On the long road to Mars and back to Earth, there's no emergency room. And on a crowded spacecraft with a small crew, there's not much room for a full sick bay.
There also is no way to know if an astronaut slated to fly to the Red Planet is actually in the early stages of a deadly or debilitating cancer which could develop during the four or five years NASA figures is necessary to visit Mars, explore, and return safely.
"We don't even know if [when] bones break, whether they would heal in microgravity," said NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.
These daunting challenges have led Goldin to form a new alliance with the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Together, NASA and NCI will work together to find revolutionary ways to take care of future long-duration space crews, using technologies and methods which researchers say could have a profound impact on health care here at home.
Goldin and NCI chief Richard Klausner agreed Thursday to a collaborative effort which would bring together advances in molecular biology, spacecraft design, and nanotechnology, as well as the traditionally separate communities of space and life scientists.
"We want to get together to be more creative," said Klausner, who leads the National Institutes of Health organization responsible for most U.S. government-sponsored cancer research.
In the bold vision of the two agency chiefs, tiny "nano-explorers" would be injected or sprayed into an astronaut to continuously monitor health during a long flight. "There's no room for a CAT scan" on a space ship heading to Mars, Goldin noted. And the crew could be carefully screened to ensure no one was likely to develop cancer.
"We're bringing medicine out of the hospital. It's time to think in dramatic ways and imagine our future capabilities... The need here is pretty clear."
Last year, for example, a researcher at the Amundsen Scott South Pole station was evacuated from the isolated base, but only after months of waiting for the weather to clear. That's a situation NASA wants to avoid on a Mars mission, given the vast distances and impossibility of a speedy rescue.
And advances in bioengineering could lead to technologies that today only exist in the minds of science fiction writers, such as space suits made of a lightweight and self-healing material.
"We can't have geologists and hydrologists on Mars tear their space suits," Goldin said. Even a minor accident so far from the environment and facilities of Earth could prove disastrous. And Goldin even imagines spacecraft which could be covered by a protective "skin" capable of mimicking the protective and healing qualities of the human epidermis while flying through the hazardous environment of space.
For Klausner, the collaboration gives him and his organization access to technological advances in engineering which offer cancer researchers new tools for quickly detecting, diagnosing, and treating cancer. "Many of our issues seem remarkably analagous," he said.
To convert science fiction to fact, Goldin and Klausner have convened an unusual mix of scientists, including Nobel Prize-winning researchers such as David Baltimore, the president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Baruch Blumberg, a biologist now directing NASA's Astrobiology Institute at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
The group of two dozen researches includes leading U.S. experts in computational biology, genetics, pharmacology, radiology, oncology, and aerospace medicine. The group is meeting Friday at the National Academy of Sciences headquarters in Washington, D.C. to hammer out both near-term goals and milestones for the next five to ten years, as well as a long-term plan stretching to 2020 -- the year Goldin says a human mission to Mars could take place.
The most radical ideas hinge on development of nanotechnology, in which scientists build objects atom by atom. President Bill Clinton proposed nearly doubling federal funding for nanotechnology in his 2001 budget in response to the growing excitement among researchers who say it will transform every aspect of technological life from computers to cancer detectors.
NCI already is funding NASA Ames researcher Meyya Meyyapan to develop novel carbon nanotubes that could be used in an advanced biosensor to detect molecular signatures of cancer cells. That funding is through NCI's new Unconventional Innovations Program. Goldin and Klausner say that they will encourage collaborative grants between NASA and NCI in order to stitch together those who develop high-tech spaceware and those who research disease. Each organization intends to set aside about $10 million a year for the next five years, Goldin and Klausner said.
The collaboration could spur a new approach to health care, given NASA's need to care for sick astronauts beyond the help of teams of doctors and their equipment, Baltimore said.
"We're bringing medicine out of the hospital," he said. "It's time to think in dramatic ways and imagine our future capabilities...The need here is pretty clear."
advertisement
