How Barry Stoddard’s career took him from Sandpoint to the USSR and (kind of) to space

by Zach Hagadone

In his recently published book “Baikonur Man,” Dr. Barry Stoddard tells a story of how, as a kid growing up in Sandpoint, his father taught him a lesson about the value of hard work by building fences. Stoddard’s work ethic carried him through a successful academic career at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, followed by graduate school at the vaunted Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston in the early 1990s.

It was there, as a 20-something working on a process to crystallize proteins in order to better visualize—and therefore understand—them, that he “stumbled,” in his words, into a wild adventure leading him to join a startup called Payload Systems that would send those crystallized proteins into space aboard Soviet rockets for further experimentation, with the goal of putting potential discoveries to use in the medical field.

Along the way, he made two trips to Kazakhstan, the first in the waning days of the Soviet political system, and the second just after the collapse of communism across Europe. There, he and his team worked closely with their Russian counterparts through conditions that, at times, proved more than a little challenging.

Today, Stoddard is a professor in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle—a world-class nonprofit organization boasting three No- bel laureates and serving as the cancer program for University of Washington Medicine.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to put pen to paper and record the epic five years he spent sending crystals to space in an unlikely partnership with the Soviets, resulting in “Baikonur Man,” which provides a glimpse not only into the science behind the project, but the people and places he encountered while having a front-row seat to some of the most pivotal political events of the late-20th century.

He spoke with Sandpoint Magazine about his early life, as well as the central themes of his book and how he hopes it might inspire future scientists—including in his former hometown of Sandpoint. This conversation has been edited for length.

Sandpoint Magazine: Tell me a little about how the events of your early life have shaped where you are and what you’re doing today. Was there a specific experience that got you so interested in science?

Barry Stoddard: I was just the biggest science nerd you can imagine from a very young age. I just always was into it and got the necessary encouragement I needed from family and teachers and never strayed from it. I had every opportunity to find some other path, but I was always fascinated by science in general and stuck with it through high school. It always sort of spoke to me.

My dad—even though he was a straight-up forest products, treated-telephone-poles-and-railroad-ties guy—a lot of what he did had a lot of chemistry behind it. He and my mom were very insistent that I take every hard class that I possibly could, and so that was a lot of science. It was a combination of my dad, just sort of an in-born interest in how the world works, and really good teachers in Sandpoint.

I can’t stress that enough. I can remember a guy named Mr. Collins that I had for seventh-grade biology. I thought he was the best teacher; I just loved his class. Then I hit high school and I had Mr. Parker for physics and I had Mr. Bauer for chemistry, and it was one teacher after another that just kept doing a fantastic job of teaching their classes and were really into it.

The pathway never got boring for me, but it was really teachers and my parents and then just my own sort of geeky interest in stuff about how the world works—how the universe works—that kept me going.

How would you describe your book?

The genesis of this is I’ve been telling these stories in the book to friends and family for years and years, and they’re highly entertaining—just telling people what it’s like to go into zero gravity on the bounce flight or the escape from Moscow, getting stuck in that airport and having this moment of, “I’m

“You should write a book. These are great stories.” So I finally did.

There’s definitely an aspect of memoir to it, but it’s a really focused memoir. Nobody wants to know how Barry Stoddard eventually became a professor, but I think that the story of how a person like me stumbled into this adventure for five years that put me right in the middle of amazing political events, plus this really interesting scientific odyssey, is an interesting story. And I think the thing that makes it a more interesting story than many is that it all happened under such challenging circumstances in many cases.

I always said it’s a first-person historical narrative.

It had to kind of spin your head around to be such a young kid and suddenly find yourself dealing with these high political issues and big economics. Was there an element of intimidation?

Fortunately we had this guy, Anthony Arrott, sort of blazing the trail and we just followed in his wake and did the project. It would have never happened without the founder of that company [Payload Systems] and his father, who had the connections with the Soviet Union that helped put it all together.

I didn’t fully appreciate at the moment how significant those times were and what was going on until that moment on the edge of Red Square. That was really when it all suddenly crystallized for me that, “Oh, holy cow, this is happening. This is the beginning of the end.”

Barry Stoddard

Clearly things were changing—the Berlin Wall had just come down right before we left and then the Romanian revolution broke out while we were there, and you had this sense that things were changing but you just didn’t have a realization that this is it—this is it for the power structure that currently exists.

And for me it just crystallized in that moment when I was staring at Red Square and I suddenly realized that the people in the leadership here are flat-out terrified, and that’s really what it amounted to. They could see the writing on the wall.

When I went back for the second visit, right after everything had fully collapsed and all of a sudden you had brand new countries that were rising out of ashes, I was much more aware of what I was looking at. It was so obvious that an entire dynasty had fallen and something else that was really undefined at the time was rising out of it.

Looking at how politics have played out since the fall of the USSR (and especially in the very recent past) do you think a project like this would have been possible at any other time? Was this sort of a magic moment?

Isn’t that an interesting question. I would argue that it was kind of the perfect moment—this all started out at the very end of the Reagan administration. The political speak at the time that dominated was the “Evil Empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and that was really reflected in Congress across the aisle.

But right under the surface you had a new doctrine in the

Reagan administration of getting away from red tape and governmental bureaucracy and encouraging companies—particularly with regard to space exploration—to sort of break free a little bit of NASA and really act independently.

And then you had the Soviet Union at exactly the same moment under Gorbachev trying to restructure the way they did business and create commercial opportunities for the first time. They needed cash as much as anything else at that time.

So you had policy changes that were pointing toward the ability of a company to create a deal with the Soviet space agency going on right underneath otherwise really hostile political talk. And then the key was the [U.S.] shuttle program came to a grinding halt.

That was really the catalyst. For a company like Payload Systems, when Challenger blew up, that was basically the equivalent of 9/11 or COVID to a lot of industries. It was like their whole business model suddenly just collapsed. It ended in a split second. There is no shuttle program all of a sudden to fly our experiments on.

So you had, I think, a lot of push from both sides—from the governments, at the bureaucratic level—to create commercial opportunities and encourage companies to push away from government and then, with regard to space, this sudden change to what was available. It all happened at that time, even though at a political level everybody was really opposed to this.

Would that happen today? We still collaborate with the

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Russians with regard to the International Space Station, even though we’re sort of in the middle of a proxy war against one another—we were in a Cold War back in the late ’80s and it happened. I think it could still happen, honestly.

In the end, cash is cash and science is science. I think it would be a lot more challenging today. It probably couldn’t happen at the nuts-and-bolts level of American scientists traveling to the Soviet Union. It would be much more “send us your money and send us your hardware,” whereas back then it was very collaborative.

When I think about space science, I envision these hermetically sealed labs in inaccessible places in humorless environments, with the top minds cranking out things no one else could ever understand. And then you look at the portrait painted in your book, and it’s a very human thing that you were doing.

The fact of the matter with regard to science at any level is that it’s the most social of enterprises, and it’s totally done by human beings—just like anything else—working with the resources that they have at hand. And more often than not, science even at the highest level comes down to people who really aren’t sure what they’re doing bootstrapping their way into ideas and experiments, and then pushing forward.

I think what we describe in the book is a more accurate depiction of science at all levels than you might imagine. I’ve got a lot of experience working with companies of all different sizes that do biotech and pharmaceutical development, and it’s still just people cloodging things together until they figure out what works.

I thought that was a really important thing that was conveyed in the book—these are normal people who are doing these things and it makes it more accessible, I think, for a young person. What would you hope a young person thinking about or just starting a career in science might get out of your book?

That was the intent of the book. I didn’t want to write a science book, I wanted to write a story. I wanted to explain as clearly as possible what the origin story was. There was a scientific purpose behind it, but I really wanted to steer away from going down rabbit holes of science and technology. It’s supposed to be a human story, more than anything else.

What I would hope they would get out of it is do what you love. Do what people will pay you for and what society needs, but do what you love. And there are adventures out there to be had in many different areas of life—science has brought me extraordinary adventures that I would have never imagined.

I got into science because I thought it would be really cool to do experiments. But really the reason I love science is because I’ve had so much fun working with people. It was true then and it’s true today, and they are unusual people in that they are inherently curious. I get to work with people who are just innately curious, really driven, really smart, very imaginative, and very social.

You just don’t last long in science if you aren’t an inherently curious and social creature, because it’s the most social of enterprises—everything is collaborative, everything involves hearing “no” frequently from your experiments and your molecules and your potential collaborators, and readers of your papers, reviewers of your papers, editors, funding agencies—it’s kind of like baseball, it’s a failure-driven business that we’re in. Most of what we do fails, so you gain an enormous appreciation for the people who surround you who are working in that sort of situation.

If I were to tell young people a piece of advice, it’s just find the thing that you love doing, figure out how to make a living at it, and find your tribe. Find your people who feel like you do and really enjoy the same sort of thing. Then enjoy the ride with them. That would be my point that I’d hope some 16-year-old who read the book would get out of it.

I love that idea of “find your tribe” and “do what you love,” but I also got the