Significant Achievements in Space Bioscience 1958-1964United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Science
Significant Achievements in Space Bioscience 1958-1964
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Biology; Space flight
Several other noteworthy advances have been made as an outgrowth of the
Mercury animal flights. Immediately before the orbital flight MA-5, in
which the chimpanzee Enos was employed, it was unexpectedly found that
this 5-year-old animal was hypertensive. Subsequent centrifuge studies
showed that its vascular responses exceeded those of a control group.
Consideration of the animal’s preflight experience led to speculation
concerning the origin of this hypertension. An explanation of the
high-blood-pressure responses detected in Enos has been pursued by
Meehan et al. ([ref.87]). Persistent hypertension has been produced in
other laboratory chimpanzees restrained in the same manner as those
participating in space flight and exposed to demanding performance
tasks, a demonstration which has important implications for prolonged
manned space flight and for cardiovascular medicine in general.
Studies more directly concerned with behavior and performance have been
extended from those of Project Mercury. These extensions have been in
the following directions: (1) the establishment and maintenance of
complex behavioral repertoires under conditions of full environmental
control, (2) the refinement of behavioral techniques for assessing
sensory and motor processes, and (3) the maintenance of sustained
performance under conditions of long-term isolation and confinement and
preliminary extension of such experimental analysis to man.
Numerous studies with primate subjects, including several at Ames
Research Center, have been devoted to developing methods for maintaining
optimum performance in environments with limited sources of stimulation.
Monkeys, baboons, and chimpanzees, for example, have been isolated for
periods of longer than 2 years with no decrement in performance on
complicated behavioral tasks ([ref.88]). The behavioral techniques used
in these studies are closely related to those employed on human subjects
under NASA sponsorship at the University of Maryland ([ref.89]). The
essence of these techniques is in the proper programing of environmental
stimuli ([ref.90]). It is not sufficient to provide the subject with his
physiological requirements for survival, but he must be given the
psychological motivation for using these provisions. This statement, of
course, is an oversimplification of the problem, but it serves to
illustrate the essence of these experimental programs.
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