Health from Space Research

Space physiology and space medicine are fairly recent sciences born of the desire to launch man into space. Weightlessness and cosmic radiation - conditions which can neither be adequately simulated nor reproduced on Earth - are on the other hand used as research tools for medical experiments, in particular in the fields of neurophysiology, internal medicine, genetics and radiation dosimetry. The newly established Austrian Society for Aerospace Medicine provides a basis for multidisciplinary approaches to space flight biomedical research. Diagnostic, prognostic and elective, operational and preventive measures can be fostered by activities of the Society. In October 1991, the first Austrian was launched into orbital flight and fulfilled an ambitious scientific programme which was dominated by life science experiments in the areas of cardiovascular medicine, fluid-electrolyte research, neurophysiology, endocrinology, genetics and radiation biology. The results of these experiments are presented in this book, and it is hoped that they will further the management of biomedical problems in daily life.