Space medicine is an emerging field that blends emergency care, physiology, psychology and toxicology to help astronauts manage the health challenges of space flight. Its key focus is understanding how the body responds in the absence of gravity. In space, astronauts live in microgravity, a state of near weightlessness caused by continuous free fall while orbiting the planet.

     Although gravity is still present, its effects are greatly diminished. Fluids move upward, muscles weaken and bones lose mass. These changes can disrupt normal body function in ways that are still being studied.

     “Microgravity is not an environment we evolved for,” says Dr. Lisa McNamee, who works with space medicine. “It acts like a stress test on the body, and that tells us things about human physiology that we’d never discover in a lab,” she adds.

     Other risks include radiation, pressure changes, disrupted sleep cycles, lunar dust and g-forces. These forces, caused by changes in acceleration, can place added strain on the body.

    The elevation of scientific discourse to a major component in the project of modernity and the Eurocentrism inherent in the Western scientific enterprise have aided both the development of racial hierarchies and the creation of the long-enduring myth of science as an impartial, pure and value-free endeavour, superior to other peoples’ modes of thinking. It is also to be argued that it is one thing to ‘discover’, identify, categorise and classify plants, beetles as well as peoples, but quite another to transform such categories and classifications into hierarchies that suggest stratification in terms of social and moral inferiority. The process of categorisation would then not in itself be normative, but rather evaluative attributions would be based upon moral and social preferences, subjective value judgements and the striving for political power.

    The conundrum of the conceptual status and the socio-political consequences of the Enlightenment has not been resolved satisfactorily. Yet there now exists agreement on some parameters. The consensus is that scientific racism, racial medicine and colonial rule were for a time closely linked, variously reinforced and justified each other. Claims to racial superiority and Western scientific and medical hegemony are seen to have emerged alongside each other in the wake of the Enlightenment, culminating eventually not only in scientifically based racism in the nineteenth century and racial medicine in the twentieth century, but also in the perceived enhancement and legitimisation of colonial expansion by reference to medical and scientific progress. The interrelatedness of race, science and medicine, and its extension to the colonial realm during the nineteenth century, in particular, therefore constitutes one major focus for work and research.

    The elevation of scientific discourse to a major component in the project of modernity and the Eurocentrism inherent in the Western scientific enterprise have aided both the development of racial hierarchies and the creation of the long-enduring myth of science as an impartial, pure and value-free endeavour, superior to other peoples’ modes of thinking. It is also to be argued that it is one thing to ‘discover’, identify, categorise and classify plants, beetles as well as peoples, but quite another to transform such categories and classifications into hierarchies that suggest stratification in terms of social and moral inferiority. The process of categorisation would then not in itself be normative, but rather evaluative attributions would be based upon moral and social preferences, subjective value judgements and the striving for political power.

    The conundrum of the conceptual status and the socio-political consequences of the Enlightenment has not been resolved satisfactorily. Yet there now exists agreement on some parameters. The consensus is that scientific racism, racial medicine and colonial rule were for a time closely linked, variously reinforced and justified each other. Claims to racial superiority and Western scientific and medical hegemony are seen to have emerged alongside each other in the wake of the Enlightenment, culminating eventually not only in scientifically based racism in the nineteenth century and racial medicine in the twentieth century, but also in the perceived enhancement and legitimisation of colonial expansion by reference to medical and scientific progress. The interrelatedness of race, science and medicine, and its extension to the colonial realm during the nineteenth century, in particular, therefore constitutes one major focus for work and research.