Germs Taken Into Space May Come Back Deadlier

westlake writes "Sounds like the plot for a B-movie, doesn't it? Germs go into space and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened. In a medical experiment, salmonella carried about the space shuttle in the fall of 2006 proved far more lethal to lab mice than their earth-bound source. 90% dead vs. 60% dead in twenty-six days, with half the mice dying at 1/3 the oral dose. Apparently 167 genes in the space-evolved strain had changed. The likely cause: In microgravity the force of fluids passing over the cells is low, similar to conditions in the gastrointestinal tract, and the cells adapted quickly to the new environment."

Comments

conditions outside the body

[mrvan]

TFS states that the deadliness is bacause the germs were adapter better to the conditions inside the body, so kill lab mice faster. Outside the lab, these germs will have to pass from host to host, and presumable in between the hosts conditions will be less like microgravity. SO, they might be deadlier, but with less rate of infection. A deadlier disease with lower infection rate might actually be less of a risk: hosts die more quickly and not enough new hosts get infected.

Also: if the new germs are really more well-adapted (ic better at multiplying and spreading), wouldn't they have evolved like that on earth? Especially since the evolutionary step is apparently small enough to be attained by a limited colony in a very limited time?

Re:conditions outside the body

[morgan_greywolf]

A deadlier disease with lower infection rate might actually be less of a risk: hosts die more quickly and not enough new hosts get infected. As long as it's you who gets infected and not me, I agree. ;)

Re:conditions outside the body

[s_p_oneil]

"Also: if the new germs are really more well-adapted (ic better at multiplying and spreading), wouldn't they have evolved like that on earth? Especially since the evolutionary step is apparently small enough to be attained by a limited colony in a very limited time?"

Not necessarily. Evolution is like a simple hill-climbing algorithm in computer programming. It blindly heads in any upward direction without any way of knowing if it will get stuck at the top of a small hill when there is a much bigger hill right next to it. It is unnatural for it to go back downhill (to weaken itself) on purpose to look for bigger hills to climb. But changes to the environment distort the landscape, in some cases turning hills into valleys and forcing life to climb back up or die out.

So most likely the germs had their little hill turned upside down in micro-gravity and were forced to climb up to the top of a new one. Their landscape got turned upside down again when they came back down to Earth, and they ended up finding a bigger hill than the one they started on.

Re:conditions outside the body

[Anonymous Coward]

A deadlier disease with lower infection rate might actually be less of a risk: hosts die more quickly and not enough new hosts get infected. As long as it's you who gets infected and not me, I agree. ;) Both you and the parent are not paying attention to the true significance of this story. What would happen if bacteria was on a satellite for years and then came back to the Earth? Everybody has always assumed that it was meteors or bioweapons lab leaks that were causing zombie outbreaks, but it could just as easily be supergerms that are so highly evolved that they can control the dead!

Isn't it entirely probable, nay likely even that an old Soviet bioweapons satellite is going to crash sometime with germs that will reanimate the dead on a large scale?

Re:conditions outside the body

[Anonymous Coward]

Mutation tends to be more random than not, so you are likely to get organisms that cannot actually DO anything useful (assuming making zombies is useful) or lack any particular advantage over the original species. In fact they may be sterile or weakened.

Irradiated flesh doesn't turn into the Hulk or glow or become self-intelligent. No. It just dies I have several thousand volumes of books (comic books) that contradict you. Who should I believe, some Nobel prize winning biologist who has only written a couple dozen scientific papers in his life (and only a couple dealing with radiation) or Stan Lee who has published hundreds of volumes dealing with the biological and social effects of radiation?

Suppose the germ developed a version of itself that was 100% lethal and then killed its own host before the host could spread it. Well the germ dies too, doesn't it? Not if it reanimates the dead! Did you miss that part? These germs are going to be so deadly that they take you past 'dead' and bring you to 'undead.' You might even say that they are undeadly! The only thing that they need to survive is a highly dense energy source that their host body could consume--maybe something like the brains of unsuspecting victims.

One Giant Virus for Mankind

[Doc Ruby]

The AIDS plague "patient zero" is estimated to have become infected in 1969, the year men returned from the moon.

This plague that has killed millions of people, primarily among homosexual men, perhaps originated in a tiny canister of testosterone-pumped men trapped in a tiny metal can thousands of miles from Earth, with only each other to turn to in conditions of unprecedented stress and lonliness.

Yep, it does sound like the plot from a B movie - by John Waters.