Nearly 40 years after Neil Armstrong’s historic “one small step for man,” Dr. Michael Barratt (Feinberg ’85) has taken a giant leap for the field of space medicine, venturing to the International Space Station as a flight engineer for Expedition 19, which launched March 26.
Barratt will also serve as a flight engineer for the next International Space Station mission, Expedition 20, which is set to officially begin on May 29 when three more astronauts dock to the space station. The landmark voyage will feature the first six-person crew in the history of the station’s expeditions.
Following his graduation from the Feinberg School of Medicine, Barratt began his residency training as one of four individuals in the Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency track, a federally funded project to develop educational strategies that promote careers in general internal medicine.
“Mike’s successes don’t surprise those of us who worked with him,” wrote Dr. Raymond Curry, the clinical coordinator of the project from 1985 to 1990 and now dean for education at Feinberg, in an e-mail. “He is one of the smartest, hardest-working and nicest people you’ll ever meet … I know that he has been working toward this personal experience of space flight for many years, and we are all delighted to see him achieve that goal.”
Barratt later served as a chief medical resident for one year before accepting a fellowship in aerospace medicine.
“(Barratt’s) two main interests are being a doctor and space travel, and he’s melding those two together,” said Dr. Diane Wayne, director of the internal medicine residency program at Feinberg.
The three-man crew of Expedition 19 lifted off on March 26 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Barratt will be working on a number of scientific experiments involving human life sciences, physical sciences and Earth observation. Similar to past missions to the International Space Station, the crew is particularly interested in understanding how the human body copes with living in space for extended periods of time.
“Humans did not evolve for a zero-gravity environment,” said Michael Smutko, a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern.
“Everything from muscle tone to bone strength deteriorates in a zero-G environment,” he said. “NASA is very interested in having physicians up in space who can study these effects firsthand.”
Smutko said having physicians observe these bodily responses is essential to expanding human space travel to destinations like Mars. However, astronauts will have to endure an arduous six-month journey to reach the red planet.
“That’s six months in a very low-gravity environment, and the health effects on just one way to Mars could be very detrimental to astronauts,” he said. “Studying people in these environments is crucial if humanity is going to explore past the Earth and Moon.”
Barratt is not the only physician-astronaut NU has produced. Dr. Joseph Kerwin (Feinberg ’57), the first physician to be selected as an astronaut, was a crew member in the Skylab 2 mission in 1973.
Barratt will pay tribute to his medical school when he unfurls and photographs a white and purple banner from NU during his mission.
“He’s living his dream up there,” Wayne said. “Northwestern should be proud.”
