Health from Space Research: Austrian Accomplishments

Space physiology and space medicine are fairly recent sciences, born of the desire to launch man into space and bring him safely back again. 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 as well as genetics and radiation dosimetry. The newly established Austrian Society for Aerospace Medicine provides a basis for multidisciplinary approaches to spaceflight 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 program which was dominated by life science experiments in the areas of cardiovascular medicine, fluid-electrolyte research, neurophysiology, endocrinology, genetics, and radiation biology. The results from these experiments, presented in this book, will help to improve the management of biomedical problems in daily life.