When the space shuttle Columbia broke apart above Texas on Saturday morning, the lives of seven astronauts were not all that was lost. As the craft disintegrated, so did the efforts of dozens of scientists whose work was aboard the Columbia. Dr. Allen Edmundson, head of the crystallography research program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, was one of those scientists.
As part of the scientific retrieval team, which is responsible for unloading the experiments from the shuttle, Edmundson was en route to Cape Canaveral on Saturday morning when he learned of the tragedy. “I just broke down sobbing when I learned that all of the astronauts had been killed,” he said. “I was devastated.”
Edmundson had sent up a pair of experiments aboard the Columbia. Both involved cells from the incurable and fatal bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.
The experiments involved taking cells from cancer patients in their natural, liquid form and transforming them into solid crystals. Once the cells had been crystallized – which happens much more readily in the zero gravity atmosphere of space than under normal, earthbound conditions – Edmundson planned to bombard the cells with radiation to study their structure. He hoped that unmasking the structure of these cells might lead to the creation of therapeutics to treat the deadly cancer.
For the 16 days the shuttle was aloft, astronauts Dr. Laurel Clark and Dr. Kalpana Chawla monitored the experiments of Dr. Edmundson and his fellow scientists. “Although I never met Dr. Clark and Dr. Chawla, I felt a very strong kinship toward them,” said Edmundson. “We were all part of the same team.”
Edmundson spent 18 months working on the project. “If you multiply what Dr. Edmundson had on the shuttle by about 50 scientists, that gives you some idea of the many, many years of work that were lost,” said OMRF President Dr. J. Donald Capra. “Still, the scientific loss cannot hold a candle to the human tragedy.”
This mission represented the fifth time Edmundson’s experiments had been selected to travel aboard space shuttles. In fact, Edmundson had gone into the most recent flight with a profound sense of optimism, as his most successful experimental results had occurred aboard a prior flight of the Columbia.
“I had looked to this flight as a sort of crowning moment,” said Edmundson, 70, whose research comparing crystals formed on earth to those formed in space had just been accepted for publication in a prestigious scientific journal. “Instead, it has become a personal tragedy.”
Although there will be no experiments to retrieve, Edmundson decided nonetheless to proceed to Cape Canaveral, where he met up with other members of his scientific team. “At a time like this, I need to be with people who are feeling what I am feeling,” he said. “We all need to do a lot of healing.”