Deep Space Pharma

[Image: The International Space Station].

Wired reports that "a swaggering Texas investor" wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting drug lab – growing hi-tech medicines in space.
After all, you can do "miraculous things" in microgravity:

Disease-causing proteins crystallize so well – growing larger and clearer – that finding a drug to stop the protein's damaging activities could happen months, if not years, faster.

In which case, putting architecture into space might have inadvertantly helped catalyze a cure for cancer.

[Image: A protein crystal – a kind of micro-ziggurat].

While it seems next to impossible to believe that we'll be able to maintain flights back and forth between Earth and the ISS in a post-oil economy, it is nonetheless quite fascinating to think that, someday, depressed teenagers in suburban Arizona might pop space-made anti-depressants, affecting hormonal moods through the use of literally extra-terrestrial substances; or musicians in small apartments in Prague might swallow attention deficit drugs crystallized in microgravity, writing the world's most intricate symphonies in response; or perhaps even illegal new hallucinogens will be developed in windowless, symmetrical rooms hovering 250 miles above the Earth's surface, and they'll be taken by Rem Koolhaas-reading students at SCI-Arc who then draw up plans for self-healing tentacular cities, under the influence of space...

[Image: Another protein crystal].

Either way, imagine that as your summer job! No longer connected to the surface of the Earth, wearing a hermetically sealed white suit, growing proteins.
Read more @ Wired.