Click to ViewOur next program will be on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 7 PM at the Huntsville - Madison County Main Public library. Our speaker is Dr. Marian L. Lewis, Ph.D., retired Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Director of the Bioreactor and Microgravity Biotechnology Laboratory at the UAHuntsville. She will be giving a lecture on "Life in Space: A Cell's Perspective."
From an historical perspective, cell culture technology and manned spaceflight co-evolved. Both gained celebrity status in the early nineteen sixties. But use of cultured cells to investigate effects of spaceflight on living systems was not accorded credibility until 1984 when Swiss researchers reported a 90% reduction in growth response in cultured T cells in microgravity. Now, a quarter century later, we know that spaceflight elicits a number of cell-level responses. Dr. Lewis' cell experiments have flown on 14 space shuttle missions. She will summarize her research, which focused on effects of spaceflight on the cytoskeleton, signal transduction, cell growth, and gene expression in human T lymphocytes (T cells). Her results indicate that the cytoskeleton may function in microgravity-related response of the immune system at the cellular level. She will also present historical perspectives of the commercial space program and flight hardware and describe some of the cell-related mysteries that remain to be solved.
About Dr. Marian L. Lewis, Ph.D.
Dr. Marian L. Lewis, Ph.D., (Retired) was a Research Professor in the
Department of Biological Sciences and Director of the Bioreactor and
Microgravity Biotechnology Laboratory at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. As a principal investigator, she developed cell
biology experiments which flew on 14 of NASA's Space Shuttle missions.
From 1990-1999, she managed a NASA sponsored commercial space flight
project in the UAH Consortium for Materials Development in Space (CMDS).
Dr. Lewis has more than forty years of experience in cell culture
technology including metabolic assays, biochemistry and evaluation of
products from cells. As virologist and laboratory supervisor at Northrop Services at NASA/JSC
for two years during the Apollo Missions, she conducted tests to detect
possible presence of microbial life forms in lunar samples and actually
held moon dust in her gloved hand.
In addition to research activities, Dr. Lewis is a published scientist with over 100 publications and technical reports. She is a co-recipient of a patent on three dimensional cell to tissue assembly for which she received a NASA Tech Brief Award in 1990.
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