IUSM is not typically thought of as a place that sends its doctors into orbit! But come January 1998 a graduate of the class of '82 will ride the space shuttle Discovery up to the Russian space station Mir for a four-month scientific expedition.
The expedition is a career highlight for which David Wolf, MD, (at right in photo) has been preparing for years. He will have spent about 15 months training for the Mir mission, much of that time in Star City, Russia's space program "factory town," learning the Russian language and space systems. But the preparation goes back much further, to 1974 when he entered Purdue's engineering school, already targeting his postgraduate mission, the Indiana University School of Medicine. It's been a long process, and Dr. Wolf senses all the planning, education and training are coming together now. "I've been here 15 years, and I feel like I'm just reaching my stride," Dr. Wolf says, sitting in his Houston office at NASA. Dr. Wolf is a synthesizer. He earned his degrees in engineering and medicine with a further goal in mind: bioengineering. "You have to handle and operate the equipment to really know how you want it to feel and behave," he says.
As a child watching the early American space missions and as a teen whose imagination was sparked by Star Trek, Dr. Wolf always had at least half an eye on NASA. The medical and engineering degrees would help him get there. So would his interest in flying. After IUSM he joined the Indiana Air National Guard as a flight surgeon - a move that got him into F4 Phantom jets. "Bioengineering was always my goal," Dr. Wolf says. "I liked flying, I liked engineering, I liked biology and medicine. And I liked space. There was only one place to do all of that at once. I'm kind of lucky; very few people find a job that wraps up all their professional interests, or lets them have multiple ones all at one time."
He joined NASA in 1983 and was selected as an astronaut in 1990. He started in NASA's Medical Sciences Division, helping develop an echocardiograph for use in space, and later helped design a bioreactor for growing tissue in three dimensions. He holds 11 patents on the device, and a version of it will fly to Mir with him. It's the second time Dr. Wolf will use in space equipment he has designed on the ground. His first space flight, a 14-day Spacelab mission in 1993, focused on human physiology and made use of his echocardiograph equipment.
Despite this summer's Mir crash, a fire and some balky equipment aboard the aging station, Dr. Wolf says he is comfortable with the notion of spending four months there, overseeing a couple dozen science experiments and performing space station chores while the earth turns 240 miles below. "It's inherently somewhat dangerous to fly in space, there's no doubt, but I think we've controlled those risks to a very manageable level," Dr. Wolf says. "Personally I enjoy working in those kind of critical situations. I'm ready to go up there and get what we can done."
(As of press time, Dr. Wolf was tentatively re-scheduled to launch September 25 aboard the shuttle Atlantis.)