THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 4, 1994 TAG: 9407040051
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
When Columbia lifts off Friday on a two-week laboratory mission, the space shuttle will be brimming with goldfish, killifish, jellyfish, fish eggs, toad eggs, newt eggs, newts and baby sea urchins, not to mention flies, slime mold - and sushi.
Japan's first female astronaut, Chiaki Mukai, is taking enough sushi to feed the seven-person crew, but it's the vegetarian variety because raw tuna and eel might present a health risk.
Rest assured: The rest of the cargo is strictly for scientific purposes.
The countdown begins Tuesday.
Scientists, including a biologist at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, want to know how the fish and other creatures develop, behave and mate in weightlessness. Their findings should provide clues to how human embryos might develop in space.
``We're all made of cells and we have structures which are similar,'' said Dorothy Spangenberg, a developmental biologist at the medical school, who is sending up 126 jellyfish.
The newt embryo resembles a human embryo in the early stages of development, said Michael Wiederhold, a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. He and Japanese scientists are sending up four female Japanese red-bellied newts and 144 newt eggs.
``The sequences that a newt egg goes through are very similar to those in the human,'' Wiederhold said. ``You'd have a hard time telling a newt's inner ear, the part that I'm most familiar with, from a human inner ear.''
A major concern for human development in space involves the spinal cord and muscular system, which are designed to support weight. A primate that develops in weightless space may have a curved spine, Wiederhold said.
Dutch biologist Geert Ubbels expects abnormalities. She's eager to see whether her 180 South African clawed toad eggs, once fertilized, yield embryos with an unusually large number of cell layers as has occurred in previous experiments.
Six testes, removed from six toads just hours before launch, will be smashed in orbit by a device resembling a garlic press, and the sperm will be propelled through a plunger to the toad eggs. The resulting embryos will be killed and preserved at various stages early in the flight.
Most vertebrate fertilization research in space to date has been on amphibians.
``People are doing a lot of work to try to get rats to conceive in space,'' Wiederhold said. ``So far, it's been mainly a mechanical problem - they tend to bounce off one another.'' by CNB