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Sustainable Agriculture and Industry
Published in Julie Kerr, Introduction to Energy and Climate, 2017
Some researchers feel that these techniques have great potential, that it can be utilized to clean up very hazardous waste sites (Lovley, 2003). For example, the most radioresistant organism known, called bacterium Deinococcus, was successfully modified to consume and digest toluene and ionic mercury from extremely dangerous radioactive nuclear waste. A major concern, however, is that releasing genetically augmented organisms into the natural environment may not be wise because it could prove extremely difficult to track, monitor, and control them.
Why Human Enhancement is Necessary for Successful Human Deep-space Missions
Published in The New Bioethics, 2019
Konrad Szocik, Martin Braddock
One important scientific issue is the difference between short high exposures and long low exposures to radiation, which apply to space missions within and beyond the protective effects of the Van Allen belts outside of the solar system. The low dose may well have less impact as the human body has some ability to repair radiation damage. It is likely that short high doses will carry a greater level of risk and it is essential that astronauts shelter or are protected from events which generate short high doses such as solar particle events (SPE) (Hu 2017). Long, low exposures might be mitigated against if DNA repair mechanisms can be enhanced and the NASA roadmap for conferring radioresistance proposes some strategies, based in part upon identification of radioresistance factors from extremophiles (Cortese et al. 2018). The assessments ESA made 10–15 years ago noted that without a major advance in radiation protection (e.g. much better shielding, reduced travel time) astronauts may survive a mission to Mars and back to Earth but cannot go further into the solar system or beyond it. Space missions also cause a substantial loss of bone mineral density and the deleterious impact of microgravity may be augmented by space radiation (Vico and Hargens 2018), and vice versa (Moreno-Villanueva et al. 2017).