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Meet the woman preparing women for birth in outer space

Patrick Durkin
Patrick DurkinBOSS Deputy editor

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Lucy McRae is a sci-fi artist and “body architect’’ who uses technology and design to help the body adapt to extreme environments. Her projects include the invention of a swallowable perfume and a dress that senses emotions, but for several years she has been obsessed with how we will conceive in space if we hope to colonise another planet.

“We have to be thinking about this before we get there, right?” McRae asks. “You have to imagine we won’t be birthed normally, maybe we are grown in petri dishes and never experience the first hug of a mother and how will that change human connection and can we genetically engineer touch?”

McRae was announced as one of the members of the 2018 World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leadership fellowship, a five year peer-to-peer mentoring and coaching program. Previous members of the program have included Leonardo DiCaprio, Anderson Cooper, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. Lucy is the first Australian artist to be named and says that artists and scientists are working more closely than ever.

Lucy McRae's Astronauts Aerobics Institute included an isolation chamber that prepares the body for space travel. 

Star Trek has massively influenced scientists for a long time and we have always used fiction as a way of imagining where we are headed to give a future perspective on the world,” McRae tells BOSS.

“This interest in the far future first started when I led a far-future design research lab at Philips. We were developing wearable technology, whether it was an emotion-sensitive dress or an electronic tattoo, we were trying to understand how emerging technologies would meet and merge with the body and what it would mean for an electronics company.

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“Fast-forward to meeting an economist from NASA randomly on a bus at Whistler. I explained that I was a body architect, I use the body as a conceptual space to speculate around biotechnologies and the future of health medicines. He turned around to me and said that NASA is concerned about the complications of growing a fetus in zero gravity. That was the point where I began dedicating a lot of my practice to understanding the effects of zero gravity on the body.”

Biological choreography

McRae, who recently returned to Melbourne after living in London for 16 years, created the Astronauts Aerobics Institute, launched at London Design Festival in 2014, which included an isolation chamber that prepares the body for space travel.

McRae has met Elon Musk’s Space X team and Dr Lynn Harper from NASA’s Ames Research Centre who told her we need to progressively move up the food chain with frogs, fish, mice and rats to tackle the problem of giving birth in space.

“Dr Harper spoke about how the body’s entire biological choreography behaves dramatically different to Earth, as if the body is floating underwater. As a consequence, collagen grows differently as does the skeletal system with lack of gravity. Specifics regarding actual physiological, hormonal, psychological behaviours of zero gravity and the body have been tested on frogs, fish, mice and rats but anything further up the food chain is yet to be tested.”

Lucy Mcrae is delving into ''deep space foetology''. Julian Love

McRae believes that CRISPR technology, which she describes as a kind of molecular scissors used to precisely cut out faulty DNA such as disease, “will be a huge solution to [what she calls] deep space fetology. But what are the evolutionary consequences of tweaking or deliberately modifying life from scratch?”

Artist Lucy McRae. Michael Clayton Jones

Patrick Durkin is Melbourne bureau chief and BOSS deputy editor. He writes on news, business and leadership. Connect with Patrick on Twitter. Email Patrick at pdurkin@afr.com

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