The scientists who can make the best use of the ISS are biologists like myself—a space biologist with experiments to fly on the completed ISS—who are interested in the long-term effects of microgravity on living organisms. For us the ISS as originally planned was going to be—and could still be—a stellar laboratory for studying the growth and development of organisms in space through several generations. The sort of work that we do is fundamental to determining how dangerous extended space flight is for living organisms and how to mitigate the risks.
In the original ISS plans is a particularly elegant but admittedly expensive piece of hardware for biological research: a large centrifuge that would rotate at a speed sufficient to reproduce the 1-g gravitational force of Earth. That centrifuge is key to high-quality space biology simply because it would allow for a 1-g control on all flight experiments. Without it ...
