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On a cool December afternoon in 2018, on a viewing platform at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida, Jordan Greco watched his research project leave planet Earth. As chief scientific officer of the Connecticut-based biotech LambdaVision, he had spent years developing a protein-based artificial retina to treat patients blinded or severely visually impaired by retinal degenerative diseases. At 1:15 PM that day, a Falcon 9 launch rocket lit up the sky as it blasted the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station (ISS), carrying onboard the proteins that make up Greco’s artificial retina.
“It didn’t really hit me until we were sitting on the balcony at the NASA complex and seeing that rocket off in the distance,” Greco recalls. “Our protein, our experiment that we’ve been working on for years, is on that thing.”
Once the SpaceX ...
