ROBERT MARKOWITZIt was early morning in Kazakhstan on July 7, 2016, when virologist Kate Rubins donned her spacesuit and rode a battered elevator hundreds of feet up the side of an icy rocket—the colossal structure “creaking and moaning” from its load of cryogenic fuel. She entered the new Soyuz spacecraft and endured a rumbly, bumpy launch, headed to the International Space Station, 400 kilometers up.
Rubin’s intense training regimen did little to mentally prepare her for the “controlled explosion” that was the launch, she says. During the next 115 days on the station, after mastering how to pipette water globules in zero gravity and how to keep her equipment from floating away, Rubins cultured cardiomyoctes and, using a portable handheld sequencer, became the first to person to carry out DNA sequencing in space.1
The switch from running a laboratory on Earth to performing experiments in space may seem like a formidable career leap. But for Rubins it was a natural progression, totally in line with her penchant for adventure and her “willingness to assume risk,” says her PhD coadvisor David Relman of Stanford University.
Prior to joining NASA, “Kate spent ...
