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Personal research areas include geomicrobiology and astrobiology in extreme environments (especially caves and mines, hot and cold deserts, high latitudes and altitudes); geological processes creating caves on other planets and moons; human life-support issues in space and planetary environments; and use of robotics and other technologies to assist exploration and advance science in extreme Earth and extraterrestrial environments.
Boston is author of over 160 technical and popular publications and editor of four volumes. Her work has been featured in ∼200 print and broadcast media outlets. As a child of a theatrical family, she first went on the stage at the age of 3 and apparently hasn't come off since…. She has served on the NRC Space Studies Board, the NASA Advisory Council Planetary Protection Subcommittee, and the External Council of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. Boston is recipient of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement in Science Award from the National Speleological Society, a Fellow of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (since 2000), a recent Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for Phi Beta Kappa (2013–2014), and recipient of the Caving Legend Award (!) from Ft. Stanton Cave Study Project/BLM. As a graduate student in the 1980s, she cofounded the Case for Mars series of conferences and activities devoted to the human exploration of Mars.
Boston holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in Microbiology and Atmospheric Chemistry, earned on an Advanced Studies Program Fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, CO). She was a National Research Council/NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Langley Research Center (Hampton, VA, 1986 and 1987).
DR. SHERRY L. CADY: I've been impressed the past few decades with the variety of ways in which you've impacted the field of astrobiology. Your experience as a principal investigator, businesswoman, educator, advisor, and mentor has allowed you to push the field forward via a number of scientific, engineering, and computational projects and expeditions. You've also been fortunate as a geomicrobiologist to have led fieldwork in some of the most remote, extreme, and beautiful cave ecosystems in the world. As the newly appointed Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), you bring an incredible amount of leadership and experience to the rapidly emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology.
Considering what you know now about your new position, which aspects of it are you most excited about?
DR. PENELOPE BOSTON: Sherry, I think that the interdisciplinary synergy is one of the most compelling aspects about astrobiology, and I think that the NASA Astrobiology Institute is uniquely positioned to help really promote that fluidity between the different disciplines that contribute to astrobiology. One of the exciting things that I want to try to facilitate as much as I can, both within the institute itself, within the broader NASA Astrobiology Program, and bridging outward into the greater community, is to help us all learn to speak each other's language broadly across physics, chemistry, biology, and whatever other disciplines that we bring to bear. To me that is really the core.
As part of that, of course, I think that it's extremely critical for us to help our budding young scientists and engineers who are interested in astrobiology, astrobiology missions, and astrobiology instruments, techniques, and enabling technologies. They are our future, as we all know and frequently say. But as you and others have pointed out in many venues, including this journal, astrobiology is fundamentally a multigenerational enterprise, and we need to always keep that in our minds. So perhaps even more than most sciences, we acutely feel this need to entrain our young folks and give them the benefit of our experience and then watch them blossom and launch them on their way to carrying this amazing human enterprise that we are undertaking forward into the future.
Those are some of the things that get me out of bed in the morning!
DR. CADY: I recall you saying that you knew at an early age that you wanted to become a scientist. Do you have any special advice for undergraduates or high school students who want to get involved in astrobiology?
DR. BOSTON: Yes, I did focus on science at an early age. I think one of the lessons that I have taken out of my early life, later when I was able to reflect on it, is that some of us are really interested in more than one kind of science. Maybe we are interested in science and engineering. Maybe we are interested in math and science, or art and science, or the psychology and philosophy of how science is done. There is a place for the polymath and synthesist.
Astrobiology is a gigantic tent, and it has many little tent-lets underneath that big tent. So it is a very encompassing field. This means that students who are interested in astrobiology can find their niche while plying the particular discipline or disciplines that speak to them and their particular talents and interests. If they are drawn to chemistry, for example, then that is the path that they should follow, and there are many opportunities to apply that to astrobiology. If they are more physics-oriented in their thinking, they can go down that path. The questions are legion and really so broad brush in many ways that I think that this breadth is one of the most welcoming and encompassing aspects of astrobiology.
Obviously, rigorous training is essential! It is not too soon to start when you are in high school taking whatever kinds of classes you can to prepare yourself, participating in summer programs in your local communities, hooking up with family and friends who might be scientists or engineers. All those pathways are possible.
And then at the undergraduate level, there are a number of opportunities for students to get involved in real research. There are summer programs within the NASA umbrella. There are also, of course, programs sponsored by other agencies like the National Science Foundation, and perhaps even state- or community-sponsored programs for students to get their hand in early, trying to experience what it is like to be a functioning scientist. It's critical to get a taste of it so that they can tell whether they really like it and whether it is the path they want to follow or not.
DR. CADY: Great advice. The NAI as an organization is now nearly 20 years old. What would you like to accomplish in the next few years that will move the NAI forward in new, impactful ways?
DR. BOSTON: Of course, I had to do a lot of soul-searching myself before I decided to take up this position. I had to ask myself, what do I have to contribute that has not been contributed before, and what is the significance of that? Which of the ideas that I have do I think are the most important for helping NAI go forward? And how does NAI fit into the larger picture of astrobiology at NASA and beyond?
I think that astrobiology has come a huge distance in the almost 20 years of NAI. Astrobiology is now widely acknowledged as a legitimate arena of science, and it is being funded. Folks from many disciplines are flocking to the field. Young people are getting degrees that actually have the name “astrobiology” on them, unlike people of my generation who kind of had to do astrobiology on the side! So that is an encouraging backdrop.
On the other end of the scale, astrobiology is often cited as one of our major scientific goals for space exploration, for our exploration of the planets and other bodies that may have astrobiological significance, and yet the astrobiology community in general is playing a relatively small role in actual planetary missions.
While there are some exceptions, I think it is time for us as a community to mature in the direction of being able to become more active players at the mission level because, frankly, that is where a lot of the action occurs.
Some areas of astrobiology have been more mission-involved than others, but I think broadly across our community we can move forward to begin to engage with our fellow scientists in other fields, like planetary geology and atmospheric sciences and so forth, to begin to develop a more comprehensive approach so that astrobiology is well represented in the work that missions do.
DR. CADY: What active opportunities are there for the NAI to take a more proactive role in influencing planetary missions?
DR. BOSTON: One of NAI's jobs, in my view, is reaching out to the greater community of planetary scientists so that we can know what missions are being proposed and formulated in the early stages, so that we can decide within our community which of those kinds of missions are potentially of interest to us. Can we share instruments or even experiments?
Beyond that, within the astrobiology community itself, we can think about how we formulate missions that are essentially astrobiology-driven. This is something that has really not happened for a long time, even though a lot of the missions that we have sent to Mars have significantly contributed to understanding the potential astrobiology of Mars.
In the search for extant life and traces of past life, we are still taking a very cautious approach. With all the fabulous missions that have gone so far and that are still there orbiting or walking around on the surface of Mars, we have done a great deal of the underlying footwork for astrobiology. I think that leaves us poised to really go on to the next level of investigations.
Hanging together only in the astrobiology community is probably not going to get us there, so this outreach to other parts of the space exploration community, I think, is really important for us.
DR. CADY: Speaking of “footwork,” human missions to Mars are on the horizon. The potential to deliver contaminants by such missions to Mars will certainly be a problem if we are still looking for nanograms of organics or a viable organism. Should we be pushing to send a human to Mars, or should we be planning more sophisticated robotic missions?
DR. BOSTON: You know, that is an interesting question. I may have a different answer from many others in the astrobiology community because I have not only plied my trade in extreme environments on Earth for astrobiological purposes but I also am a lifelong advocate of human missions back to the Moon and on to Mars.
I am a big fan of the idea that it is part of our human nature to go forward and explore directly other lands, which we have done on this planet, and I believe we will do so on other bodies where that is possible. So for those who feel less favorable to that prospect, I would suggest that perhaps it is something that humans simply are going to do, and it would be wise for us to prepare for it no matter what our personal opinions on human extraterrestrial exploration may be. If I am right about that, then from the pragmatic point of view, I think it behooves us to contemplate how astrobiology can engage with this process of eventually sending humans to the Red Planet.
Human exploration can bring a lot to the science, and I think that we need to be planning for that because I am pretty firmly convinced that it is going to happen.
You know that I have a very long passion for trying to advance the science and operational thinking about how we tackle planetary protection. I'm devoted to the idea that we must do this very carefully and very well.
So the planetary protection structure that we currently have is working well for the most part as it applies to robotic missions. But we have to rethink some aspects of how we meet planetary protection goals so that we can implement it in the valid way that we need to do, but within the context of how we control the contamination that humans will unavoidably bring with them.
We are never going to produce microbially sterile human beings. That would not be advantageous even if we could do it! So we are going to bring our own individual microflora with us, each one of us who are lucky enough to eventually find our way to the Red Planet.
I think that we can develop a much more sophisticated emerging view of the fact that each human being is a microbial ecosystem and ask the question how we manage these ecosystems. How will we control the spread of organisms from each one of our personal human microflora into the environment?
I frankly think that it is quite doable. Several studies that were conducted and published in the early 2000s advanced the idea of zonations for human-inhabited sites with a sequential series of increasingly more stringent procedures to reduce bioburden load or the amount of microbiology that devices were carrying with distance from the potential human habitat site.
For example, this is a similar model that we use on Earth when trying to control highly infectious pathogens, at containment laboratories like the Centers for Disease Control. We can learn much from the way that hospital nosocomial infections are contained.
Even reading about the recent Ebola crisis in Africa, it is clear that in those very difficult field conditions a lot of the practitioners were essentially using that kind of zonation. So this is not something alien to us in terms of managing microbial potential risks, and I think we can apply a lot of those principles in a much more refined and stringent way to converting our current robotically oriented planetary protection protocols to support us as we start sending people to Mars.
DR. CADY: As you know, astrobiology is an intellectually broad field that covers topics that include the origins of life and the exploration of our universe and the potential for life beyond our planet. What do you think are some of the more exciting research areas now and for the near future?
DR. BOSTON: Oh gosh. You know, there are just a bunch of them. Some areas are more mature than others. I think our ability to more and more finely interrogate the genetic constituents of organisms that we have here on Earth is amazing and is coming along very, very rapidly. It is not only the astrobiology community that is interested in this but also fields from medicine to biotechnology.
In a different research direction, we are incredibly privileged to be living in an era of emerging knowledge about the different kinds of exoplanets that we are beginning to understand are out there.
This is a very challenging arena within which to contemplate doing astrobiology. We are only just beginning to understand these objects as geological planetary bodies. And we are trying to assess whether such bodies at incredibly great astronomical distances from us have astrobiological features. Do they have biospheres? How do we detect those? How do we develop a suite of features that we can actually measure on exoplanets that might indicate that there might be life processes going on there?
Exoplanet studies are really going to stretch our instrument capabilities, including, of course, a requirement for ever-more capable and high-resolution telescopic and spectroscopic methods. Perhaps as we contemplate the far future, as this century comes into its maturity, there are ideas afoot for possibly sending a very-long-duration direct probe to another promising solar system.
Another area that fires my imagination is future landed missions on Mars, Europa, and Enceladus where we will strive to have increasingly non-invasive methods of studying these objects for astrobiological significance. It is highly desirable to develop methods that don't perturb and change the systems that we are trying to study, and where we can distinguish life processes from nonlife processes that might mimic them.
The fabulous work going on trying to understand a lot of the analog systems that we have here on Earth is providing us with an atlas of possibilities that we can apply to the development of our planetary life-detection missions, as well as providing us with important information about biology on Earth. We are learning a fabulous amount about the fundamental properties of life from the life that we are very familiar with, that we come in contact with on a daily basis, all the way to the most exotic kinds of organisms that you find in extreme environments here. So it is a vast portfolio. But those are the areas that really gun my engines.
DR. CADY: I'm curious as to whether advancing technological innovation is an important aspect of your new position, and how you view the role of astrobiology instrumentation. Also, though it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, do you feel that instrument innovation will drive scientific discovery on future astrobiology missions, or will the scientific discoveries made during those missions be the driver of future technological innovation?
DR. BOSTON: I am passionate about the need to continually advance our technological capabilities for two reasons. First, new technology gives us new windows on Nature that we may not have had previously. In turn, we continually develop new questions that require the development of new or refined instrumentation. So I guess the eggs and the chickens coevolve! Speaking as a scientist who frequently has come up against things that I cannot measure, or cannot measure with the precision or resolution that I need, I know how that impedes our ability to answer many questions. Personally, I have done a lot of work with different technologists. For example, I have been on a team to look at a new type of spectrometer that allows us to do things we have not been able to do before. I work frequently with robotics groups because I want to get to places that we cannot with our current robotic mobility. From my perspective, the way to go forward with this is to have increasingly close ties between the scientists who are trying to formulate the science that they want to do and all the brilliant engineers out there who would love to be able to help solve our measurement and access needs with us.
From the pragmatic point of view, it is probably more efficient in terms of cost and human resources to actually come together to be able to work together, rather than to work in our separate corners and then try to bring those science goals and technology capabilities together ex post facto.
DR. CADY: You mentioned the role of engineers in advancing the science. Do you see a future where there will be an advantage for engineers who became more involved in science prior to specializing in an area of engineering, like it has been for scientists that have trained in an interdisciplinary way prior to specializing in any one area of science?
DR. BOSTON: I think that could be very useful. It is hard to predict, because the way we are typically trained as students is very often not our ultimate career pathway. It is hard for young people to know what kind of skills they will need and what arena they want to ultimately function in. Developing problem-solving skills is perhaps the most translatable skill of all.
There are a lot of challenges in trying to speak across the science and engineering community barrier because the language of science and the language of engineering and the best practices and way of thinking are quite distinct within those two arenas. Many of us try to be “multilingual,” and frankly, it is a whole heck of a lot of fun to work across the science/engineering boundary.
You know, we can foresee the future in a hazy kind of way and push forward to get these new methodologies and techniques and instruments online for us. And then they will take off on a life of their own and be even more rewarding than we can predict in advance.
DR. CADY: As the NAI director, you work with 12 virtual teams, each with a large number of participants spread across the United States, and with the teams of the 13 NAI international partner organizations. Any plans to enhance international communication with all these folks?
DR. BOSTON: Truly, astrobiology is an international enterprise. I think that NAI has done a great job of keeping in touch with a lot of our international colleagues, and there are formal international partnerships that we already have in place with some countries. Since I am so new in this position, I am just beginning to explore how we might go forward in the international arena working with my fabulous team here at NAI Central.
America seeks to continue to be a leader in this field, and I think that is one of our prime mandates. But we have great challenges as we go forward, and a lot of those challenges can be met best by international teams, international cooperation.
I have to say that when my appointment to this position was announced, one of the very first e-mails that I got was from Dr. Frances Westall, who is currently the head of the European Astrobiology Network Association, welcoming me to this position. Frances and I have known each other for a very long time.
DR. CADY: Given the demands of this new position, I suspect that it could consume every available minute of any given day. Have you given any thought as to how you are going to balance your professional career and personal life in this leadership position?
DR. BOSTON: Well, sure. It is always a hard thing for any person in a demanding job, no matter what it is, to try to be a real person in that fully fleshed-out sense that we want to be. I will strive to be a renaissance woman as much as I can, given the limitations of energy!
Several of my own avocational passions overlap with my work, including pictorial textile art and poetry. And not only do I do science for a living, but I am a science geek fan for fields that are not my own.
I am strongly devoted to the importance of interactions between science, engineering, the arts, and the humanities. All the things that humans do are fascinating and valuable, so I try to participate as much as I can in those other arenas of human activity that matter a great deal to me, like dance, for example. I am the daughter of a ballerina, so I grew up with dance my whole life. My father was an actor, so I have great respect for and love of the theater and the other performing arts. All the fine arts speak to me deeply.
DR. CADY: One more question, Penny. Given the state of astrobiology as a discipline today, what do you anticipate the discipline will look like 50 years from now, in 2066? Any thoughts on that?
DR. BOSTON: Well, I imagine that we will have a lot of techniques that we cannot even imagine at this point. As I touched on before, I think that we will be sending missions with tremendous complexity to places in our solar system. I anticipate robust and long-term human exploration of Mars. I like to believe that we will have major increases in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems that can greatly enhance missions that we will send to the outer Solar System.
I hope that we will have figured out how to penetrate what we believe are the internal liquid oceans of the icy moons that have ocean worlds nested within them. Whether this will be by physically penetrating the icy shells or by some as-yet-unknown other method, I cannot imagine.
The last item that I hope we are making significant progress toward is perhaps direct interrogation of an exoplanetary solar system beyond our own.
DR. CADY: Thanks so much, Penny. I really appreciate this time you shared with me and look forward to the innovative breakthroughs that are sure to come as you lead the NAI and continue to inspire astrobiologists worldwide.
DR. BOSTON: Oh, it is my pleasure, Sherry.