Slanted Science

It has been 40 years since Neil beat Buzz in a best-of-three game of paper/rock/scissors on board Apollo 11, and earned the right to be the first human ever to get moondust on his shoes.

40 years since he uttered the immortal “One small step for man…” line, while – this isn’t widely known – Aldrin stood at the spacecraft’s porthole window, holding a piece of paper with “You Suck! LOL!!!!” written on it.

Since then, mankind has rarely been back to the moon, and never to anywhere solid beyond it. Scientists are now saying that extended spaceflight, as well as increasing the mutation rates in human DNA and its bacterial counterparts, alters the human immune system in potentially harmful ways.

The research is published in the current edition of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology; lead author, Jean-Pol Frippiat of Nancy University, France.

The authors reviewed available data on the impact of space flight on human immunity; important, given that a return trip to Mars will presumably take around 18 months to complete, given a month’s layover on the planet.

Their review reveals contradictions between some of the studies, and it seems that many of the observed changes simply constitute the body’s normal reaction to stress (such as that produced by bringing a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment in to land).

But some of the results are interesting, and potentially problematic: even short trips into space reduced the astronauts’ circulating levels of interferons. As the body’s first-responders to viruses and cancer cells, these proteins are crucial in preventing infections and tumors.

This is even more troubling given the effects reduced gravity conditions have on microbial growth. It seems that our friends, E. coli and Salmonella, are not only ubiquitous on board spacecraft, but actually prefer the conditions out in space; not only do they divide more rapidly, but the increased rates of mutagenesis provided by cosmic radiation may allow them to more quickly develop drug resistance.

Pretty scary stuff, when you are halfway into an 18 month flight and 200 million miles from the nearest Rite Aid.

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: space flight, with its attendant billions of research dollars, has led to some very clever inventions over the years (often as workarounds for performing routine tasks in low-gravity conditions). With a bit of luck, maybe we’ll get a new generation of antibiotics out of this kind of work.