A Microbe Hunter Plies Her Trade In Space

by NPR March 14, 2017

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NASA astronaut Kate Rubins floats in the International Space Station in September 2016, wearing a spacesuit decorated by patients recovering at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. NASA Johnson/Flickr hide caption

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NASA Johnson/Flickr

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins floats in the International Space Station in September 2016, wearing a spacesuit decorated by patients recovering at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

NASA Johnson/Flickr

A few months ago, at her office in Houston, Kate Rubins was feeling weird.

She was dizzy, she says — “staggering around like a 2-year-old who had just learned to walk.” She was constantly looking at her desk to make sure the objects on top weren’t floating away.

Rubins wasn’t going nuts. She was just readjusting to Earth after living without gravity for four months, hundreds of miles above the planet’s surface.

Floating around up there, with blood rushing to her head like she was hanging upside-down on monkey bars, had been disorienting at first, though she eventually learned to move around using all four limbs.

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Rubins donned a spacesuit to install equipment on the outside of the International Space Station. NASA Johnson/Flickr hide caption

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Rubins donned a spacesuit to install equipment on the outside of the International Space Station.

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Coming back to Earth’s gravity at the end of October was even more disorienting.

But Rubins is used to drastic transitions. Oddly enough, her journey to space had started years before, in central Africa.

“If you put your finger on a map in the middle of Africa, that’s about where our field site was located,” says Rubins, a microbiologist as well as an astronaut.

It was 2007, and an airplane touching down on a grass runway in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had brought Rubins and her colleagues to study a nasty outbreak of monkey pox in a remote village. She’d already spent time studying HIV, Ebola and smallpox in the lab.

This time the airplane wouldn’t be back for six weeks.

Rubins didn’t know it at the time, but that remote expedition gave her experience she’d eventually draw on during a much bigger journey — to outer space.

After the work in Africa, Rubins returned to Cambridge, Mass., and a fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where she spent a lot of time writing grants.

All that paperwork was “mind-numbing,” Rubins says. Just to get a break, a colleague suggested they try filling out a different sort of application — to become NASA astronauts.

“So, I found the application online,” Rubins says, and filled it out on a lark. “I’ll take this chance,” she figured, “and maybe it’ll be a good story someday of how I applied to be an astronaut.”

A few months later, she got a call from Houston asking her to come down for an interview.

Rubins doesn’t fit the normal astronaut profile. Many start out as military pilots, engineers or doctors — not microbiologists studying viruses. But she got the job.

“There’s been a lot of growth in people’s interest in doing biological research on the space station,” explains Julie Robinson, NASA’s chief scientist for the International Space Station program.

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Rubins works on an experiment inside the station’s glovebox. Prior research has suggested that the microgravity of space can change gene expression in certain bacteria and make them more virulent. NASA Johnson/Flickr hide caption

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Rubins works on an experiment inside the station’s glovebox. Prior research has suggested that the microgravity of space can change gene expression in certain bacteria and make them more virulent.

NASA Johnson/Flickr

Before the shuttle program ended in 2011, Robinson says, “our commanders and our pilots had to be ready to land the shuttle, so that implied a really strong piloting [and] aerospace background, and that isn’t as important now.”

But once NASA’s shuttle program ended and U.S. astronauts started hitching rides to space on Russian rockets, the focus for the American personnel shifted away from piloting skills — they no longer have to be counted on to land the shuttle.

“What’s more important now is the time they spend in orbit, when they’re carrying out a variety of experiments,” says Robinson. “We can take what we learn in space to help us understand aging, disease processes, and even the basic biology of cells.”

There’s another reason it’s useful to have molecular biologists and microbiologists in space: While there aren’t viruses like Ebola or monkeypox on the space station (astronauts get quarantined before liftoff to make sure of that), space travel has never been sterile.

Take this moment from the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, for example, when three astronauts on board notice a loose turd floating through their spacecraft.