NIH and NASA ready for take-off

After a couple years of discussion, NIH and NASA are teaming up to send your biomedical experiments into space. The two agencies are accepting proposals for a two-phased linkurl:5-year grants;http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-09-120.html that would first give investigators $150,000 to make their lab experiments feasible in space, and then provide a follow-on $300,000 for the "flight phase." Nine NIH institutes will be participating in the grant. Experiments in space have already studied bone and muscle deterioration in micro-gravity, as well as topics related to infectious disease and cancer, according to an NIH press release. Last year, the space shuttle Discovery carried on board an experiment meant to explore the production of a Salmonella vaccine in space. Doing science in space can be a bit of a tricky operation. Astronauts without laboratory training have to be able to execute all aspects of the experiment with ease. If your experiments require too much technical expertise,...