3 Things Microbes in Space Can Teach Us About Our Health on Earth
We all know the typical astronaut accessories—the EVA suit, the oxygen tanks, the radio assembly. But there's an invisible part of each space mission that's often overlooked: the trillions of microorganisms that hitch a ride.
Observing responses of pathogens in space could help scientists figure out how to outsmart them when they cause trouble on Earth.
Dr. Sarah Wallace is a NASA microbiologist who aims to keep microbes from causing problems for U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station. According to Wallace, research on microorganisms in space has more than cosmic importance. It can also reveal things about our health here on Earth:
1) Avoiding disease isn't all about maintaining a sterile environment.
NASA has a great track record of keeping the crew healthy on space missions. But surprisingly, it's not from having kept the space flight environment as sterile as possible.
Wallace says, "We [monitor] the environment but unless we find something that's medically significant, or [in] super high numbers, we're not going to do anything."
Not only is it impossible for astronauts to live in completely sterile quarters—crew members, after all, are microbe-shedding machines—but it may not even be desirable, given what we now know about the human microbiome. Scientists have found that the entire community of microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses) living in and on us likely have an active role in keeping us healthy. This means that down on the ground we need to let go of the germophobe idea that eradicating all microbes is always better for our health.
2) Disease-causing microbes change their behavior under different conditions.
Remember the recent E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to romaine lettuce? We're still grappling with a lot of pathogen problems here on Earth. One reason is that scientists are still learning which strategies these disease-causing microorganisms are capable of employing under different conditions.
Space missions are associated with a major shift in gut microbiome composition—as shown in NASA's twin study.
Wallace says experiments with Salmonella Typhimurium showed that the pathogen became more virulent in space. Yet curiously, the opposite seemed to happen to Staphylococcus aureus under space-flight-like conditions—it became more benign.
"The way these organisms have evolved, certain triggers [in the space flight environment] might be dictating how they're responding," Wallace says.
Observing these responses could help scientists figure out how to outsmart the pathogen when it causes trouble on Earth. "It's giving us some great insights into how we could target them differently in the future," she explains.
3) Major shifts in the gut microbiome could affect health in specific ways.
Scientists still have a lot to learn about which changes in an adult's gut microbiome actually cause a change in health status. In fact, microbiome-focused therapeutics companies are in hot pursuit of these connections.
Space missions are associated with a major shift in gut microbiome composition—as shown in NASA's twin study, which followed astronaut Scott Kelly during a year aboard the ISS while his identical twin brother Mark (a retired astronaut) stayed on the ground. Scott experienced simultaneous changes in telomere length and bone formation; were these related to the gut microbial differences?
Wallace says a soon-to-be-published study of nine additional astronauts could help answer this question. The research may reveal how closely gut microbiome shifts track health outcomes, and the reversibility of the changes.
She emphasizes the science from her lab isn't meant to help only the small minority of humans who will ever go to space: "That's always our goal—that our research is helping people on Earth."
When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.
“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.
Over the next several years, Savannah’s seizures continued and worsened. By age five Savannah was having seizures dozens of times each day, and her parents noticed significant developmental delays. Savannah was unable to use the restroom and functioned more like a toddler than a five-year-old.
Doctors were mystified: Tracy and her husband had no family history of seizures, and there was no event—such as an injury or infection—that could have caused them. Doctors were also confused as to why Savannah’s seizures were happening so frequently despite trying different seizure medications.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Savannah with Lennox-Gaustaut Syndrome, or LGS, an epilepsy disorder with no cure and a poor prognosis. People with LGS are often resistant to several kinds of anti-seizure medications, and often suffer from developmental delays and behavioral problems. People with LGS also have a higher chance of injury as well as a higher chance of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) due to the frequent seizures. In about 70 percent of cases, LGS has an identifiable cause such as a brain injury or genetic syndrome. In about 30 percent of cases, however, the cause is unknown.
Watching her daughter struggle through repeated seizures was devastating to Tracy and the rest of the family.
“This disease, it comes into your life. It’s uninvited. It’s unannounced and it takes over every aspect of your daily life,” said Tracy in an interview with Today.com. “Plus it’s attacking the thing that is most precious to you—your kid.”
Desperate to find some answers, Tracy began combing the medical literature for information about epilepsy and LGS. She enrolled in college courses to better understand the papers she was reading.
“Ironically, I thought I needed to go to college to take English classes to understand these papers—but soon learned it wasn’t English classes I needed, It was science,” Tracy said. When she took her first college science course, Tracy says, she “fell in love with the subject.”
Tracy was now a caregiver to Savannah, who continued to have hundreds of seizures a month, as well as a full-time student, studying late into the night and while her kids were at school, using classwork as “an outlet for the pain.”
“I couldn’t help my daughter,” Tracy said. “Studying was something I could do.”
Twelve years later, Tracy had earned a PhD in neurobiology.
After her post-doctoral training, Tracy started working at a lab that explored the genetics of epilepsy. Savannah’s doctors hadn’t found a genetic cause for her seizures, so Tracy decided to sequence her genome again to check for other abnormalities—and what she found was life-changing.
Tracy discovered that Savannah had a calcium channel mutation, meaning that too much calcium was passing through Savannah’s neural pathways, leading to seizures. The information made sense to Tracy: Anti-seizure medications often leech calcium from a person’s bones. When doctors had prescribed Savannah calcium supplements in the past to counteract these effects, her seizures had gotten worse every time she took the medication. Tracy took her discovery to Savannah’s doctor, who agreed to prescribe her a calcium blocker.
The change in Savannah was almost immediate.
Within two weeks, Savannah’s seizures had decreased by 95 percent. Once on a daily seven-drug regimen, she was soon weaned to just four, and then three. Amazingly, Tracy started to notice changes in Savannah’s personality and development, too.
“She just exploded in her personality and her talking and her walking and her potty training and oh my gosh she is just so sassy,” Tracy said in an interview.
Since starting the calcium blocker eleven years ago, Savannah has continued to make enormous strides. Though still unable to read or write, Savannah enjoys puzzles and social media. She’s “obsessed” with boys, says Tracy. And while Tracy suspects she’ll never be able to live independently, she and her daughter can now share more “normal” moments—something she never anticipated at the start of Savannah’s journey with LGS. While preparing for an event, Savannah helped Tracy get ready.
“We picked out a dress and it was the first time in our lives that we did something normal as a mother and a daughter,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
A sleek, four-foot tall white robot glides across a cafe storefront in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, holding a two-tiered serving tray full of tea sandwiches and pastries. The cafe’s patrons smile and say thanks as they take the tray—but it’s not the robot they’re thanking. Instead, the patrons are talking to the person controlling the robot—a restaurant employee who operates the avatar from the comfort of their home.
It’s a typical scene at DAWN, short for Diverse Avatar Working Network—a cafe that launched in Tokyo six years ago as an experimental pop-up and quickly became an overnight success. Today, the cafe is a permanent fixture in Nihonbashi, staffing roughly 60 remote workers who control the robots remotely and communicate to customers via a built-in microphone.
More than just a creative idea, however, DAWN is being hailed as a life-changing opportunity. The workers who control the robots remotely (known as “pilots”) all have disabilities that limit their ability to move around freely and travel outside their homes. Worldwide, an estimated 16 percent of the global population lives with a significant disability—and according to the World Health Organization, these disabilities give rise to other problems, such as exclusion from education, unemployment, and poverty.
These are all problems that Kentaro Yoshifuji, founder and CEO of Ory Laboratory, which supplies the robot servers at DAWN, is looking to correct. Yoshifuji, who was bedridden for several years in high school due to an undisclosed health problem, launched the company to help enable people who are house-bound or bedridden to more fully participate in society, as well as end the loneliness, isolation, and feelings of worthlessness that can sometimes go hand-in-hand with being disabled.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that [people with disabilities] feel they are a burden to society, or that they fear their families suffer by caring for them,” said Yoshifuji in an interview in 2020. “We are dedicating ourselves to providing workable, technology-based solutions. That is our purpose.”
Shota Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy. Ory Labs, Inc.
Wanting to connect with others and feel useful is a common sentiment that’s shared by the workers at DAWN. Marianne, a mother of two who lives near Mt. Fuji, Japan, is functionally disabled due to chronic pain and fatigue. Working at DAWN has allowed Marianne to provide for her family as well as help alleviate her loneliness and grief.Shota, Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy, agrees. "There are many difficulties in my daily life, but I believe my life has a purpose and is not being wasted," he says. "Being useful, able to help other people, even feeling needed by others, is so motivational."