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[dramatis]

"So, I found the application online," [Kate] Rubins says, and filled it out on a lark. "I'll take this chance," she figured, "and maybe it'll be a good story someday of how I applied to be an astronaut."

A few months later, she got a call from Houston asking her to come down for an interview.

Rubins doesn't fit the normal astronaut profile. Many start out as military pilots, engineers or doctors — not microbiologists studying viruses. But she got the job.

"There's been a lot of growth in people's interest in doing biological research on the space station," explains Julie Robinson, NASA's chief scientist for the International Space Station program.

"What's more important now is the time they spend in orbit, when they're carrying out a variety of experiments," says Robinson. "We can take what we learn in space to help us understand aging, disease processes, and even the basic biology of cells."

There's another reason it's useful to have molecular biologists and microbiologists in space: While there aren't viruses like Ebola or monkeypox on the space station (astronauts get quarantined before liftoff to make sure of that), space travel has never been sterile.

Take this moment from the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, for example, when three astronauts on board notice a loose turd floating through their spacecraft.

Recently, an entire wall panel of the station turned green with mold.

"Imagine your shower curtain at its worst," says Castro-Wallace, pointing out that the wall of mold happened on the Russian side of the space station.

Just weeks before, Rubins had sequenced DNA in space — the first time anyone had ever done that. The fact that the technology worked in microgravity showed that, in the near future, it should be possible to swab a moldy wall, for example, and immediately determine the type of mold.

She'd also grown stem cells into heart cells without gravity, and — peering through a microscope that she'd set up — watched them beat in unison.

A few months ago, at her office in Houston, Kate Rubins was feeling weird.

Pretty nice article on specifically Kate Rubins and the microbiology being studied up in space. In an enclosed environment, all it takes is one bad disease to eliminate humanity.