My name is Caye Johnson.
I went to work at NASA Ames in 1964.
I was a biologist in the
Life Detection Branch and I worked in
the Lunar Biological Laboratory which was
specifically designed and built
to look for microbial life
in the Apollo 11 samples.
So in order to go into the lab, we would have to
walk through an air shower, where everything would
get blown off of us.
You know we had to be really careful that
we didn't introduce a microbe into the samples
and then falsely say that we'd found it.
We were culturing the samples
under 300 different environments.
And there were ten petri dishes for each environment.
Typically the way you make petri dishes
is you have agar with different kinds of
chemicals in it, depending upon what it is
you're trying to culture.
In one of the sequences, you can see the guy
sort of running like a little pump and then
he's going from petri dish to petri dish
and that's just putting a certain amount of agar
in each petri dish.
You would dump the sample in, like there, so that
it falls onto this disk right underneath
where the funnel is.
And then you see them attach a hose
and that hose is high pressure gas.
Scatters it, so that you get more uniform
distribution of the lunar sample over the surface
of the petri dish.
And then, you would take the petri dish and put it
underneath the microscope.
We only looked at the petri dishes twice a week.
You know, sometimes it would be me,
sometimes it would be some of the other women.
And that's how we examined the petri dishes
to see if there was anything growing on them.
No signs of life were ever found
in the lunar samples.
The research paved the way for later work
in astrobiology and the search for life on Mars.