Millie Hughes-Fulford

Selected into a payload specialist by NASA in January 1983, Hughes-Fulford flew in June 1991 aboard STS-40 Spacelab Life Sciences (SLS 1), the first Spacelab mission dedicated to biomedical studies. SLS-1 was also the first mission to have a crew with three female members, and Hughes-Fulford was both NASA's first female payload specialist in orbit and the first representative of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs in space.[6] The mission flew over 3.2 million miles in 146 orbits and its crew completed over 18 experiments during a nine-day period, bringing back more medical data than any previous NASA flight. Mission duration was 218 hours, 14 minutes and 21 seconds, or 9 days, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 20 seconds.[9][10][11]

After her space mission for NASA, Hughes-Fulford was a professor at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center where she continued her research until her death in 2021. She created and directed the Hughes-Fulford Laboratory [12] at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, where her research focus included immunology, bioastronautics, and oncology.[4]

She was the Principal Investigator (PI) on a series of SpaceHab/Biorack experiments, which examined the regulation of osteoblast (bone cell) growth.[9] These experiments flew on STS-76, in March 1996, STS-81 in January 1997, and STS-84 in May 1997, and studied the root causes of osteoporosis that occurs in astronauts during spaceflight.[2] One experiment resulted in observations of changes in anabolic signal transduction in microgravity.[9] A later collaborator was Dr. Augusto Cogoli of Zürich, Switzerland; one experiment with Dr. Cogoli was lost in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster,[9] and another experiment using technology from Affymetrix and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) examined changes in T-cell gene induction in spaceflight on a joint NASA/ESA International Space Station mission that launched on the Soyuz TMA-9 in 2006.[9]

Further studies of gene regulation and signal transduction in spaceflight were approved in January 2002 for Shuttle/ISS experiments examining protein kinase C (PKC) signal activation. She flew her most recent experiments to ISS on a SpaceX rocket in collaboration with the ISS International Laboratory, the European Space Agency, and the National Institutes of Health. In those studies, she found one basis for changes in the immune system in spaceflight.[6] Many of her publications are available at her laboratory web site.[12]

Hughes-Fulford contributed over 120 papers and abstracts, including on bone and cancer growth regulation, and on the effect of spaceflight on the immune system at the cell molecular and systems biology level.[9] She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Society for Gravitational Science and Biology, American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, American Society for Cell Biology, American Society of Hematology and the Association of Space Explorers.[9]