| Abstract |
It was early April 1961. As 27 year old Yuri Gagarin and 26 year old
Gherman Titov were getting ready for the historic first manned
spaceflight, still unaware of which of them would be chosen to fly first,
a team of microbiologists from the Institute of Experimental Biology of
the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences were keen not to miss this
excellent opportunity. The upcoming event meant they could send some new
experiments into orbit and start answering the question: what effect does
space environment have on cells and tissues? It was not simple scientific
curiosity driving them. Everyone involved in the nascent space program was
aware that such information would be vital if any future long duration
exploration and maybe even colonization of outer space by humans were to
be considered. Among the samples they prepared for the journey were
cultures of bacteria Escherichia Coli and human cancerous cells known as
HeLa. Despite the reality of the Cold War, the team led by microbiologist
N.N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov had acquired vials of HeLa cells from their
American colleagues several years earlier. In fact, these cells made it to
space prior to Gagarin, as they were on board the satellite Korabl-Sputnik
2 in 1960 [1]. HeLa cells were known since 1951 when George Gey, a
scientist from the John Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore,
US, managed to turn tissue taken from a cervical tumor of a 30 year old
African American woman into the first immortal line of human cells.
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