Science Magazine Podcast Making drugs in space, the man who fed India, and what narwhals can teach us about changing seas
Aug 27, 2026
Michael Greshko, science reporter covering efforts to produce drugs and tissues in microgravity. Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, marine mammal scientist who put CTD sensors on narwhals to sample East Greenland fjords. Priyambada Jayakumar, historian who wrote M. S. Swaminathan’s biography. They discuss space biomanufacturing and its economics, narwhals revealing warm Atlantic water intrusion, and Swaminathan’s role in India’s Green Revolution.
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Design Space Manufacturing Around Big Economic Gains
- Make space biomanufacturing economically viable only if it delivers large, not marginal, improvements over Earth processes.
- Companies must solve end-to-end reliability: launch, orbit ops, re-entry, recovery, and reproducible quality for regulators.
Technical Progress Is Bringing Larger Space Bioexperiments Within Reach
- Improvements in sample return and in-orbit experiment sophistication are making larger-scale space biomanufacturing experiments feasible now.
- Early promising results include more efficient cardiac organoid production and protein films for vision restoration.
China Is Rapidly Advancing Space Biolab Research
- China is an active center for space biomanufacturing research, using its Tiangong station to study stem cells and early embryonic development in microgravity.
- This adds an international element of scientific competition and rapid progress.
