Morning Discussion
Lynn Harper
I just want to reiterate that the output from this workshop will go into
the report to Mike Griffin on July 5. This workshop came together only
18 days ago. As you can see it was pulled together quickly, but only because
of the talented folks here that I want to acknowledge. There was Deb Barnes
who did logistics magic. Thank you Deb. I want to thank the California
Space Grant Foundation, Jim Grady, Phil Smith, Mike Wiskerchen, Ken Cox,
and Joe Carroll who couldn't be here. Joe was a catalyst in helping to
bring this all together. And I want to thank the Silicon Valley Space
Club who volunteered and did a lot of work, they're led by Bruce Pittman.
I want to thank Richard Mains and Mains Associates, who went through all
the biological pieces that contribute to this. That information was supported
by Lockheed Martin. I want to thank John Hines and his staff. And I want
to especially thank InnovationLabs. InnovationLabs provided the facilitation
and they're led by Langdon and Jay, who does this amazing visual synthesis.
I want to thank the rest of their support team, Kim, Leah and Christopher.
This workshop is being broadcast to headquarters and our colleagues at
JSC. We have the Digital Mud Studios crew, Cindy and Andrew, to thank
for that. When we asked for help people came in fast and without their
efforts this would not have been possible.
I think we need to address the credibility issue, which is if the RWV is so good why isn't it a pharmaceutical standard and in more use.
I want to reframe the question. It's really about: if people aren't even using the RWV what makes us think they would then go do the harder thing of going into space?
The main reason is that a lot of people don't even know about the RWV. I think NASA hasn't done a good job of getting the word out to highly critical medical journals. It's also very expensive. A lot of investigators won't put that kind of money into something that they have never heard much about. It took us seven years to start getting data on it. Until you get it out in peer review journals people will be highly skeptical. The bottom line is that it's gaining wider acceptance now because it's starting to appear in respected journals.
Now with regards to going in space there's the question of why should you spend more money to fly in space when you can use the RWV and get a lot of the same attributes. But it's much more complex than that. Any piece of information we can get to plug into the paradigm is going to be very important. By flying in space you can see what the model is truly like.
How many people are using it?
We have 52 collaborators and 25 people using our RWV Center. So far we've had 52 investigators. Josh at NIH now has a center too. He's worked a lot with the 3-D cells as well. With anything that's new there's a learning curve and that's part of the reason it's been somewhat slow in its adoption by the research community.
About ten years ago when I did a benefits study I was looking for inventions that would be good research tool candidates. The RWV was developed to solve the problem of keeping the biological specimens alive for payload not really for research, but they saw what it was capable of. There was some anger with NASA early on because there were questions around who owned the IP, and that got in the way of marketing it. When you look at commercialization it can occur quick, but then sometimes it can take years. And this is a limited market, the research community -- so things will take time.
The anecdote I heard from Tim Hammond is that he didn't first read about it in peer review journals, but in an airplane magazine.
The good thing is that the data really does look good.
The discussion that was a big concern was marketing. If the RWV has a lot of potential and the word took so long to get out about it, then how can we get people interested in using spaceflight? There's a huge piece of public relations and marketing that we need to address.
One of the things that became clear is what Bruce Pittman said, "this is the greatest story never told."
Lynn, we did have a licensing problem at JSC but we've had a lot of problems with tech transfer and utilization not being properly publicized.
I remember talking with one of the fellows at headquarters and he told me to look at the bio-reactor. I don't think NASA realized it's potential for other things.
Science is about truth. The other link is the ability to make money. Science is worth a certain value, and if you can apply science to solving problems that affect humanity then you can make money. Then there's the development side -- you have to get the people who can see the profit potential so that they come in and bring their dollars for investment.
Langdon Morris
Do you have any thoughts about yesterday's work?
I found yesterday fascinating but I was somewhat unsatisfied. There was a lot of uncertainty.
The rhythm today will be quite a bit slower. It's a learning curve that we're compressing so in the first day you have to absorb a lot of information from a variety of areas. Today though we will focus on developing a business case for this.
Different parts of this collaborative process are comfortable for different types of people. Some parts of the creative process are highly dissonant for certain types of people, then in other stages of the process there are personality types who are more comfortable, while others can become more uncomfortable.
Will we get some kind of output from this session?
All the material that's been done here will go up on a website and that should be ready by Friday. It will be accessible to everyone. That will basically act as an appendix to the report that is sent in to Mike on July 5.
What I'd like you to do now is go back to yesterday's teams and take about 15 minutes to think about how you want to tell the story of what you accomplished.