Street Theater Outside NASA HQ at 11 am

Will PETA volunteer for radiation testing on humans, then?

One question...

Do we get to feed the animals?

:)

Why is this experiment considered necessary? We already know radiation exposure is harmful.

I have a number of problems with this experiment. From what I can gather it is to measure task response in the face of increasing doses of gamma radiation as an analog to cumulative radiation exposure over say: a journey to Mars.

A/ the dose will be a single burst of gamma rays rather than a continuous exposure. Even if the test subjects were Human, using this methodology you could not extrapolate from the study to the real mission!
B/ not all mammals/simians have the same radiation tolerance as humans. Metabolic rates anyone?
C/ as far as this space cadet is aware we are not planning on a Moon mission much before the 2020's and Mars/NEO missions are even further away. Why now?
D/ Galactic Cosmic Rays not Gamma Rays "are one of the most important barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft. See Health threat from cosmic rays." Perhaps Jack Bergman doesn't read wikipedia!
E/ we have enough data to ALREADY extrapolate the following; That impairment of tasks will be directly proportional to cumulative radiation level. I.e. a sub lethal but critical dose will merely cause hair loss, vomiting, bleeding from orifices, etc, etc. Result: a dedicated space cadet on a one way Mission to Mars will take a stress pill and 'soldier on.' Whilst a monkey will crawl into a corner in abject misery. Higher doses will cause death and Mission Failure. Lower doses eventual death but Mission Success. Monkeys lack the essential motivation to 'soldier on' unless these 'scientists' (and I use the term loosely) ...intend to use "negative reinforcement techniques" further compounding the horror. You can't use a food pellet to positively reinforce a bald, vomiting spider monkey!
F/ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12045
G/ http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11340
H/ yet another existing study
I/ etc
Instead of funding THIS study, the money would be better spent on mitigation techniques.

Finally as a biochemist who has 'sacrificed' any number of animals, one should make a judgement as to the suffering caused vs its medical benefits! From what I have seen to date I see no value in this study whatsoever and am ashamed to see NASA even consider its funding!

Conclusion: This will be a PR disaster. 'Nukes' vs cute spider monkeys? What were they thinking!

brobof, your rant boils down to two claims: (1) there are some differences between the experimental setup and the real-life situation they are trying to gather data about, so the experiment has no value; and (2) we already know some things about radiation exposure, so we don't really need to learn any more.

Both claims are without merit. Regarding (1), yes data from this monkey study would not be nearly as good as sending actual humans to Mars and seeing how they react to the actual radiation. But imperfect does not mean useless. We often learn a lot from imperfect experiments. There are very, very few perfect experiments.

Regarding (2), yes, we have some information, but what we know has a lot of limits.

But let's step back a second and ask where the emotional bias is. Obviously, virtually nobody likes animals to suffer. So people are biased from the start to avoid experiments on animals. So when scientists propose animal experiments, it is very unlikely because of an emotional bias and very likely because it is based on logical analysis of the situation.

Let's even suppose that these scientists are really just crooks and just want to do anything to get taxpayer dollars and don't actually care about whether the experiments return useful data. The last thing crooks like that would propose is animal experiments, because those would be less likely to be funded! The crooks would propose some nice, expensive non-animal experiments.

Do you have a theory about why these experiments would have ever even been proposed if they were, as you claim, so obviously without any benefit?

"So people are biased from the start to avoid experiments on animals. So when scientists propose animal experiments, it is very unlikely because of an emotional bias and very likely because it is based on logical analysis of the situation."

Sorry, but animal testing abuses in the food, pharmaceutical and especially cosmetics industries over the decades undercuts your argument badly.

People do what they know will work. Testing on 1,000 rabbits will be done for a product containing 10 well known and well studied chemicals even if there is ample past test results for the individual chemicals and well grounded models for their interactions because no one wants to accept the possible risk of missing something. Likewise NASA appears willing to sacrifice these monkeys even though we have a fairly good understanding of the effects of radiation on humans just so that they can say they ran the test.

The last bothers me, and bothers me a lot. I am not totally against animal testing, but I do demand that there be very high hurdles. That standard is seldom met, and does not appear to be met with this study. If NASA cannot explain to the layman why this test is so critical that these monkeys must suffer and die, then I will bet that it is not a worthwhile experiment.

If you want accurately test radiation to Mars then NASA will have to put some animals in a spacestation at say EML-2 for several years.

Agreed. However task trained mice or rats (my preferred choice) would need crew tending and some spin gravity for ease of 'handling'. One very good reason for a MoonBase! IMHO.