By Dianne Anderson

Some Netflix armchair scientists may be happy to learn that, at least theoretically, Afrofuturism is cutting edge and already here.

Ronke Olabisi doesn’t just celebrate Black History Month – she is Black history in the making.

She imagines a vast universe of possibilities through tissue regeneration, skin and bone, and more, but she’s not just contemplating the here and now. It’s more like 100 years into intergalactic possibilities.

Some of the best things that blow her mind are uncharted territory, those things she has yet to learn. One, among so many recent reports of AI, caught her attention that a brain implant  helped a paraplegic to walk.

“They gave the AI the capacity to control his legs through this implant, it skipped the spine. The thing about AI is they don’t always know how or why it does what it does. They gave it control, and he was able to walk again voluntarily,” said Olabisi, Ph.D. Associate Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering UCI Natural Sciences II.

It’s still unclear how it works, but she wonders where humanity is headed with the help of AI, and how someday researchers may ask AI to read over the vast body of literature, and interpret it. Everyone is making incremental steps today, but perhaps AI could help humanity move in giant leaps.

For now, she said her field is just trying to grow new tissue for people. Understanding how to grow sheets of skin for burn victims is for the most part easy, and it has been around for a while.

The process is how oxygen diffuses out, and she said that no cell in the human body is more than two human hairs thick away from a blood supply. But it is difficult to recreate a vasculature system to work in such a tiny space, while organs like skin and bladder do not require the same type of support.

“When growing skin, we can grow it in a solution because we don’t need a vascular network, we just put it in a petri dish and put a whole lot of fluid on top,” she said. “But it’s hard when we get to the liver, the kidneys, the lungs because they need an extensive vascular supply.”

Olabisi, whose lifelong love of science has its childhood beginnings in science fiction, holds her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, from UW-Madison, an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering, UM-Ann Arbor, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, UM-Ann Arbor and her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

Shows like X-Files and the “Scully Effect” led many young girls into STEM fields during the 90s. For herself, she was drawn more into Star Trek, including one of the latest, Star Trek Discovery, which both upset her social sensibilities and inspired her.

To start, she couldn’t figure out why the Black woman had to suffer consequences for doing the same thing that white Captain Kirk got away with. But before long, the show turned a bold, brave corner as Sonequa Martin-Green took over as captain.

Star gazing is heady stuff, as is wondering about how to preserve life on the planet, something that starts with her father, who like many Nigerian families, was uncompromising on education. As a child she wanted to be an astronaut so she got into studying engineering.

At the same time, she knows Black children are not getting the education they deserve and society’s social ills are at its base. Part of fixing the school system is not blaming the victim, but getting kids what they need to learn.

“It is very hard to care about school if you don’t know if you’re going to live to be 20, or go home hungry every night. It’s so mind-boggling to me that the people in power can’t understand that. If I’m hungry I don’t care that five plus five equals ten,” she said.

Dr. Olabisi, who has researched orthopedic tissue engineering and regenerative medicine for injury, aging, disease, and space flight, said that there is ample research to show the disparities are rooted in poverty.

She believes the issue is the income versus wealth gap. A Black family in urban environments making $50,000 a year often has two parents working, whereas often a white family with the same income has a stay-at-home mom for free childcare.

Still, she holds out hope that the education system will come up to the idea that all children deserve to learn science for the future of the earth.

Some far-out concepts are close to home, for example, her work with the first Black astronaut, Mae Jemison, and the 100 Year Starship project on pace for space travel to another solar system within 100 years.

That thought experiment is more than a notion. In looking at the Apollo missions to the moon, she said so many earthly advancements came out of inventions that were needed for the spaceships, like satellites.

“They built the satellite to talk to the astronauts and because of that, we have GPS, cell phones, and weather satellites to warn us about hurricanes. We have all these things because we were trying to get to the moon,” she said.

Shoe insoles were also made for astronauts, as were cordless drills for moon rocks. Water recycling and filtration were invented for the space trip. She said that engineers like to simplify science to make the benefits available to larger systems.

Spaceships are built for a small environment, nothing can be taken on the trip except what can be reused and recycled.

“It’s hurtling through space, that’s a small example of earth. We don’t have anything else, but we brought with us,” she said. “That’s the idea of the 100 Year Starship.”

Whether society makes it to a distant planet or not, she said the idea spawns an explosion of inventions, and the science fiction of yesterday is happening today, and yet to come.

It stirs questions of how to get to another star, and what’s needed, like renewable energy.

“Of course it will help on earth. If it’s going to take a long time, we might need suspended animation. It could help people that have certain conditions where only a handful of surgeons in the world can now operate,” she said.

But for all the otherworldly possibilities, if she could change anything on earth, it would be to make children secure, and pay teachers what they deserve.

“No kid would have to worry about safety, hunger or shelter,” she said. “In other countries, teachers are professionals and paid the way doctors and lawyers are paid. I would teach people how to teach math and science so it’s not boring, but fun.”

To learn more of her research, see https://www.olabisilab.com/