Moon Landing Memories

Ted Davis

When the first moon landing took place, I was a high school student visiting my grandmother on the Jersey shore. She had one of those small, black-and-white TVs with a wooden case that were popular in the 1950s. No one in my family owned a color set for several more years at that point. All of us were keen to watch it—astronomy has always been my first love in science, and the same for my father. No one cared that the images were grainy and colorless. We had been waiting a long time for something like this, and we weren’t going to miss it!

Nancy Stump

It was a warm and muggy July afternoon in Indiana. My husband and I were sitting on the couch glued to the old black and white television set. People all over the country and even around the world were doing the same thing. For this was the big day when man set foot on the moon.  Around us our three young children were playing and occasionally glanced at what was happening on television. On my lap lay our ten-day old infant. I can always remember the date of the moon landing because I relate it to the birth of that child—July, 1969.

You see, my name is Nancy Stump. I was that 28-year-old mother of four children. The ten day old infant on my lap was a little boy that we had named Jimmie. Little Jimmie grew up until you probably know him as James Stump or Dr. Stump. I’m just sure that his exposure to that great event at the young age of 10 days must have sparked his lifelong interest in and his study of science.

Darrel Falk

I was in my first year of graduate school in the summer of ’69. Conducting my own set of experiments for the first time, I was just beginning to learn the joy of scientific discovery. A new technique for creating chemically-induced mutations in the fruit fly, Drosophila, had recently been developed and I was excitedly giving it a try. Lacing a solution with a little sugar to make it enticing, I would feed my flies the chemical EMS. As the experiment proceeded, each day I couldn’t wait to get into the lab to see if new mutants (genetically altered flies) had appeared in my culture bottles. Can you imagine the excitement? Creating new mutations in flies and then breeding them as brand new mutant strains that had never before existed was close to being the most exhilarating experience of my life. I was doing science, sensing its joy and its power for the first time. Meanwhile about 240,000 miles away, another experiment was being completed.   That same exhilarating joy of discovery and amazement at science’s potency was the experience of hundreds of millions of individuals all at once.

On that Sunday afternoon, July 20th, 1969, I was in Edmonton, Alberta watching it unfold on Canadian television where the CBC video feed was coming directly from CBS. So, with my own reel-to-reel tape recorder running to memorialize the occasion, I can remember Walter Cronkite taking off his glasses, rubbing his hands together as he, shaking his head in amazement, waited for Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped from the landing module onto the moon’s surface. The first phrase was clear, “That’s one small step for man,” he said, but the second came through as a bit fuzzy and he waited for someone to tell him the second part of what Armstrong had said—“One giant leap for mankind,” they told him. With that, we all just sat there in amazement. In just eight years, science had accomplished exactly what everyone’s hero at the time—the late John F. Kennedy—had said America’s science would do.  Sure enough, we were walking on the moon before the end of the decade. With regard to my own little experiment with fruit flies that summer, little did I know just how trivial making a few mutations would quickly become. Within the next 30 years, Drosophila molecular biologists would decipher the entire DNA code for building a fruit fly body.

Indeed, shortly thereafter BioLogos’ founder, Francis Collins, led the equivalent of biology’s own moon-landing—the massively successful effort to sequence of our own genome.  Scholars say that the moon-landing had all sorts of unforeseen effects, most significant of which has been its unparalleled role in ushering in the digital era that has revolutionized how society functions today.  The jury is still out for biology’s “moon-landing,” but all indications are that its impact on biotechnology is ushering in a change at least as dramatic. Indeed, it is likely that in almost godlike fashion we will have the capacity to enhance our biology in mind-blowing ways we haven’t even fathomed yet—quite scary when you stop to think about it.  As the ramifications of this “moon-landing” unfold and begin to change the world of human biology forever, we need the stabilizing love, guidance, and wisdom of the One who never changes.  We need to remember that we are creatures, not gods. We have a history of demonstrating that we cannot master our own destiny even though we think we can. There is good news though: we are not alone.  And for the sake of all creation—given the power of the mighty forces we now know we can unleash—we had better not pretend we are.