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>> We are doing an experiment called the light microscopy
module biophysics 3 experiment.
And it's an experiment that involves crystal growth.
We do the experiments on the International Space Station,
because it takes time to grow a crystal.
When we grow a crystal in the ground it can take from days
to weeks or even months.
There's only a few opportunities to do experiments
in the acceleration free environments of space.
To get that kind of timeframe where you need days or weeks
or even a month of time to grow something in that environment,
the only capability available to is the space station.
If you go into a pharmacy and get a drug,
almost every single drug is being developed
through the process of looking at what
that drug interacts with.
Drugs are very small.
The machines in the body
that they interact are also very small.
And to look at them we can't use a regular light microscope we
have to use a process called crystallography.
As the name might suggest,
crystallography involves crystals.
And when we grow crystals in space,
oftentimes we get crystals that are of much higher quality
and we have higher quality crystals,
we get more information, we get more detail
and we can design new pharmaceuticals faster
or better.
Now not all proteins that we send into space grow better.
And we have a process on the ground
where we believe we can identify which proteins will benefit
from microgravity and which proteins won't.
And that means that instead of sending 100 proteins into space
and getting good results from a few of them,
we can send 100 proteins into space where every single one
of them would produce results
that benefit health on the Earth.
What we're doing is using the light microscopy module
on the space station to actually study the crystals as they grow.
Now some crystals, crystals that don't benefit
from microgravity are like building blocks
and they'll grow just as well on the ground
as they will in space.
Some of them are more like jellybeans
and those are the ones that benefit.
If we try to build a wall of jellybeans
on the ground it will fall over.
When we build that similar wall of jellybeans in space
and we extend that wall to three dimensions we get a crystal.
And that's where we get the advantage of using microgravity
to grow crystals and that's what our experiment is about,
using a microscope on the space station
to see whether we've got building blocks or jellybeans.
And then from those observations, using techniques
on the ground which we can predict that and then send
up just the jellybeans and not the building blocks.
Every pharmaceutical that you take today is helped
by a process called structural biology.
What we do is we look at the molecules of life on the very,
very smallest level, the same level
that pharmaceuticals act on.
And if we can understand life in more detail which we hope
to be able to do from the crystals that are grown
in space, we'll be able to build those pharmaceuticals
or design those pharmaceuticals much more rapidly.
Many things that we can't crystalize
on the ground we have no understanding of how they work
at the structural level.
If we can crystalize them in space we get an idea
of how they work and that drives the development
of new cures, new understandings.
So what we're doing is developing a tool
which can be used by a lot of different people to ensure
that space is used efficiently and effectively.