By Theresa Rogers

Her biography lists astronaut, scientist, physician and pioneer after her name, but you could add any number of titles: photographer, business consultant and author.

Roberta Bondar first came to international prominence as Canada’s first female astronaut and the world’s first neurologist in space, as an astronaut on the space shuttle Discovery in 1992. Globally recognized for her contributions to space medicine, she continued as head of an international space medicine research team working with NASA for more than a decade. Since that time she has applied the insights gained in space to helping organizations and their leaders adapt to the uncharted territory of work and life. As both a consultant and presenter, she has worked with CEOs and business leaders around the world who face the challenges of a business environment that is in continuous change.

LAB Business recently spoke to Dr. Bondar about the state of science and research in Canada today. Following are edited excerpts of that conversation.

Q:What’s interesting to you in science right now?
A: Science is just so fascinating; all branches. I think what I really like and what I speak to students a lot about is the crossover and in designing any type of new research work, people have to be very flexible and very agile and the only way they can do this is if they have a number of the traditional disciplines under their belt and in their heads to be able to see research opportunities. In the interim, people are getting much better at tapping into other people’s brains, assembling teams where people can make up for an individual’s lack of diversity across disciplines by having other people from other disciplines.

I think the exciting thing for me in research, getting back to your question, is looking at the moon for research laboratories and things that can be done long-term. If we can look at things that improve our understanding of human physiology and disease processes, then that’s extremely exciting and we can’t do that in little bits and pieces on the space station. We need to have longerterm facilities in a more stable structure on the moon… human adaptation is extremely exciting. Right now we see, in the experiments that I’ve been involved in, how much the human body changes in space flight, but what about when you come back to Earth? We’ve been very poor at looking at recovery because our constants are all based on animal models to give people the equivalent of that disease. Space provides this very exciting opportunity in terms of human physiology and that’s what I believe very strongly in.

Q: Much has been said about the amount of TV children watch today and toys that leave nothing to the imagination. There’s been a change in the way children play and learn. Is that of concern to you?
A: It certainly is. I spent my childhood, like a lot of people who grew up in the 50s, having to build our recreation and build creative ideas and we had very supportive parents. There are a couple of issues here. One is the availability for that occur in society today, but there is also the responsibility of parents and educators to not give people the answer because when people have an answer to something, they never think of what’s involved in solving a problem. It would be very scary if children were only involved in a finished product rather than trying to see all the difficulties and trying to appreciate all the angles that one has to see in order to solve a problem. It’s that familiarity with things that don’t go right. It’s that familiarity with the pleasure of, ‘Oh, this is really how I do it.’ All those kinds of things are very important to a skill set that a young person develops and to be able to move from there to doing research, or law, or anything in life. The ability to find a different path and know you have to find a different path is as important as taking a straight path to success because that does not build a person’s strength of inquisitiveness or curiosity and it doesn’t build character and it doesn’t build the kind of person that our very complex society needs where we have a huge global economy, a knowledge economy and the global interactions that occur. I firmly believe in lifelong learning for everyone because the world evolves, subjects evolve, new knowledge comes in, new ways of approaching problems, and we have to be flexible. When people are just given things as a fait accompli, they will never be able to understand that there are parts involved and the difficulties involved in trying to get to the endpoint.

Q: Have things changed in science since 1992? For example, there’s so much being done in biotech now.
A: Yes, certainly science never stays the same and that’s the great thing about science: evolution of theory, change of theory and replicating experiments… if I was to pick one area, I would pick biotechnology, I would pick the crossover and application of bio to technology, the application of two formerly distinct disciplines —that whole melding and developing a new way forward for various things that we have speaks highly of how human brains can adapt. When we look at genomics for example: the way that we can use genetics to modify organisms to make them more resistant to disease, more resistant to drought, all those things are very important to the survival of human beings as a life form on the planet… not even to develop new widgets, but to develop new and better ways of dealing with our existence on the planet. Some people would say sociology is the underpinning of society. There’s no question cultural things change the way we view things, but science teaches us stuff at every level. Without science and without these advances that we continue to make, society certainly, would flag.

Q: Since February’s federal budget, there has been a lot of discussion about what most scientists seem to feel is a great lack of funding in this country. What do you think?
A: I think the one thing that we don’t fund well enough is education and education also deals with research. Education is important because once people understand concepts and why we do things a certain way and understand why it’s important to us, people put pressure on political systems to say, ‘Hey, we need to fund this research more.’ When we start getting into religious biases, philosophical biases, cultural biases, politically, people start dividing the pie differently… but I do believe that governments who are irresponsible about scientific research and who slowly and incrementally get rid of chief scientist positions, as I do believe the current government has done, then it is not serving the country well. Not just in the short-term, but one cannot build up this kind of strength quickly and the lack of vision forward is something that we hope our politicians do not have. We hope they can see past four years but with silent lobbies going on, especially if people are not from a scientific background, if they do not have a critical thinking mode, if they don’t see Canada’s potential in the world to integrate, then they’re failing the country and they’re people that should not be in a position to decide budgets. When we talk about funding research we have to understand what we do well and without chief scientists, without people involved at that kind of level to provide good counsel to the government, one should not expect that the government in turn would have any kind of critical thinking in this area.

Q: Do you miss space? Is it in your blood?
A: No, what’s in my blood is adventure, curiosity, I think to formulate new questions so it would drive me to develop answers. I think being in space was a reality check for me about being a human being, a reality check about where we are in understanding the universe philosophically. I think it was extremely important to me in terms of my photography and looking at the planet and looking at the wide perspective but I think overriding that, I think the actual build-up to the space flight and what occurred after was instructive. The actual mission of just over eight days was scientifically rewarding because we did 75 or 80 per cent of the work properly. It was a successful flight considering everything that can go wrong but the thing that I remember most was not actually doing the science. It was looking at the planet and thinking about the way forward for me. It was thinking about coming back to the planet and exploring it. It wasn’t a wistfulness that I may never get up here again. I’m on a planet and I’m an astronaut and you can’t take the astronaut out of my blood but the astronaut part is the same as being a doctor or being a scientist or being a photographer. It all involves curiosity, it all involves setting goals and trying to understand something in a different way than anybody else possibly could, not as an ego thing, rather, as a life form that has many experiences trying to rejuvenate society. I look at myself and say, how innovative can I continue to be throughout my life? How creative can I be? I have one life.

Q: One final question. Do you have a favourite moment in the lab?
A: There are probably two. One involves me personally as the subject and one involves me as the investigator. The one of me as a subject was related to the space program because I was head of an international scientific research program that dealt with how the brain regulates blood flow and how that changes in space flight and we worked with the people in NASA who dealt with the cardiovascular aspect. Astronauts when they come back, if we’re not careful, they can actually pass out because of the changes in blood volume and how the body uses and pumps blood throughout the body, especially the brain. We actually make people try to pass out by putting them on a tilt bed. Usually what happens is a person lies down for 10 or 15 minutes and they either stand up or you tilt the table. On my flight we did the stand test so they laid me down after my flight and they had all these measures on me including blood flow to the brain. My colleague was examining me and I looked at my data as they were examining me and I could see my heart rate going through the roof, I could see my blood pressure dropping, I could see the blood flow in my head dropping, the room was getting clouded, they were looking at me like there was almost no cardiac output and I’m looking at this data and thinking, ‘These are going to make great slides!’ I will never forget that moment and the way my mind was thinking, ‘This is not about being macho, this is about getting the data.’ The other one would be I worked with people at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is one of the teaching hospitals attached to Harvard Medical School. There was a gentleman there that was one of our co-investigators. We took the same experimental techniques with the astronauts postflight and used them on patients that had problems with their blood pressures when they stood up—Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries. These patients would volunteer to come in because they were so debilitated they felt even if it could not help them, they wanted to have a contribution to scientific research work and the way forward, and these people were incredible.

Science teaches us stuff at every level. Without science and without these advances that we continue to make, society certainly, would flag.