I was shocked — literally shocked! — when I saw the story. The headline read: “Germs taken to space come back deadlier.”
That’s just great. As if we don’t have enough problems in the world, now we have to deal with juiced-up salmonella that WE sent up into space. Just great!
What did these people expect? That the salmonella would come back tamer and help find the cure for cancer? Any kid who has ever read a comic book or watched a sci-fi flick could have told you how this one would turn out. Send germs into outer space, and they come back to eat your face.
It’s that simple.
If you haven’t read the story, I will sum it up for you: Enterprising scientists decided last year to send salmonella up in a space shuttle, curious to see how the bacterium would fare on such a voyage. The year before they sent salmonella on a cruise to the Caribbean, but between the bacterium getting drunk all the time and contracting the Norwalk virus, that experiment was a complete bust. So this time they picked space. Makes perfect sense!
Maybe it’s just me, but I get these pictures in my head of astronauts conducting little, tiny tests on the weightless salmonella. You know, like how long salmonella can pedal on a stationary bike in zero gravity. Whether they react differently to ink blot tests while orbiting earth. How long it takes them to put a miniature puzzle of the Eiffel Tower together. Or whether bad TV comedies are any better in zero Gs. These are the things I honestly picture. What did you think, that they just sat around and listened to Strauss the whole time?
But I am concerned that they would send such a dangerous bacterium up into space without knowing how it would react. Shoot, what if it freaked out on the flight and soiled the whole place? What if it got loose in the freeze-dried chicken? Can freeze-dried chicken be infected by salmonella? Or would it have to be freeze-dried salmonella? I want to know if these questions were asked before the shuttle was launched.
Remember, salmonella is a mean little bugger. When ingested, it has the ability to make your insides feel, well, like they’re trying to get out. That, and many other uncomfortable effects that usually involve a long stay in the restroom, if not the emergency room.
Now they tell us that after being aloft in space, the space salmonella were tested and found to be three times deadlier than the same strains left behind on Earth.
Um, that’s quite frightening. In fact, that’s downright terrifying. What if salmonella learn how to build rockets? Or start paying the Russians to take them up, too?
Researchers also found that 167 genes in the salmonella had changed. We created deadly mutant bacterium! I hope there are never any plans to take mosquitoes, spiders or poisonous snakes into orbit. Who knows what they would come back as.
Scientists don’t really have a good idea why any of these changes occurred. Sure, they have theories, but again, none seem to be that convincing to me. Or at least no more convincing than ideas you’ll find in comic books. Could it be the radiation in the Van Allen Belt caused the salmonella to become edgy and mutate? Why not? If I were ever genetically altered by radiation, you can bet I’d be pretty mad and a good deal more dangerous. It’s not unlike how you feel if your underwear is too tight.
Maybe I’ve seen one too many sci-fi movies, but I don’t like experiments like this. There’s too much we just don’t know, which is one of the arguments for conducting these kinds of tests. But, you know, my chicken is dangerous enough (considering I don’t usually cook it long enough.) The last thing I need is some strain of mutated space salmonella getting in there. I don’t know if my lower intestines could take a mutant invasion like that.