Will Life on Mars Require a Genetic Rewrite?

Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.

“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp autumn morning. “Just so I can get there faster. Not because I’m late for a meeting, just because it’s taking too long to walk…I’m the only one I know who runs to work to get there faster."

Mason is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. At least that’s his official title. He seems to be working on a hundred different projects all at once, ranging from tracking changes in the virus that causes COVID-19 to helping corals adapt to climate change.

The previous day, I had visited his research group on the Upper East Side. The Mason Lab occupied four separate laboratories across three buildings and was still growing. Although they were pursuing a wide range of projects, a major focus of their work was on how the human genome and microbiome are affected by spaceflight...