Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 29, 1994 TAG: 9407290077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He had just spent four days of his summer vacation at Cape Canaveral on Florida's ``space coast.''
In a security-ringed hangar, far from NASA's standard horde of astro-fascinated tourists, Pfeiffer spent his hours monitoring a tank of the little salamander-like creatures. But mostly, the Virginia Tech biomedics professor was waiting for the space shuttle Columbia to land.
When Saturday morning arrived, Pfeiffer and all the other scientists who shepherded 80 experiments to launch-time gathered on the Tarmac.
``Twenty-five minutes to landing,'' blared the loudspeaker. Columbia was over the Pacific Ocean, headed for the Atlantic coast in no time.
A cheer went up when the shuttle burst into view far overhead. Pfeiffer had the videocamera. ``And a Nikon,'' he added, tapping his shirt pocket where he'd stashed his still-shot backup.
Off came four Japanese newts, who only last fall were running wild in their native rice paddies.
Two had died during nearly 15 days in space, the longest shuttle flight ever. Two others survived in their small, water-filled Plexiglas space box-homes. But they soon were ``sacrificed,'' in scientific parlance, for the sake of testing.
Then came newt eggs laid in space, and the larvae that grew to tadpole size as Columbia whipped around Earth once every hour and a half.
One of dozens in a global group of shuttle-experiment scientists, Pfeiffer is the newt cell pathology expert, the man with the electron microscope.
Over the next six months, in collaboration with five colleagues - led by Makoto Asashima, head of the University of Tokyo's biology department - Pfeiffer will figure out what weightlessness might do to new life.
``For example,'' said Pfeiffer, a smooth-voiced scientist with an international resume, ``when the dead newts were brought back, one of my key jobs was to examine them and give advice of what they died from. The information's not all in yet. ... It could be lung, liver. Whatever.
``We want to determine if in fact gravity is required for normal development,'' Pfeiffer said, seated before a stack of newt slides and Columbia glossies back home in his lab at Tech's Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.
``In future years, if humans or some other species happen to be born in space, would it be possible? Or will there be defects?''
It's a heady question to ask - much less try to help answer.
The cooler that Pfeiffer brought back to Roanoke contained spare newts - live ones, extras from the 1,000-newt contingent that originally traveled from Japan to Florida before Columbia ever left ground. ``They only picked four,'' Pfeiffer said. ``It's harder to become an astronewt than an astronaut.''
But the stakes are astronomically higher. In a plain brown box strapped with silver electrical tape - next to the aquariums where the newts he brought back to Roanoke, all female, entwine bodies as they amiably float atop the water - sat more newt parts.
The combination of space newt parts and ``controlled'' newt parts - tissue from those that spent the mission on Earth in the hangar on Cape Canaveral - will be compared.
``A lot of this is exploratory,'' said Pfeiffer, who also is noted for his research into ulcers, as well as his analytic expertise of the tissues of stranded whales and other marine mammals.
He and his colleagues will focus on a couple of theories.
``Astronauts have some changes in their bones when they're up in space. The spinal column lengthens - all gain 1 to 2 inches when they're up there,'' he said.
Their spines snap back to normal once back on Earth.
Did the astronewts experience the same? Pfeiffer will examine the space newts to see if the spaces between their vertebrae widened. Did their bones lose density? If they did, maybe clues will emerge about why that happens to humans. In some way, perhaps that can help future astronauts - or future space villagers of any other stripe.
The scientist also will aim his electron microscope toward more basic cell structures.
``The electron microscope is a very large instrument, a kind of a microscope that allows you to look at the interior of cells. It does not use light rays like a regular light microscope. It uses an electron beam instead,'' he explained.
Cells from the newt eggs and larvae may reveal developmental changes to a new life's first cell layers. One of the so-called ``germ layers'' that grow into organs, called the mesoderm, will be examined for changes.
The shuttle, replete with its experiments of newts, sea urchins, Japanese Medaka fish, goldfish, jellyfish and more, went up under the auspices of NASA. But the Japanese equivalent, the National Academy of Space and Astronautical Sciences, signed on for many experiments, as well as ground and space staff. Among the astronauts was Chiaki Mukai, the first Japanese woman in space.
It also went up amid the hoopla surrounding the 25th anniversary of Apollo's first moon walk.
``I'd bet my life on it, that humans are going to go to the moon again,'' Pfeiffer said. ``It's just a question of when.''
When they do, maybe the quest toward space colonies will resume. And if a couple gives birth to a child up there in his lifetime, maybe Pfeiffer can take his due satisfaction - that he helped pave the way toward that child's safe passage from mother's womb into a brave new world.
by CNB