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My name is Caye Johnson.

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I went to work at NASA Ames in 1964.

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I was a biologist in the

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Life Detection Branch and I worked in

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the Lunar Biological Laboratory which was

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specifically designed and built

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to look for microbial life

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in the Apollo 11 samples.

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So in order to go into the lab, we would have to

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walk through an air shower, where everything would

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get blown off of us.

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You know we had to be really careful that

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we didn't introduce a microbe into the samples

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and then falsely say that we'd found it.

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We were culturing the samples

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under 300 different environments.

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And there were ten petri dishes for each environment.

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Typically the way you make petri dishes

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is you have agar with different kinds of

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chemicals in it, depending upon what it is

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you're trying to culture.

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In one of the sequences, you can see the guy

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sort of running like a little pump and then

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he's  going from petri dish to petri dish

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and that's just putting a certain amount of agar

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in each petri dish.

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You would dump the sample in, like there, so that

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it falls onto this disk right underneath

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where the funnel is.

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And then you see them attach a hose

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and that hose is high pressure gas.

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Scatters it, so that you get more uniform

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distribution of the lunar sample over the surface

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of the petri dish. 

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And then, you would take the petri dish and put it

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underneath the microscope.

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We only looked at the petri dishes twice a week. 

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You know, sometimes it would be me, 

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sometimes it would be some of the other women.

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And that's how we examined the petri dishes

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to see if there was anything growing on them.

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No signs of life were ever found

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in the lunar samples.

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The research paved the way for later work

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in astrobiology and the search for life on Mars.

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