The mission launched with the cargo ship Tianzhou-10 is to shed light on how the space environment affects the mystery of the origin and development of life. The Tiangong station is tackling the most important question for civilization: can it survive beyond its cradle – the Earth?
Not an embryo, but a copy of it
True, the station went not embryos in the usual sense, but their cellular models – the so-called blastoids. These are structures grown by biologists from stem cells. By their architecture and molecular signals, they imitate a real human embryo at the blastocyst stage, but they have an important difference – they are not capable of developing into a full-fledged fetus.
The use of such surrogates circumvents strict international ethical restrictions on experimentation on human life.
Its main task is to monitor a small time period, which embryologists call the “black box”. This is the third week from fertilization, when a person’s major organs begin to form.
“It is important for us to understand whether weightlessness will not bring chaos to the basic formation of the body, – quotes the authors of the project Latvian portal bb.lv. – If it turns out that gravity affects the way cells orient themselves in space, any plans to have children on the Moon or Mars could be called into question.”
Nanny robot in orbit
The model embryos are to spend five days at the Tiangong station. The samples are monitored by an automated culturing system. It maintains the ideal temperature and independently changes the nutrient medium for the growing cells.
Immediately after the end of the active growth phase, the containers will be frozen right on orbit. Later, the samples will be returned to the laboratories for comparison with a control group of embryos that developed under identical conditions, but under the influence of Earth’s gravity.
Why humanity needs this
The aims and objectives of such an experiment go far beyond science. Humanity’s ambitions to colonize space face a harsh biological reality. It is known that radiation damages DNA, and microgravity changes the work of genes and even the shape of cells. Will the program of “building” an organism work if gravity is turned off at the moment when this program is just starting? The answer is not yet available.
If the results of the experiment show that embryonic development in space occurs without critical anomalies, it will be an argument in favor of the possibility of human reproduction in long-distance interplanetary flights. If serious abnormalities are found, we will have to look for much more complex engineering and biomedical solutions for life beyond Earth.
