A flatworm that was sent in space has finally returned but it now has two heads! About two and half years back, a group of scientists decided to test how various animal species would adapt to the environment in space. As part of the study, they sent these invertebrates into the stratosphere. While the flatworms were used as the guinea pigs, the primary concern was not really to understand how they’d cope with space environment. More so to actually use the experience of the worms to see the kind of effects that space will have in humans.
There are already talks of sending astronauts to space for long missions and understanding the impact of the environment there on humans is seen as an important step towards developing the required coping mechanisms. According to Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University who was also part of the project, the study could also help to understand regenerative medicine in the future. He added that the project would explore the kind of effects space travel has including how the loss of both the gravitational and geomagnetic fields affects the regeneration of organs in the body. The concept has been dubbed as exomedicine which basically means medicine without gravity.
The choice of Planarian flatworms was based on a number of factors. To start with, the invertebrates are known to have very strong regenerative abilities and have often been used in medical research. The scientist divided the flatworms into two groups where one group was amputated while the other remained intact. The two sets of flatworms were then packed in a test tube half filled with water and deployed into space using the SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft. When the worms finally returned, it soon became clear that space had already affected the test specimens.
The first observation was made on the test tube with intact flatworms. Scientists say that the worms underwent a spontaneous fission. This basically means that they split themselves into two different and identical worms. But that is not all. One of the most interesting observations was done on the amputated flatworms. Scientists noted that one of the worms had developed a second head. The researchers at Tufts said that even though they had worked with nearly 15,000 worms in the past, they had never seen anything like it. It is believed that the development of this second head was not by chance and the effects of space travel had to have played a role in it.
However, it was not really clear what exactly caused this phenomenon. Scientists are still trying to establish whether it was zero gravity, the stress and vibrations caused during landing and lift-off or the zero geomagnetic fields. The conclusion here was simple. Space has the ability to affect living organisms in very strange ways. The researchers added that because of this experiment, it was now important to fully understand the effects of space on humans before sending them on long missions into space. The scientists also feel that this study will help understand life systems here on earth and how they differ out there.
