How Space Exploration Contributes to Our Health

Feb. 7 -- The tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members also meant the loss of something much less in the public eye — a large amount of medical research data, the product of years of hard work from hundreds of scientists in the United States and abroad.

Columbia was the first dedicated science mission since 1998, and one of NASA's primary goals for flight STS-107 was to use the low gravity environment of space — called microgravity by scientists — for scientific experiments, many of which were dedicated to advancing medical knowledge.

Among the many projects on board were:

Protein experiments, sent up by former astronaut Dr. Larry DeLucas, which used microgravity to grow proteins in a much purer form that can help guide drug development for human diseases.

Vials of prostate cancer cells studied to identify new cancer genes.

Tubes of bacteria and other microbes which would give insights into treatments for infectious diseases.

Laboratory rats and mice that could have helped determine how the Earth's gravity affects our hearts and brains.

Moreover, medical science often benefits in untold ways from the many flight projects that may seem completely unrelated to health and disease — the experiments on physics, data systems, and engineering.

But the shuttle failure has postponed these goals for the time being.

"There was a huge loss for society that all that research was lost — never mind the loss of life," observes James D. Thomas, lead scientist for ultrasound at NASA and chair of cardiovascular imaging at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio.

The Greatest Loss

The most important subjects of all, for innumerable reasons — the seven crew members. While many of the team's experiments may seem to be focused solely on the health and safety of the astronauts, it is the actual human experiments which perhaps have the greatest impact on medicine on Earth, benefiting the rest of us down here on terra firma.