Making Babies In Space May Not Be Easy 262
Hugh Pickens writes "Studies of reproduction in space have previously been carried out with sea urchins, fish, amphibians and birds, but Brandon Keim writes in Wired that Japanese biologists have discovered that although mammalian fertilization may take place normally in space, as mouse embryos develop in microgravity their cells have trouble dividing and maturing. The researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction. Some embryos were ultimately implanted in female mice and survived to a healthy birth, but at lower numbers than a regular-gravity control group. Part of the difference could be the result of performing tricky procedures on sensitive cells, but the researchers suspect they also reflect the effect of a low-gravity environment on cellular processes that evolved for Earth-specific physics. '"These results suggest for the first time that fertilization can occur normally under G environment in a mammal, but normal preimplantation embryo development might require 1G," concludes the report. "Sustaining life beyond Earth either on space stations or on other planets will require a clear understanding of how the space environment affects key phases of mammalian reproduction."'"
Re:Where can I find results of all those experimen (Score:5, Informative)
where can I find results of all those experiments?
You better clear out your calendar, you have a lot reading [nasa.gov] ahead of you.
Re:Reproduction in space (Score:3, Informative)
Humans have survived in space for extended periods without difficulty. Given a large enough breeding population there is absolutely no reason why a space-based species could not evolve. If you have no data, you're just pissing in the wind.
And if you're just making up bullshit that directly contradicts everything we've learned from fifty years of putting people in orbit, you're just an Anonymous Coward.
Re:Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do *this* (Score:5, Informative)
It's not ignored - it's turned out to be devilishly difficult to arrange.
Everyone who? Because everyone I know is familiar with the problems with those tethers bring with them.
Its extraordinarily difficult to stop and start the rotation. Its difficult to avoid tension problems during payout, it's REALLY difficult to prevent snarls during retraction. It's extraordinarily incredibly difficult to make orbital corrections while tethered and spinning...
Until someone comes up with some engineering solutions to test (and they are working on them and two tether deployment tests (both failures) have flown on the Shuttle), any experimentation is moot - kinda like sticking your finger into boiling water to see if it burns you.
Re:.. on your part (Score:3, Informative)
Simple: first there is your inner ear balance and second there is the pooling of blood in your head when you are upside down. Both of these are affected differently by freefall and neutral buoyancy on the Earth because the two are very different physical environments.
Yup someone else pointed this out above, you're right it's an "unhelpful" analogy. I tried to clarify what I meant above so I'll drop it here.
What's important is that it's not a problem with it as a zero-G equivalent on the cellular level, it's just a bad analogy.
Not at all - it would know because of the pressure difference across the cell would always be changing direction.
The other guy who responded added this point, but I think he was right that it'd have a negligible effect for embryos, which are tiny.
I haven't looked up info on the device they use but the center of rotation would be quite a way from the center of the tiny embryo, and it wouldn't be spinning very quickly, so the difference in centripetal force between the closer and further of the two sides would be tiny. (I'm imagining the embryos placed on the outer ring of some steadily rotating gyroscope-like thing, but not sure.)
(e.g. When you see people passing out in those high-G machines they're spinning quite a distance from the center (seated, facing inwards), so they feel almost exactly the same force over their whole body (but the tip of their nose would feel very slightly less heavy).
Now imagine the person was spinning much slower, and instead of feeling the difference between the tip of their nose and the back of their head they had to feel the G-force difference between the tip of their nose and their upper-lip. Not a huge difference, but scale that down to the cellular level and I think it can safely be ignored.)
Also it'd be easy to isolate any effect caused by such a tiny force by spinning the otherwise stationary "normal-G" embryos slightly to duplicate the force.
If they turn out the same as the perfectly stationary "normal-G" embryos it'd be safe to conclude that the slight rotational effect is having no effect on the "zero-G" embryos either.
So I'd say they can probably be pretty confident in applying these results to zero-G. Besides however much we discuss this now you can be sure it's well-trodden ground to the people running the experiment, and I'm mystified how the GP could think otherwise.