During our visit to the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, I spent a lot of time looking at glass bottles of old drugs, blood, and chloroform. While I had a blast, I had no idea that what would come next would blow my mind. On February 22, 1961, a little guy named Hector boarded a Véronique space craft, was shot into the atmosphere from the Sahara Desert, and remained in flight for 8 minutes and 10 seconds. Covered head to tail in electrodes and suited in what looks like a full-body strait jacket, Hector soared through the sky on his one-man space craft. Le Service de Santé des Armées wanted to send Hector up first to see how time spent in space effected the body…and it was a huge success! If you couldn’t tell by now, Hector was a rat and made his involuntary journey into space because this was the first time the French tried to send anything/anyone up. Like I said, Le Service was ecstatic because Hector made it back alive AND this was the first time in the WORLD anyone collected live recordings (from space!) from electrodes implanted in the cortex, the mesencephalic reticulate, and the neck muscles of a living animal. Thanks to Hector and a few others, this grand success was a huge win for Le Service de Santé des Armées, as they went on to share their findings with Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique.
I was unable to find what exactly Le Service concluded from the data Hector so kindly provided, but they were the first to predict that there might be some negative consequences to general nerve function when you send your body soaring through the atmosphere. As expected, aeronautical research ensued, and to this day, questions about what time in space does to the body continue to be asked. Kokhan et al. (2016) analyzed the effects of space flight factors (SFF), such as gravitational overloads, hypo-magnetic field, and ionizing radiation, on the central nervous system and found that SFF do have significant negative implications on the CNS but there is still no defined reasoning for it. Additionally, Cucinotta et al. (2014) reported that prolonged exposure to radiation induces apoptosis, cell loss, altered neurogenesis, and autophagy in the CNS. Unfortunately, they were unable to assess the effects of the equivalent dose that would be found in space. All in all, there’s still lots of research to be done but Hector was able to give us a head start.
Figure 1. Me in the ‘operating room’ in a French army hospital
Figure 2. THE Hector. Space Rat. Trailblazer. Revolutionary.
Works Cited
Cucinotta, F. A., Alp, M., Sulzman, F. M., & Wang, M. (2014). Space radiation risks to the central nervous system. Life Sciences in Space Research, 2, 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lssr.2014.06.003
Kokhan, V. S., Matveeva, M. I., Mukhametov, A., & Shtemberg, A. S. (2016). Risk of defeats in the central nervous system during deep space missions. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 71, 621–632. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.10.006