Media Contacts: Reathel Geary, 919/515-9570 or [email protected]
Dr. Sarah Wyatt, 919/515-9570 or [email protected]
Sara Frisch, News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
Oct. 21, 1998
NASA Space Shuttle to Carry Experiment by NC State Botany Student
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A North Carolina State University junior will send a science experiment into space on NASA's shuttle Discovery, which is slated to lift off on Oct. 29 from Kennedy Space Center. Twenty-six-year-old Reathel Geary of Raleigh is one of a handful of college students nationwide who will have an experiment on the shuttle mission.
Geary hopes his experiment -- to see if fractured strands of plant DNA can repair themselves in space -- will yield new clues about how weightlessness and other forces encountered in space flight affect plant growth and health. That's important, he says, because for long-distance space flights in the future, NASA proposes growing plants on board for food, to purify water and to help filter carbon dioxide out of the air.
Geary's project was selected for the mission through a national competition sponsored by Instrumentation Technology Associates (ITA) of Exton, Pa., and the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology. His experiment will be contained in automated research hardware produced by ITA.
The opportunity highlights a personal turnaround and a science career in the making for Geary, a former shoe salesman and part-time community college student. Now, he has set his sights on graduate school, possibly for a career in ecology or environmental law.
To add hands-on experience to his NC State training, Geary works in the lab of Dr. Dominique Robertson, a member of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT) team at NC State. The NSCORT group has a five-year, $5 million grant to study gravitational biology, do secondary school outreach and train all levels of university students.
It was in the NSCORT lab that Geary learned about the ITA competition for space experiments. "It's the research opportunity through NSCORT that has provided all the other opportunities," Geary says. "That was the single most important thing that's happened to me so far in college."
Only in recent years has Geary become so focused on his goals. After graduating from Atlanta's Henderson High School in 1990, he put off going to college and went to work. He knew he had potential, he says, but he wasn't confident yet about leaping into higher education. A few years later, when he was living in Asheville and working in a shoe store, Geary and his wife, Angie, decided to try their hand at college. Reathel kept his full-time job, and the couple enrolled at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.
"For me, the community college system was a really important step in my progress," Geary says. "I had wonderful instructors there; they were very encouraging. I'm a huge supporter now of the community college system. It worked for me."
In January of 1998, Reathel and Angie Geary moved to Raleigh and transferred to NC State -- he for botany and she for horticultural science. Soon after, Reathel Geary landed a research job in Robertson's NSCORT laboratory.
Dr. Sarah Wyatt, a research associate in the lab, hired Geary and later helped him prepare a proposal for the ITA student experiment competition. "He asks good questions," Wyatt says about Geary's scientific skills. "It's important for a researcher to ask good questions. If you don't ask good questions, you'll never find the answer."
In the research lab and in his own space experiment, Geary has taken the initiative to get things done, performing extensive background work and seeing projects through from beginning to end, Wyatt says. Geary rose to the challenge of meeting the strict technical parameters of the research hardware and of the space flight environment, she says.
In space, microgravity -- or extremely low levels of gravity -- can affect biological processes. Geary will send into space fractured molecules of DNA, the basic genetic material of all organisms, along with an enzyme that usually repairs, or ligates, DNA on earth. An automatic process is expected to combine the materials in an attempt to ligate the DNA. Geary and some NASA researchers will orchestrate a control experiment on the ground with the same materials.
Back at NC State after the shuttle lands, Geary will transform both the space-exposed and control DNA into bacteria, and will then reproduce it. The bacteria should grow if the DNA was successfully ligated. Ligation is an important function for long-term plant growth in space; Geary's hypothesis is that it will be as successful in space as it is on earth.
The results could have implications for both plant and animal reproduction in space, says Dr. Chris Brown, associate director of the NSCORT group at NC State. Brown teaches a Space Biology course in which Geary works closely with NASA researchers. With sponsorship from the NSCORT group, Geary will travel to Florida to prepare his experiment and work in Brown's lab at Kennedy Space Center.
Sending an experiment into space, working in a top-notch research facility, and meeting NASA scientists will be great opportunities for Geary, Brown says. "I hope Reathel will bring home the
excitement of being involved in the space program and communicate to other students that there are opportunities for biological scientific research with the space program," he says.
ITA, an entrepreneurial firm that makes and leases space processing hardware to perform microgravity experiments, has sponsored student experiments on NASA shuttles and vehicles since 1991. The student space education program gives young people a unique hands-on learning experience and communicates the benefits of space research. On the current STS-95 shuttle mission, 16 different student experiments will be housed in ITA's automated laboratory.
-- frisch --
NOTE TO EDITORS: Reathel Geary will be in Raleigh and available for short interviews through Oct. 27. For help reaching him before and after Oct. 27, call Sara Frisch or Tim Lucas at NC State News Services at (919) 515-3470. For more information about ITA, contact Nicole Adams or Valerie Cassanto at (610) 363-8343.
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