U of M Mechanical Engineering Professor John Bischof remembers when he first realized that outer space could potentially play a role in his pioneering work to safeguard the earth’s endangered animal biodiversity.

It was at a stakeholder meeting to conceptualize what would become the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio), an initiative co-led by Bischof at the U of M’s Institute for Engineering in Medicine and Professor Mehmet Toner, who leads the Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Bischof’s research partner, MGH biomedical engineer Toner, had to call in to a meeting to deliver a talk. Over a loudspeaker, Toner urged his colleagues to think broadly about how to create a biorepository that could house living cells of the world’s fauna for future safekeeping. It would be similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located above the Arctic Circle in Norway, which stores over 1.2 million seed specimens from 80 countries to maintain the world’s food supply in case of environmental disaster or human mismanagement.

The idea: Store cells in a permanently shaded—and therefore naturally cold—crater on the moon, where temperatures consistently hover near or below minus 196 degrees Celsius.

Less than a decade after Toner first suggested it, that seemingly audacious idea is gaining traction, thanks largely to the work of a multi-institute project led by Mary Hagedorn, a marine biologist and research scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Initiative. Partners in the project include the U of M, along with several other research institutions across the country.

“It’s pretty broadly accepted that human beings are changing the climate,” says Bischof, whose research focuses on cryobiology, which uses extremely cold temperatures to preserve the function, growth, and development of healthy cells and tissues for later use. (Cryobiology is not cryonics, in which bodies are frozen after they die in the hope that they can be later revived.) “And so what that means is that there’s a lot of us, and we’re taking up more of the sea and the land, and that leaves less room for plants and animals of the water and of the earth. ... There’s this web in the ecosystem where species depend on one another. And if we break that by losing a keystone species or important species, we may have a collapse in the ecosystem.”

The proposal, which was outlined last summer in an issue of BioScience, builds on the successful cryopreservation of skin samples from the Starry Goby, a common reef fish. In the past decade Bischof and his colleagues have made breakthroughs in how to use extreme cold to preserve healthy organs, cells, and tissues; in reducing the toxicity of the chemical antifreeze treatments used; and in how to thaw these samples slowly and evenly in a way that doesn’t destroy them. (According to Science magazine, various labs have cryopreserved and then revived coral, fruit fly larva, zebrafish embryos, and even rat kidneys.)

While the Starry Goby samples are currently stored at the Smithsonian, the hope is they will be the model to develop techniques to store specimens housed in the lunar biorepository. Next steps for the scientists include radiation exposure tests to help determine what kind of packaging could be designed to safely deliver the samples to the moon. 

There are ethical and governance issues to consider as well. “Part of the vision behind building such a biorepository is really as an insurance policy, as a hedge against disaster here on earth,” says Susan Wolf, Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine, & Public policy at the University. “It could be ecological disaster due to climate change. It could be nuclear war—there are a lot of scenarios. And so it’s very challenging to think if Earth’s population were under that much stress, what ownership and governance structure could maintain cooperation?”

Wolf says that Svalbard is a potential model, given that it’s a public entity with an international advisory team and formal governance rules.

But recent events at Svalbard make clear the need to consider a lunar biorepository—a 2017 flood caused by unnaturally warm temperatures melted the permafrost surrounding the seed vault. While no seeds were lost, the event was a warning that even our most failsafe resources on Earth may not withstand the impacts of global warming.

Because it has no atmosphere, the moon isn’t susceptible to climate change. And while there are already biorepositories on Earth, including at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the USDA unit in Fort Collins, Colorado, the type of lunar storage proposed in the BioScience article wouldn’t require electricity or liquid nitrogen to maintain the integrity of the materials.

“The value of biobanking, to my mind, is that it gives us a suite of tools that we can use to help nature out in compensation for all the damage we’re doing,” says Nikolas Zuchowicz (M.S.M.E. ’23), a U of M mechanical engineering doctoral student who works on the initiative. “What we want to do is develop the tools that allow us to enhance genetic diversity, that allow us to make populations more resilient to stressful conditions. And that enables the long-term success of nature to get us over this hump, this difficult time that humanity is imposing on the natural world,” he explains. “[The hope is] to have the option for people in 10 or 20 or 100 years to pull specimens out of the frozen bank and be able to inject diversity back into populations.”

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