Posted Jul 2, 2010; 3:57 AM

Everest grad grows plants in space

Kennedy uses space station to study cells

By Amy Ryan
Everest Herald

Since graduating from D.C. Everest Senior High School in 1957, John Wayne Kennedy has done a lot of things. He helped discover the Lost Pyramids of Rock Lake in Lake Mills, he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a federal investigator, he published a novel, and he consulted for companies across the nation dealing with pesticides.

For the past three years, he's found another focus: sending plant and human stem cells into space to see how they reproduce, and in the process create hardier versions of the plants and, perhaps, even human organs.

The project stemmed from a question he'd asked in 1960 as a biology student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: How would plant cells reproduce in zero gravity?

"The juices that stimulate plant cells to grow into roots, stems or leaves are usually geotropic, which means they're dependent on gravity to make the roots go down and the stems go up," Kennedy said. "I asked my professor what would happen in a weightless condition, and he didn't know. That stayed with me for years."

Kennedy theorized the cells would reproduce faster in zero gravity and, because the cells are undifferentiated -- meaning they don't have qualities that make them leaf cells or root cells -- they could manipulate the genes of the plants to take on different characteristics. The plant they're experimenting with is the jatropha plant, which can be used to make jet fuel. However, it only grows in tropical conditions.

"This is a great opportunity to stress (the cells) into a modality and introduce cold tolerance or heat tolerance or drought tolerance," Kennedy said. "We're going to push them to see if we can expand the range of the plant so it can be grown throughout the whole southwestern United States."

So far, the experiments have been successful. Kennedy and his team sent up their first batch of cells in 2007 on NASA's STS-118 shuttle mission to the International Space Station, and they've launched two more experiments since.

"We were able to confirm what John had anticipated. The cells grew faster and multiplied faster," said Wagner Vendrame, an associate professor in the department of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida Tropical Research and Education Center, which is leading the research for the project.

Next, Kennedy hopes to see if the same theories work on human stem cells.

"These cells will grow exponentially because of the weightlessness. You could put a small amount of stem cells up there and bring down a mass, and that industry could be worth billions in the future," Kennedy said.

His former Everest classmates are a little surprised by what Kennedy has been working on, but admit he was quite brainy in school

"He went through more of the 'brain' classes in school, the advanced classes," said classmate Andrew Burgoyne, 72, of Hatley. "But he was much smarter than most people."

Kennedy admits he's somewhat of a "mad scientist," but it's a designation his colleagues think serves him well.

"There might be some people who think we might be dreaming, but how many people had those dreams before, and they turned into realities and they made a difference," Verdame said. "We need to dream a little farther, have the vision, and who knows what we can do."

http://www.wisinfo.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20107020379

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