other interesting processes.
Looking for specific molecules or material inside the body is no
different. We can put nano-scale probes in the body to look for
specific bio-chemical structures, we can characterize what we find
categorize and count them, model them and report the results.
These sensors would be a combination of biology, chemistry and
electronics all integrated on a chip or more likely a mere "speck".
We can use this information to tell us something is wrong or that
everything is O.K. The National Cancer Institute will be concerned
with detecting indications of cancer. This could be an indication of its
onset, the recovery process, the effectiveness of treatment or
detecting unwanted side effects.
This bioinformatic system could also be used to control the delivery of
drugs. The sensors could analyze blood chemistry -- or other
material -- in-vivo to determine what the dosage should be. Equally
important, the sensors could be placed at specific locations where
measurement is optimal or where measurement is critical. We would
know that a drug may be accumulating at too high a rate in a
sensitive part of the body before there is any adverse response. We
would not wait for the body to tell us there is a problem, we would
know it before hand. In effect we could outfit the body with made-
made sensor suite to monitor all critical bodily functions and use this
data to guide therapies of all kind.
While the National Cancer Institute is working to prevent disease and
cure those afflicted with cancer, NASA needs to monitor the health of
our astronauts. We need to know their health before we send them
on a mission. We need to know any changes during a mission, and
we clearly need to know in advance if any condition might arise that
may need medical attention.
Beyond monitoring, we must develop protocols for health in a
microgravity environment. This need may take us back to the
fundamentals, but we need processes that are analytically
understood. We cannot rely on ground-based treatments or
telemedicine, because we are not yet entirely sure how the human
immune system is altered by long-term exposure to microgravity. Nor
can we predict with certainty how zero gravity will affect the way the
body responds to drug treatments. Once we gain some certainty in
those areas, we will be better able to develop machines to assist in
keeping our crews healthy.
The union humans will make with our machines will be far more
intimate than ever before. We are all used to seeing people -- maybe
even ourselves -- connected to monitoring and healthcare delivery
devices. But in the future I just described, they will be hooked up from
inside their bodies and the won't even know the devices are there.
At least we won't sense they are there. We will certainly know they
are there from the information they provide. Whether in our bodies
or in a subsurface channel on a distant planet, our microscopic
devices will provide a continual stream of information about what they
are doing and finding. Such on-board devices will be crucial to health
care in space. An astronaut's medical emergency could in turn
become a tragedy if we were forced to rely on responses from Earth,
which might involve round-trip transmission times of 20-40 minutes.
Health and safety are much better served with real-time assessments
and decisions, which could easily be done with on-board machines.
A smart robot, acting as a health-monitoring "buddy" to a human, will
free an astronaut from ongoing self-monitoring, leaving much more
time for humans to think, create, and experiment. Humans will still
be the ultimate decision makers, using information from the robots.
However, we will be much more informed decision makers than we
are today.
This same technology will also enable us interact more intimately and
in a more informed manner with our machines. We will make our
machines more responsive to our needs and even our moods. By
measuring nerve activity on the surface of the skin, we can determine
if a person is calm or agitated. Brain waves can tell us if some is alert
or tired. Or we might measure hormone levels as an indicator of our
emotional state or stress level. In addition, our "thinking" computers
will respond not just to the words spoken, but they will understand the
intent behind the words as well.
They will play a vital role as scientific partners doing the routine tasks
that require "intelligence" but not necessarily insight and great
expertise. They will also, make us more productive and improve
safety my alerting us to mistakes before we make them, letting us
know when we are showing signs of fatigue even if they are not.
As we continue to explore our universe this relationship will be ever
more important. Wherever we go we will first send robots. And the
more human-like they are in their ability to sense and the more
intelligently they can explore and communicate, the more we will
learn. By giving machines the same kind of health monitoring
systems we design to monitor human health they will be able to also
sense their own condition, reconfigure as necessary to prevailing
conditions and make repairs as needed. They will become
"biological" in character and at least partly biological in substance.
What this will also help us do is to know when people should follow
robots, or travel with them. We clearly want to use robotic systems
whenever possible. Robotic missions are far less risky and expensive
than human missions. Because robots may have limited creative and
intuitive abilities, there will come a time when they reach the limit of
what they can do and it may be time to send people. We are just
now discovering the mechanics of how we think, how we learn, how
we perceive, how we judge and make comparisons. It will be a long
time before robots begin to rival human intelligence though
someday they inevitably will. Clearly, if in the next decade our robotic
exploration of Mars found solid evidence of significant past life or
indisputable evidence of primitive life forms alive today, or
unbelievable geo-chemical or geo-physical phenomena, we would
want to send humans to find out for sure.
We must make sure that where ever we send our machines and our
people, the "biology" we find is the biology that was there before we
started looking for it. We do not want sensors in the body to
introduce any affects that we were not already there and we do not
want to contaminate any samples we find on other planets or leave
anything behind that may confuse future investigations. NASA has
always had a very strong policy to guard against cross- contamination
and with the introduction of biology into sensors and systems we will
have to be even more diligent.
In our biological world of the future we will engineer biological
systems the way we engineer mechanical, chemical and electrical
systems today. Only they will be smaller, smarter and more
sensitive both to what they are doing and to our own personal
needs than any system we can build today.
We cannot achieve the kinds of innovations I have hinted at here by
acting alone. The challenges are so broad that interagency and
interdisciplinary cooperation would have to be intense even if budgets
were unlimited. We in the U.S. need to work with international
partner agencies, but more importantly, we need to reach out to our
sister agencies in America and to a very broad range of researchers,
health care providers, and engineers who can augment our core
capabilities in spacecraft design and orbital research.
NASA has an outstanding working relationship with NIH and NSF,
and together we are supporting a vibrant program addressing
neuroscience, biodiversity, and survival in, and adaptation to,
extreme environments. But this is just a beginning. Now we have the
opportunity to link the fundamental sciences with information
technologies to create an extraordinary capacity for researching and
developing the tools that will expand and project human capabilities
over time and distance.
NASA and the NIH have found a series of common interests in health
care issues and in technology exchange. We have over 20 active
agreements with NIH. Cooperation on the recent Neurolab Mission,
new cooperation on aging research and the continuing success of our
NASA/NIH bioreactor center are shining examples. This is just the
first stage in a trip that will be filled with unbelievable new discoveries.
And we apply our technology to medical problems whenever the
opportunity presents itself. Everything from an artificial heart
inspired by the Space Shuttle Main engines to diagnostic equipment
for measuring bone density quickly and non-invasively. We have
applied telescope technology to breast cancer detection and
laboratory equipment for fluid physics into a groundbreaking
instrument that can scan the eye for microscopic signs of cataract
development.
We have already begun exploiting the DNA-based chips through
research designed to demonstrate the changes in gene expression
between space and ground in human cells. We are pursuing
research into self-organizing systems to help us extract information
from complex data sets and enable robotic systems to conduct self-
directed tasks.
This meeting is a good place to look for even stronger and deeper
connections.
At a fundamental level, I think health care providers and researchers
face similar sorts of problems with the human body as the system of
interest. In the future, our cooperation may go beyond a common
interest in health syndromes associated with space flight and the
utilization of the products of advanced technology. We may share
basic solutions to the problem of creating meaning and understanding
out of ever-expanding data streams from very complex systems.
One area of cooperation might be the astrobiology project: a search
for the very origins of life in the Universe. On May 18, I was at the
NASA Ames Research Center to inaugurate the Astrobiology Institute
located there and led by Nobel Laureate Dr. Baruch Blumberg.
The Institute has a three-pronged approach to the search for life.
First, we will scan the skies with telescopes, searching for other
planets that show evidence of being hospitable to life. Then we will
develop tools to search those planets to increase our understanding
of the fingerprints of life. Once we understand pre-biotic and biotic
stages, the best minds in the world will use the best computer models
and simulation to couple their theories with observations in the lab, on
Earth, on our solar system and, yes, maybe even beyond.
Just imagine the implications for improving life and health here on
Earth when we gain deeper understanding of life throughout the
Universe.
As we move into the age of biology, this partnership between NASA ,
the NCI, and the entire NIH will become even more essential, and I
hope today's workshop provides us the foundation for many more
cooperative efforts.
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