Q & A | 10/09/2008 6:00 am
When Will Earth People Live on the Moon? (Audio)
Dr. Katja Van Herle courtesy of Mary Wells
Editor’s Note: Dr. Katja Van Herle is a professor of Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where she heads the Community Outreach for Education Center (CORE). The division works to make a difference in people’s health and overall lives by educating them about basic science research. She’s also a clinical faculty member at the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine, where she sees patients in a private practice, offering research knowledge to better their lives through a program called from "Bench to Bedside."
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Below is an edited conversation between Mary Wells and Dr. Katja Van Herle about the realities of human life on the moon. To hear the conversation in its entirety, click the play button on the audio icon above.
MARY: Katja, the last time that we talked you started to tell me something that I thought was extremely interesting and thought about a lot since. You started to tell me about working with NASA and various other groups, to develop the possibility of earth people living on the moon.
KATJA: Right.
MARY: And I’m just going to turn this over to you and maybe you could say how that got started and where it is now and what it will be like.
KATJA: Well, you know, Mary, of course, you’re very astute because it is very exciting. My partner, my co-director of our division of Community Outreach at Scripps Research, is a woman named Jacinta Behne who has been working with an educational laboratory called McREL Laboratories. Their research on education sets standards on how we basically educate our children, through “standards” that the government asks research education laboratories to set. Jacinta has had long-standing relationships with NASA and when she came to our division, about two years ago, what she opened my mind to was that space science is not so far from any other kind of science – biologic science and others. And NASA is actually ahead of medicine in this because what they saw was that people weren’t understanding the importance of what space missions mean to us as a community – a global community. So what does that mean? Well, that means that we’re talking about translational science, taking research and biology and applying it to our healthcare even through what we learn in space sciences. NASA’s been looking at this kind of stuff for many more decades than physicians and medical researchers have.
So what they’ve been saying is that the space sciences ultimately help us understand the knowledge we will need not only for our personal health in the future, but how this applies to where we’ll live, how we will deal with environmental issues and whatnot. So Jacinta’s role through her work with McREL and with NASA has been all about that. And that’s what led us to work on developing, expanding relationships with JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Pasadena, CA, and with NASA. These are informal relationships through the knowledge that she has brought to me. And what has come out of this is that we are seeing that ultimately, if we really want to look far out there, we will see where our future will be, on what planets, and even on the moon. And then you may ask, “Well, where are we in this as scientists?” Where we are at the moment is in the process of developing systems for human life – pods, housing, homes, auditoriums, schools — that will be on the moon. Now why is that so important?
Read more about: Audio, Change the World, Dr. Katja Van Herle, Environment, Health, Medicine, Moon, Science, UCLA
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Eliza Dodd
Great Post and Informative!