A conversation with Johnathan Galazka, a scientist in the Space Biosciences Research Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

Transcript

Host (Matthew Buffington):Welcome to the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast, episode 39. Today we meet with Jonathan Galazka, a NASA scientist in our Space Biosciences Research Branch. We discuss a wide range of science experiments on the International Space Station. Of which, one is called GeneLab where NASA conducts research beyond gravity to search for answers in space that one day will lead to discoveries that push back the frontiers of understanding on Earth. As we like to say, working off the Earth, for the Earth. We also talk about his work on synthetic biology and how you could possibly use organisms to clean up CO2 levels on the International Space Station. Well, here is Jonathan Galazka.

Music

Host:What brought you to NASA? What brought you to Silicon Valley? Tell us about yourself, John.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, so I’ve been at NASA for two years now, one year in my current position. And to a degree, ending up at NASA kind of feels like destiny or fate. Like a lot of people at NASA, my first love was spaceflight and space science and cosmology. But during school, I fell in love with biology. And so I had got a biology degree in my undergraduate, and then did my Ph.D. at Berkeley and kind of left space for a while. I was transitioning out of my last postdoc and looking for the next thing and reached out to my contacts here, and NASA was doing this new thing called space synthetic biology and immediately brought everything back, that excitement of space travel and exploration, but applying all of these skills that I had been developing for the last 10 years. And so it really feels like the perfect place for me to apply my skills and my passion for biology towards this previous dream of space exploration.

Host:Now you said you were at Berkeley. Were you born here? Are you always in the Bay Area?

Jonathan Galazka: No, I was born in Ohio.

Host:Nice.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, so I went to school in Cincinnati. Then after undergraduate, I think like a lot of people, was looking for what was next. Right?

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: I actually did a year of AmeriCorps.

Host:Nice.

Jonathan Galazka: So I came out west and was up in Washington state near Mount Adams, one of the volcanoes up there. I was actually living at a ranger station for a year. Every day we’d get up and we go out to some trails or repairing areas and do work. A lot of them worked for the Forest Service. That’s really where I fell in love with the West Coast, the wilderness here. Then I went to Portland and did some work, got back into science. So I went to Oregon Health Sciences University and I worked actually in a protozoa parasitology lab. They were interested in diseases like malaria, which are caused by these protozoa parasites. We were trying to figure out the nitty-gritty of how they work, what do they eat at a molecular level. And if you can figure out what they eat, can you then stop them from being able to eat that?

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: And so if you can do that, then you have a drug. So you have a drug that keeps them from eating their food, then you can, in principle, kill malaria. That was the idea. We were very far from that. We were doing basic science.

Host:I’m sure, sitting out, working in a park at ranger stations, I imagine the view of the sky has got to be insane.

Jonathan Galazka: Absolutely. We would oftentimes in the summer months, we had cabins, bunkhouses we could stay in. But I’d say half of us would just take our sleeping bags and sleep out under the sky. Absolutely inspiring. There was the, I believe it was the Pleiades meteor shower while we were there. It was a pretty big one. And so we all hiked up to one of the peaks there, it was called Angel’s Rest, I think – there’s a lot of Angel’s Rest in the world – and watched that. Again, just one of these stunning, almost religious experiences connecting with the cosmos, one of those things I’ll never forget.

Host:I’m sure that was one of those things even before going to, I’m guess, University of Cincinnati?

Jonathan Galazka: Exactly, yeah.

Host:Bearcats. Right?

Jonathan Galazka: You got it.

Host:See, I’m from Ohio.

Jonathan Galazka: Okay, you are? Where?

Host:I’m from Dayton.

Jonathan Galazka: All right, yeah. Right up the road. The D.

Host:I’d imagine even before then if you studied biology, did you always have the struggle of astrophysics and space…?

Jonathan Galazka: Absolutely.

Host:…or biology? You’re getting pulled in both ways.

Jonathan Galazka: I was. When I was first trying to make decisions about graduate degrees and pursuing science as a career, I did look into some astrobiology programs. Those programs are small and very selective, and honestly I didn’t get selected, and that pushed me into more of a general biology degree. So I got a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology, which is like a kind of everything degree at Berkeley. It ended up being a great experience. But again, it was kind of one of these fate things where I didn’t get what I was going for. I ended up down a different road. But I think it all really worked out well for me.

Host:Yeah, it’s funny, because people probably don’t think of studying malaria in some park in Oregon as eventually a road to NASA.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah. I think you just can’t predict where your life is going to go and what’s going to take you where you want to be. I think we all have that story. Right? No one ends up where they think they’re going to be, with a few exceptions.

Host:And in NASA in general, but especially here over at Ames, there’s such a breadth of different areas. It’s like you name it, chances are there’s somebody working on it.

Jonathan Galazka: Absolutely.

Host:When you’re doing, I guess, your postdoc, did you have some contacts at Ames or was it just NASA in general? How did you end up figuring out placement?

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, I had a contact here. When I was finishing my graduate degree and looking for my first post doc, I was in touch with someone who was here. So I did a post doc, again, back in Oregon. And then that wrapped up and I was looking for the next thing and reached out to my network. Networking is very important in science and elsewhere. Keeping those contacts is critical.

Host:And so you landed over here. Was it immediately working on synthetic biology you said, or where did you end up landing and what were you working on?

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, so I immediately ended working in synthetic biology, which is a catchall for a lot of things. My principle project was to understand the epigenetic changes that yeast undergo. Epigenetic is a loaded word, which you can talk about, that they undergo in response to exposure to microgravity. So there’s a lot of scientists at NASA Ames who are looking at how biology responds to microgravity, or spaceflight in general. And so we’re interested in how mice do that, plants do that, worms do that, yeast, other microbes.

And so my project was to understand how yeast would respond to spaceflight. Then the idea was once we knew that, we could then use that information to engineer those yeasts to do important things. Yeasts are commonly used on Earth to make all kinds of things, one of which is beer.

But now a lot of companies and academics are reengineering yeast to make things, drugs. There’s a company who’s making an antimalarial drug in yeast. And so the idea of using yeast and microbes in general as production platforms, so a microbial factory is real, and it’s being done on Earth. And we want to extend that out to Mars, the space station, the moon. There’s a lot of good reasons to do that.

Host:For fans of the podcast, probably remember past episodes. One was with David Smith who was working on bioscience experiments that were going up into the International Space Station. And we also did one with Lynn Rothschild, who’s worked a lot on synthetic biology. That was more, as you were saying, looking at biology almost as a tool to create things. If you’re on your way to Mars, why bring a ton headache medicine in bulk, or if you have some organisms that can create those drugs for you, it’s a bit more efficient. You’re working with some of that kind of stuff, or is it more actual science experiments, or are you going more theory?

Jonathan Galazka: All of the above. A lot of us here at NASA Ames are split in many different ways.

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: I’m on multiple projects doing multiple things, thinking about many different things. The reality is they all come together is the ultimate goal. I do work on pure science, what happens when you take organisms to space. That’s part of my job. I’m working on a project called GeneLab, which you may know something about, which is about pushing that information out to the public. But then I also have my synthetic biology work. So the simple answer is I’m doing all of it.

Host:All of the above. Of course.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, right. It all comes together. This is how science works, is you lay down this foundation of answering basic questions because you don’t know which questions are important until you go to try and do something, and then you realize that random bit of information is really important, those really aren’t that important. But it’s this nonlinear thing where you have to do a lot of foundational work to build up to something very applied.

And we run into this all the time in trying to do applied synthetic biology work, is there are these knowledge gaps. We realize, “Let’s go find out what people know about this.” You go and you search, and nobody knows the answer. And so somebody needs to go figure that out, and it can’t be us. A lot of people are working on this. But we struggle with that tension all the time.

Host:You had mentioned GeneLab. I’m trying to remember. Is that the one that’s a database where you’re trying to…? Some of this information you’re going to the space station, but like a shared database that everybody can put all their information in, if I understand correctly.

Jonathan Galazka: Exactly. It’s a public database.

Host:An open source kind of thing.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah. Your listeners can go home and search GeneLab and download all this data. And that’s the idea is it’s very difficult to get biological experiments up to the space station. They’re very precious, extremely expensive, hard to do. There’s only a few astronauts up there to do them. And so we need to squeeze out as much data and also as much analysis from all of those experiments.

And so the idea is that GeneLab is a platform to get that data out to everyone who wants to look at it: scientists at universities, kids at high school, hobbyists in Silicon Valley. There’s lots of hobbyists we’d love for data scientists in Silicon Valley to look at this data. Again, it’s one of those philosophies that you don’t know who’s going to make these discoveries.

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: And so you just get it out there, and we hope that getting more eyes on it is going to get more value out of this. That’s the general principle of GeneLab.

Host:And so looking at other experiments, stuff that you’re sending up to the space station, anything specific that you’re working on? I find it fascinating these experiments that are going up. Because not only are you trying to answer a fundamental scientific question, but you got to build this thing in a way so that it can survive a launch and it can rattle around. It’s got to be durable. What are some of the stuff that you’re working on?

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, I don’t have a flight experiment now. They’re hard to get, honestly. You compete for these and you get a slot. And so I’m not actively working on a flight experiment per se. But certainly all of those issues are real.

Host:It’s where science and engineering come together.

Jonathan Galazka: Combined. And I think that’s one of the shocks to the system when you come from academia to Ames. In academia, you set up your experiment on your lab bench by yourself. It’s pretty easy to set up the experiment, and that’s not necessarily the case, but relatively easy.

Host:Amongst many things.

Jonathan Galazka: You can tinker around, you can fail, you can make it up as you go along, and that’s not the case here. You have one shot. This has to work. You don’t get tinker around. It has to be an engineered experiment.

Host:Yeah. It’s going to be solid.

Jonathan Galazka: It’s got to be solid. It’s a different way of thinking, and it takes some mental training to get into that mode. There’s a lot of drawbacks to that in terms of the pace at which we can push this. I think there’s some advantages too. I think the clarity of thinking sometimes is stronger because of that. If you really think through all the details, I think that there’s an opportunity to find things that otherwise you wouldn’t in different settings.

Host:Wow. Okay, so you talked about GeneLab and some of the experiments going up. What are some other things that you’re working on.

Jonathan Galazka: A specific example right now, more synthetic biology related, is – we want to make things with microbes. But one of the problems is you have to give the microbes something to make it from. And on Earth you can give them sugar.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: Sugar is abundant here. You get it from corn or other sources. It’s not a big deal.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: But there’s no sugar on Mars, and there’s no really microbial food up there. There’s a lot of carbon dioxide.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: And so we’re really interested in whether or not we can use carbon dioxide as a feedstock for microbes. You can do this with photoautotrophs, so cyanobacteria. Algae can take CO2 directly and then make them into biomass and other stuff. Heterotrophic organisms can’t do that. They can’t use carbon dioxide. You first have to turn it into something that they could eat.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: NASA is already doing this by accident, to a degree.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: On the space station, the astronauts respire and they…

Host:They create CO2.

Jonathan Galazka:… they create CO2. So that’s a problem on the space station.

Host:Awesome.

Jonathan Galazka: CO2 levels on the space station are actually very high. They can’t get it all out. There’s a lot of people thinking hard at NASA about what to do.

Host:What to do with this.

Jonathan Galazka: CO2. One of the things they do is they use an elegantly named system called Sabatier. The Sabatier system takes that CO2, reacts it with hydrogen to produce methane. So methane is now a reduced form of carbon. And methane is a form of carbon that heterotrophic organisms can use.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: So there’s methanotrophs eat the methane.

Host:Yeah. For people who aren’t familiar…

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, so methanotroph, troph means to eat.

Host:Eat. Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: So a methanotroph is an organization that eats methane.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: So NASA right now is making methane on the space station, but they’re dumping it out to space. It’s being vented to space because it’s currently useless. So we’re really interested in how can we take that and turn it into something. It’s kind of like black gold.

Host:Efficiency.

Jonathan Galazka: Right.

Host:Efficiency. It’s like something that would be a byproduct waste. Can we tweak that and make it useful?

Jonathan Galazka: Exactly. I’m working on a project to actually take a yeast, which doesn’t use methane.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: It’s a methylotroph. It uses methanol. Methanol, it’s a C1 compound just like methane, but it’s slightly oxidized. So this yeast can use methanol, but not methane. So what I’m trying to do is engineer this yeast to actually use methane and not just methanol so that it’s directly compatible with NASA’s current infrastructure.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: We think a lot about fitting in with NASA’s current infrastructure because there’s so much invested, billions of dollars, in building all of this, and you can’t really change it to a degree. There’s so much momentum there. Biology is pretty flexible. It’s like the software of…

Host:Life?

Jonathan Galazka:…of life. Yeah.

Host:Right. Really.

Jonathan Galazka: So you can reprogram it. You can reprogram it to do a lot of different things. And so we’re trying to make it fit into NASA’s current hardware. I’m doing that with a yeast called Pichia pastoris. Pichia pastoris is used a lot in Silicon Valley in the biotech industry. It’s a yeast that can make proteins and secrete them. And so proteins these days are becoming very important as therapeutics. Traditional drugs are “chemicals.” They’re small molecules. Proteins, or peptides, are just like they sound. They’re more complex and they’re a very different form of therapeutic. Antibodies are being used with therapeutics now, and those are often made in this use called Pichia pastoris. So it’s widely used here in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley for this purpose. The idea is that there’s already this big base of scientists using this. So it would be great if we could take that system –

Host:Kind of like this pool of ingenuity…

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, “You guys are doing lots of great work, but it doesn’t quite work for us because we’re one step removed.”

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: So if we can just make that last connection, then all of a sudden NASA is plugged into this big community.

Host:Brain power. More likely to find a solution.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, so we’re always looking for that, because we can’t do everything here at NASA. We have to focus on these targeted things that kind of connect us to a larger sphere. So what are the barriers to NASA applying synthetic biology? Why can’t we put these microbes on Mars right now?

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: There’s plenty of people in academia working on this. The NIH [National Institutes of Health] and NSF [National Science Foundation] are funding this to a level that NASA never will. So we’re really trying to just find those little pieces that let NASA leverage everything that is being done out there, so this is an example of that.

Host:Yeah, it’s not only doing the science and the research, and the applied engineering, to do these experiments. It’s also a lot of just connecting people.

Jonathan Galazka: Exactly.

Host:Creating those networks that, as NASA can, to be – even in terms of a space telescope, you’re gathering all this information, but instead of hoarding it for yourselves for your own astronomers, give it out to the world. And the same thing in this realm. You’re coming up with this information. But the more it’s shared amongst other researchers, other scientists, other groups, you’re just more likely to come up with an answer.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, more eyes is always better, more minds.

Host: So from where you’re sitting at now, what are you looking forward to?

Jonathan Galazka: I’m just getting started here, honestly.

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: I’m looking forward to a lot of things.

Host:And then the last two years have been treating you well?

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah. I’m looking forward to building synthetic biology here at NASA. I think that it’s an incredible opportunity for NASA and the synthetic biology community at large. There’s obvious reasons for NASA to use it. We talk a lot about the constraints that NASA has versus the constraints that terrestrial industry has. So terrestrial industry is bound by economics. They’re constrained by how cheap sugar and oil are here. But those constraints are completely different in space travel. Constraints are around how expensive it is to get stuff out of Earth’s gravity well.

So what that means is that the technological solutions that we can pursue may be very different than what would be here on Earth. Some of the ideas that wouldn’t work here, for a while at least, might work pretty quickly in space. And so I think that that’s pretty exciting for us. And also I think for the larger bioengineering/engineering synthetic biology community is some of these kind of crazy idea that you just wouldn’t do here on Earth could –

Host:Yeah. For no business, it wouldn’t be cost effective. You’re not going to make a product that you could turn a profit on in the next years, decades even.

Jonathan Galazka: Exactly. And so we could that. It might be the key thing that we need to do in the next 10 years to enable deep space exploration. So I think it’s very exciting and I’m very excited to see where that’s going to go.

Host:I get a kick out of just even the efficiency of it all. Being able to do things that no private company would be able to do on their own. But then when you come up with a real solution of whether it’s dealing with CO2, whether it’s dealing with methane and coming up with a creative way of dealing with those complexities in space – but then oftentimes those can spin off to another product. Here’s a technology that now we can transfer over to the private sector and to other folks that it probably would’ve never come up with on their own. But it worked in space, we’ve made something more efficient, now we can use it here.

Jonathan Galazka: Absolutely, yeah.

Host:Working off the Earth for the earth.

Jonathan Galazka: Right. Often happens. I think that, again, you don’t know where the right ideas are going to come from oftentimes. I think that as we push boundaries here at NASA, we come up with ideas that will potentially — An idea I’m really interested in is trying to figure out whether or not some of the responses we already see in biology and in microbes, how conserved those are throughout biology. So we have pretty sparse data right now. We send up a given strain or given organism and we get some data back on that.

What I’m really interested in is how conserved is that in the biological kingdom. We have sent up a few strains of yeast out of millions of species of fungi, the kingdom that yeast are in. And so I’m really interested in whether or not we can find a conserved response there. I’m interested in exploring that. I’m a fungal geneticist by training.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: And so using the fungal kingdom for that, I think, is a real opportunity. Fungi, they’re easy to grow in the lab.

Host:Okay.

Jonathan Galazka: They’re not like mice. Mice take a lot of work just to keep them alive.

Host:Yeah.

Jonathan Galazka: And so we can keep a lot of the yeast alive in the lab. There’s many strains, thousands of yeast strains that have sequenced genomes. And this allows us to get really dense data from diverse strains of yeast and species of yeast to see how they may respond, whether or not there’s a conserved response or they’re all doing different things. I think we don’t really know that yet.

Host:Excellent. So for anybody looking for more information on GeneLab, you can go to www.genelab.nasa.gov. For the podcast, we’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley, and Twitter we’re @NASAAmes. So if anybody has any questions for John, don’t be shy. Come and ask him all that you can about synthetic biology and bioscience in space, and we’ll hit it on over to you so we can chat a little bit more. Thanks for coming over. This has been awesome.

Jonathan Galazka: Yeah, thanks a lot. It’s been fun.

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