It still amazes me that I can call myself a Space Biologist. But at one point people started calling me that, and after a while I accepted that this was the case.

My research – “mine” meaning I was the first author but there were 38 researchers involved – was on the cover of CELL magazine, which commemorated 20 years of research at the International Space Station. CELL is one of the biggest research journals in the world, and we are talking about the International Space Station here! An interesting series of events led me to that.

I am now adjunct professor at the International Space University, an alumnus of the NASA STAR training program, a frequent consultant for the European Space Agency, and I am trying to found a European Space Life Sciences Network. And that on top of being a lecturer in Medical Genomics at the University of Salford.

So, I don’t think it is unfair to claim that I am, in fact, a Space Biologist. And now that I am possibly done bragging, the point of this text is to talk to you about how careers normally go.

What amazes me about this story, my history, is how that happened. It is not like I planned it to go this way.

We will have to go back in time for that. When I was a teenager, I was very impressed when I read Machiavelli’s book The Prince. If you have never heard about it, it is a 16 ^th -century book on how to rule pragmatically. The book is criticised for how it deals with morality, but here I really digress. In one chapter, Machiavelli discusses whether it is better to be lucky or to be prepared. In the end, he concludes you need both. If you are lucky but not prepared, no matter how many opportunities you have, you will not be able to use them. But if you are prepared but never lucky, there will never be an opportunity to show your skills. So, you have to be prepared, not only to use your skills when luck appears but also to recognise these opportunities and find them.

That resonated with me. My family is of humble origins; my grandpa died without knowing how to read, and at that point in time no one had a university degree. So, I had in my mind that I had to be prepared, the best I could, and to use all the opportunities I could find.

I decided to become a pharmacist-biochemist, and a little before my 18 ^th birthday I took the test to enter university, and I failed.

See, I had to put my options on the table. I considered myself a good student, and my family had no way to help me pay for university fees. My only option was to enter a Brazilian public university. That was very competitive for two reasons: 1) They are free, 2) They are good.

It is a different system there. You actually have to pass a test to enter. The test only occurs once a year, and I failed on my first try. After that, I looked for an affordable preparatory school. I had money to cover half of it, and my family agreed to cover the rest, which made me very happy.

On the second try I passed. Long story short, I became a pharmacist. During my master’s degree, I decided to be an Immunologist. Then I gave up on being an Immunologist. Then I tried to enter a second master’s degree in science communication, and I failed. I tried to enter a PhD programme in Women’s Health, and I failed the first time. I was successful on the second try. I had a really good four years of my life studying the genetics of breast cancer. I successfully became a PhD, won the award for best project of the year, and became unemployed.

For six months I tried every place I knew for a job in my area, but I could not find one. This is when I decided to try to emigrate. It took a while, but I found a job in South Carolina, USA. I was already in my second year on the job on a fateful day when my boss appeared at my office (the first office I ever had) and told me NASA was looking for projects in the state. I was prepared.

The first thing I did was to evaluate what we had available to try to identify what could be of interest to NASA. We worked in a hospital that had an irradiator, and protection against the effects of radiation is still of major interest to NASA, so we started with that in mind. I became aware that hibernation puts the body in a state that protects against radiation effects. That was interesting, but we were lacking an animal model.

We got access to a Zebrafish facility, which was the only animal model we had, and after some reading I realised that fish do not control their temperature as we do. Their temperature is the same as the water, and a lower body temperature emulates some aspects of hibernation.

So, I proposed to my partners: what if we have fish in two sets of water temperature (28°C and 18°C), expose these fish to two low-dose events of irradiation to simulate exposure to solar flares, and then check the gene expression alterations in the gut? The gut was chosen as it is the most sensitive organ to radiation.

They liked it; we wrote the project and won the grant. The fact that we were the only biology-related project sent from the whole of South Carolina helped a lot.

But that was just the beginning. Once the project was approved, we started to receive newsletters from NASA, and in one of these emails it was advertised that GeneLab was recruiting for their Analysis Working Groups.

These two events changed my life.

I was accepted into the working group, and as a biochemist I could choose to analyse mice liver data. If you are a biochemistry student, you know the liver is the most important organ for body biochemistry. It took a while for me to make the gene expression analysis; I wanted to impress, so after finding nothing in the first set of analyses, I made a deeper and more exploratory analysis. At that point, I was not aware that people in the group had already analysed that data and found nothing, and no one was really thinking I would.

I took a system-level approach, and I was able to find alterations in the metabolism that looked like diabetes to me. It was not, but the pathways were similar. That made no sense to me; I was not aware it was common knowledge that astronauts develop insulin resistance in their vessels once in space. But even if I was aware of that, it still made no sense. Why would space affect metabolic pathways?

After a lot of reading and after considering the increased radiation exposure and the presence of microgravity, I hypothesised that these two environmental stressors could directly affect the mitochondria. If the liver is the body centre for metabolic pathways, the mitochondria is the cell centre for that. Everything, one way or another, passes through the mitochondria at some point. If mitochondria are altered, there is a pattern you will expect to see. I was seeing this pattern in this space liver data.

So, on a fateful Sunday I wrote an email to NASA that took me four hours to finish. It was not very long, but it was important that it explained well why I believed what I did, and I took my time.

Some days later, I received a response: “This seems like an interesting hypothesis. What do you need to explore to see if this is true?”

I cannot explain in words how I felt after reading this. After I calmed down, I made a list. First, I needed more gene expression data from those mice to combine and see if the hypothesis held. Second, I sent a list of blood markers that would be useful to see if the hypothesis made sense at the body level.

After some issues, I got access to the gene expression data. The hypothesis held. This is the principal reason that I became first author on that paper.

People had looked at the data and not seen what I was seeing. I was the only biochemist in the group; they could see the results as well as I could and produce figures better than I could. But they were not understanding the implications of what they saw. They were not linking probable causes to possible mechanisms and expected outcomes. The data was too big; they were getting lost in it.

When I proposed a way to organise things, it started to make sense. There were pushbacks, of course; scientists are quite proud and competitive, and I was a nobody. But my analysis held. My hypothesis held. When other people started analysing different kinds of data – like proteomics and metabolomics – the hypothesis held.

And then I received my first and only Top-Secret email. NASA checked, and there were no blood data from these mice. They are too small, and it is too messy to try to take blood from mice in space. But astronauts do it all the time, and they asked if having access to astronaut data would help. Of course it did. Still today I cannot tell anyone the specifics of the data I saw; it is too easy to link it to specific astronauts.

We continued to write the paper, we finished it, we sent it to the New England Journal of Medicine, the highest-impact-factor scientific journal, and we were desk rejected. They had not even read it. We sent it to Science, and we got to the review process.

Science is one of the major scientific journals; being in a position to try to be published there was already a major achievement in my career. We were rejected.

The critiques were strong and detailed.

We rewrote most of the article, reorganised the figures, and the supervisors of the project were able to add gene expression data from the NASA Twin Study that corroborated our hypothesis. We decided to send it to CELL, and by luck these pushbacks made the publication date close to the anniversary of the 20 years of the International Space Station.

After some back and forth, CELL decided not only to accept the article but also to do a whole special edition commemorating the ISS anniversary and to put the article on their cover of the November 2020 edition.

I called my family the moment I heard of it; I was so agitated they were worried I was going to have a heart attack.

It was three years of hard work for free, most of it on my weekends and free time. It was a side project when it started. It changed my life.

A little after that I became a lecturer, first at the University of Staffordshire and now at the University of Salford. I became an adjunct professor at the International Space University, I helped to found and lead a Topical Team in Space Omics funded by the European Space Agency, and I was accepted into the NASA STAR training program and have a diploma to show for it.

So yes, I think it is fair enough to call myself a Space Biologist nowadays.

People normally don’t tell you the hard parts, the failures in the process. The nights before presentations when I could not sleep, afraid that people would see something wrong in my hypotheses or analysis and the whole castle would crumble. The difficulties of doing that as an immigrant. All the times the situation stood on a knife edge.

I had support, I was lucky, and I was as prepared as I could be. When a chance presented itself to me, I took it the best I could. Maybe something similar but better will happen with you. I hope it will.