(00:00:00) Hi, I'm Misha Gajewski, host of The Story Collider. Every week, The Story Collider brings you true personal stories that help us to discover the wonder of being a human. The natural world is amazing, and what makes Story Collider unique is that you discover how science can help make sense of it all. Of course, you can get Story Collider on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you like to get your podcasts. And like potato chips, one story is never enough. It's a good thing we come out with a new episode every week. So, go ahead, experiment a little. Check out Story Collider today.  

(00:00:38) Ken Ono: Welcome to Hoos in STEM. I'm Ken Ono, your host and the STEM adviser to the provost and the Marvin Rosenblum professor of mathematics at UVA. Our goal is to evoke flights of imagination and wonder by showcasing the cornucopia of all that is STEM at UVA. The marvelous world of UVA science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Behind every scientific discovery, every breakthrough are people with stories. Their experiences matter. How they come at their questions, their setbacks and insights, they all play an important role in the discovery process. and communicating why it matters is just as important as the research itself. That's why, for the third year running, UVA is proud to partner with The Story Collider, a podcast dedicated to sharing deeply personal stories from scientists, researchers, and innovators. 

This spring, the Story Collider team returned to Charlottesville to spotlight some of UVA's most inspiring voices in STEM. These aren't just stories about research. They're also stories about resilience, passion, identity, and the winding paths that lead people into science in the first place. The individuals who took the stage aren't just leaders in their fields. They're also powerful communicators, helping to bridge the gap between scientists and the rest of the world. You can hear these featured stories and others from this year's live event on The Story Collider podcast in the link below as well as this episode of Hoos in STEM. On the Story Collider podcast, you will hear stories by Scott Acton, Professor of Engineering and Stephanie Rowley, the Dean of the School of Education. Here we will share the other two stories that were presented at Carr's Hill. Bill Petri is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at UVA and he'll describe his drive to his scientific breakthrough and the effort that goes into setting the stage for how that can happen.

(00:02:51) Bill Petri: So, it's 2010, and I'm 45 years old and I've just become the Chief of the Infectious Disease and International Health Division and I wanted to do something big, and it struck me that the Gates Foundation had just been founded a few years ago and even though we had international health in our name, we didn't have any funding from the Gates Foundation. So, I kind of set about to think how does one accomplish that, and one of the problems was that the Gates Foundation was very focused on three diseases: AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. None of which at the time we were doing at at UVA. What we were really strong in and are still strong in, is what's called enteric infections, which is a nice way of saying diarrhea. So, we were very, very good at that. And I actually put five children through college studying diarrhea. So, I was trying to think like how does one do that?

Well, the other thing that the Gates Foundation was interested in was polio eradication. And in 2010, there were tens of thousands of children that were being paralyzed every year from polio and Bill Gates put this on his radar screen to eradicate polio. And the problem with doing that was that the polio vaccine doesn't work very well in the low-middle income countries where all of us were studying diarrhea. And so I thought well maybe there could be a connection there; maybe all the diarrhea that these children are suffering from has something to do with the polio vaccine not working, so that you actually have to give four or five doses of this vaccine to get the same response that you'd see in a child in the United States. And so I did what's called a freezer dive in science, which means we had frozen plasma from children that we follow very, very closely in Bangladesh, and to the extent that I could pull a test tube out of the freezer and know, oh that child's had five episodes of diarrhea by the time she's one year old, and then another child had no diarrhea. And so, we just measured antibodies produced by the polio vaccine. In fact, we found the child that had five bouts of diarrhea had much lower antibody levels, a non-protective level. And so that was like a foot in the door with the Gates Foundation. And I was at a meeting like this, and I was sitting next to Tom Brewer, who at the time was a senior program officer and you know so much of science is relations with people and we were chatting, instead of paying attention to the talk, we were actually chatting the whole time. And I said, I think I understand like why the polio vaccine is not working. And he was interested in that, but I had no credibility to do this. I'd never worked on polio. I had never done a clinical trial. I had never even really studied the vaccine.

I'd spent the first years of my career studying a single protein and a single parasite. But the big thing about science is that it's not one person alone at night in the lab pipetting something into a test tube. It's the best team sport there is. And I then got together a group of experts that could sort of fill in the things that I didn't know. So, I had like this idea that maybe diarrhea had something to do with this. We put a team together. I'll mention two people in particular. One, his name is Zaman and he's very quiet, like you don't ever want to have dinner with him because there's no conversation happening at all, but he's also probably responsible more than any one person in the world for saving children's lives through vaccines so he is like the vaccine guy, and then the other person that I engaged is Mark Davis at Stanford who is the discoverer of what's called the T- cell receptor, and so that's very fundamental to understanding how vaccines work because it has to work through the T- cell receptor. And it was actually easy to assemble the team because I think we all like the idea that we improve the health of children in low-income countries, and also it was so exciting with the Gates Foundation on the scene now, that there was this opportunity to really make a make a difference in something like that. This is before Zoom, so we actually we did like a teleconference conference with AT&T, which I had never done before. And it went very well and then then I got the bill, and they had charged me $3,000 for one hour. I guess I didn't know to ask, like how much is this going to cost? And so, I pleaded with them like, "Oh, we're just, we're trying to study poor children in poor countries." And so they lowered the cost a little bit.

So, we've got this whole team and the way it works with the Gates Foundation is different than NIH. You send in a proposal, and they say, "Oh, we like this part about it, but we don't like this part." And so, it's back and forth. And then we finally got to a point where they were sort of on the same page with us, or we were on the same page with them, maybe more accurately. And so, then we flew everyone to Seattle. The Gates Foundation had just built a new headquarters right across the street from the Space Needle. And we're in a conference room that's not subterranean, but it's below street level, and so you can kind of look up and see people walking on the sidewalk as you're meeting. We had a small conference room, and it had this whole team of experts that had kind of thrown their lot in with me. And it went reasonably well, but then it was clear like I had never done stuff like this before. And I remember one of the program officers asked me,"Well, how are you going to enroll 600 children in a study of polio?" And I could turn to Zaman, say, "Hey, Zaman, how did you enroll 6,000 children in that last study?" And that was like that was the end of like the credibility. Because I might not have credibility, but the team as a whole had had credibility. But this was a big enough investment that that wasn't sufficient, and so the last thing was to meet with Bill Gates. And so, we went into a small conference room in a hotel because at the time the Gates Foundation was having their Grand Challenges meeting in Seattle. And so, if you imagine like walking into a conference room, there's a small table. Bill Gates is sitting on one side, and Mark Davis and I are sitting on the other side. And Bill, like me, is like a Diet Coke addict. And I guess he's had a meeting before, and so there's two empty Diet Coke cans. And then there's two waiting to be drunk. And he's rocking back and forth like this in his chair. And Mark Davis decides that he should explain to Bill Gates how this technique called Cytometry by time-of-flight mass spectrometry should work. It's this amazing technique series where you can take a single white blood cell and you can measure 40 different things in it, and so it's like 40 dimensions and so Mark starts to try to explain what 40 dimensions is like to Bill Gates. Bill Gates is rocking back and forth, and Mark is saying "if you measure one thing, that's one dimension," back, forth, back and forth, "if you measure two things..." and Gates says, "I get the math." So it wasn't a great meeting but you know, we all flew home, you know Mark flew to Palo Alto and I came back to Charlottesville.

We really didn't know. We thought, well gosh, we had a pretty good job. We didn't know if we were going to be funded or not. Finally, you know, this is... they used to deliver mail back in 2010 or something and so we got the got an envelope with a return address to the Gates Foundation and opened it up and in fact, we'd been awarded the grant. I sort of felt a little bit like Jimmy Valvano when he won like the NCAAs or something, looking for someone to hug and I went into the lab with a letter and I found Christine Peterson, who was one of the postdocs, and I said, "Christine, look at this!" The work has been successful to the extent that today, not entirely due to us, but now there's only a hundred children that have been paralyzed by polio and it's only in two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. There's new work now, including UVA, on making a better polio vaccine so that we don't have to give like four or five doses to eradicate it. Thank you.

(00:11:51) Ono: That was Bill Petri, the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at UVA. Next, we'll hear from Kathryn Thornton, a retired astronaut and Professor Emerita at UVA. She was formerly in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her department was the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Of course, that makes sense, she's the astronaut. By the way, she's a member of the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame. She has a compelling story to tell, and it's about the importance of preparation and how one handles things when things go badly wrong. 

(00:12:29) Kathryn Thornton: So, it's sort of a basic principle in aviation and space flight that you fly like you train. When you're going to an environment that is totally foreign to your normal everyday life and you've maybe never been there before and you only have one chance to get it right, you learn to depend on the accuracy and the fidelity of simulators. I spent hours in shuttle simulators that were really good at at mimicking and mocking up the functions of shuttle systems and all that, except for the floating part. Simulating the floating part is really tricky. So, there were a couple simulators for that. One was a huge water tank where we had a full-size space shuttle, cargo bay, and satellites, whatever we were working on in there, and we would use that to simulate zero gravity, but gravity was still there. Tools were still heavy, and the viscosity of the water reliably kept your rear end behind your front end when you were moving around. The other zero-g simulator that we used for space walking was an air bearing floor, where the astronaut and the payload were both the pucks and you could move almost frictionlessly in a horizontal plane. So you could move right, left, you can move forward, back, and you could do a yaw but you couldn't move up and down, you couldn't pitch up and down, and you couldn't roll. So, we did a fair amount of training on that.

When you get to space, you find out that the laws of physics are real. They're uncompromising and they don't care how awesome you were in the simulator. So let me tell you about Intelsat. Intelsat was a communications satellite that was launched on a Titan from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in 1990. It's shaped like a giant can of tomato soup. About 17 feet tall, 12 feet in diameter, weighed about 9,000 pounds, and about half the mass of it was liquid propellant. So shortly after they got up to orbit, they found out they couldn't separate from their upper stage and so they had to separate all the booster stages from the satellite. They left it stranded in orbit a couple hundred miles up and no way to get to a geosynchronous orbit where a communication satellite needs to be. So, they commissioned NASA to launch a rescue mission on the space shuttle. And I don't know how many of you know or even remember the space shuttle. I can't believe it's been more than a decade since it's been retired. But the space shuttle was a flying truck. It had a cargo bay that opened up fully to space. It's about one-third longer than a standard school bus and twice the width of that. It also had a 60-foot crane-like mechanical arm that could assist you in doing whatever it is you needed to do. So, the plan was to launch the new space shuttle Endeavor with a new rocket motor for the satellite and for the astronauts to go up there and grab it, attach a new booster motor, send it on its way. And oh, by the way, while we're there, we'll do a couple space walks to demonstrate how to build a space station with giant tinker toys. So that was the plan.

The crew was selected in 1990 and we trained for about 18 months and by the that time we were we were ready to go, we were confident. We were sure it's going to work. We had simulated the heck out of it, and we were we were going to do it. So, we launched through a cloud cover and got to orbit and everything went really well until it didn't. So, on the first capture attempt, Pierre Thuot, who was the astronaut on the end of the mechanical arm, took this capture bar, and I forgot to mention that Intelsat was never intended for visiting astronauts to work on it. So, it doesn't have a handle of any kind. And so, NASA engineers invented this capture bar that was about 15 feet long, weighed 90 pounds on Earth. And the idea was that an astronaut on the end of the mechanical arm was going to get underneath that satellite, which was rotating, and get the capture bar in exactly the right place and then these spring-loaded latches would automatically fire and grab it. So like, what could go wrong with that, right? So, first attempt, Pierre is out. He's on the end of the mechanical arm. He has the capture bar and Dan flies the orbiter right up underneath the satellite and he gets the capture bar, and gets in just the right place, and he pushes it on and the latches didn't fire. So, we tried again, same result. Third time, same result. So, by that time, the satellite which was normally rotating about its long axis had began begun a rotation about a perpendicular axis to it. That's behavior we never saw in the simulators because of course they couldn't do that. So, we moved we separated from it and let the ground get control of the satellite, get it back to rotating like it should. Came back the next day, same procedure, same result. 

So, the whole team took a timeout, took a day off and looked at all the equipment we had on board, and the tools, and what could we possibly do to get this catch this satellite. And the guys on the ground did the same thing. And so, one of my crew mates came up with the idea of sending three guys out to grab it with their hands. So you might not think that's such a radical idea, unless you know that the airlock is only sized for two people. It's designed for two people, sized for two people. We want to put three people in it. So, I was in charge of squashing them in there. So, I got three in there. One right side up, one upside down, and one L-shaped along the ceiling and the wall. It was like a can of sardines, if sardines wore spacesuits. So that problem was solved. There was a concern about whether they could open the outer hatch which swept inward. So, our colleagues on the ground suited up, got in the water tank simulator, and showed that that was possible to do that. So, by the end of the day, we had a plan. So, we came back the next day, we got the three guys out there in position and Dan flew the orbiter so close to Intelsat, it was practically in the cargo bay. So, one more aside, math models, they lie to you as well by the way. So, before the flight, there had been flight designs that said that the Intelsat's rotation rate and its significant mass would keep it stable enough for us to do what we needed to do to get the capture bar on it. They're wrong. So now there are models talking about what's going to happen when the three guys stop the rotation of it because half of this mass is liquid propellant and it's going to slosh around. There was one model that said it was going to be so violent, it was going to rip out of their hands, hit the tail, blow up and kill us all. So, I didn't believe that one either. So, I could see how precisely Dan could fly the orbiter and I I was confident that he could keep us safe. So, we have these three guys out there and we wait several minutes for it to get just in the right position. Dan has us so close, it's literally in the cargo bay with them. And at the right time, Rick says, "Grab it." And they all just closed their gloves on it, and it was just there. None of them can say who stopped the rotation of that. So, they they did their work. They attached the booster motor on it. When they were done, they retreated to the safety of the airlock and it was my job to deploy it.

So, I go through the procedure to deploy, and I get to the last switch, deploy, throw it, and nothing happens. Two more times, same result. Nothing happened. So, then we're in a real pickle because a space shuttle with a satellite sticking out of its cargo bay cannot come home. There is a procedure for that contingency, and that is to you know, disconnect the whole assembly from the payload bay and then dump it overboard and leave it. But that's about a three-hour spacewalk. So, these guys had been in their suits for 12 hours with no food and little water. They'd been spacewalking for eight hours in suits that were certified for six and a half. And we're talking now about three more hours. So, we started planning how we could use three people out there to efficiently do that procedure while cycling them into the airlock to pump up their oxygen and their battery power when somebody on the ground figured out what the problem was. Turns out the simulator we had trained on didn't match the real thing. So, a minor switch throw, and it fixed the problem and we successfully deployed the Intelsat.

Intelsat, seven days later, was on station. A few months after that, it carried the summer Olympics from Barcelona to this country. It lasted for 23 years. It's now been decommissioned and it's in a graveyard orbit in deep space. So NASA management when we came back from this flight were very happy that it was successful but also quite unhappy with all the unknowns and surprises associated with it. So they declared that we would do no more of these cowboy EVAs and that for the upcoming very critical Hubble Space Telescope service mission, all the space walkers would have prior spacewalking experience in the real environment and not just simulators. So 18 months later, Tom and I were a little older and much wiser and also floating in the cargo bay of Endeavor again with the Hubble Space Telescope. Thank you.

(00:21:55) Ono: That was Kathryn Thornton, retired astronaut and Professor Emerita at UVA. We hope you've enjoyed her story as well as Bill's story. You can hear the rest of the stories from this year's live event and more on the Story Collider podcast using the link below in the show notes. Many thanks to Misha Gajewski and Shane Hanlon and the whole Story Collider team for their collaboration and their commitment to making this event a huge success. The event was sponsored by the Office of the President. Indeed, it was at Carr's Hill, Jim Ryan's residence. It was also sponsored with the Office of the Provost and also with the Office of the Vice President for Research. I'm Ken Ono, STEM Advisor to the Provost and the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics and you've been listening to Hoos in STEM.

• William Petri, MD
• Kathryn C. Thornton, PhD
• Story Collider