The Ethics of Deep Space Travel
Rosario Isasi is contributing to an ethical framework to safeguard the rights of the women and men who want to go where no one has yet gone and may have to enter suspended animation to do so.
As we push further into deep space, the ethical implications of travel well beyond LEO, the low-Earth orbit, have experienced a Big Bang of their own.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Rosario Isasi, J.D., M.P.H., led a research team to propose a foresight framework for dealing with the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) arising from the application of biopreservation technologies in space exploration missions that, due to rapid technological advances, may exceed a customary human lifeline.
Dr. Rosario is an associate professor of human genetics at the Dr. J. T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Miami. She directs the Program in Genome Ethics and Policy at the Miller School’s John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics and is a member of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute.
She studies the socio-ethical and legal implications of disruptive technologies, such as genomics and regenerative medicine, gene editing, stem cells and organoid models. She’s been integral to the development of the Miller School’s community ethical standards in genetics. She’s an expert in comparative law, bioethics and health disparities.
If you want to work through the moral quandaries of subjecting an astronaut to suspended animation so she can live long enough to fulfill a mission to Mars, Dr. Rosario is the person to talk to.
“I think the ultimate goal of ethics is to create an environment where we can foster scientific integrity,” she said. “There is no science without moral and social values.”
We spoke with Dr. Rosario about her work and the paper that catalyzed a discussion about the rights of the women and men who want to go where no one has yet gone and may have to halt their natural metabolic processes to do so.
Prof. Isasi, can you tell us about your work in ethics?
I have a portfolio in genomic medicine, genetics and stem cell technologies. Right now, I have an NIH RO1 grant that looks at the potential translation of prenatal gene editing and the values that will inform scientific best practices. I have also worked extensively in stem cell research and have led the creation of best practices, such as with the use of legacy collections.
My expertise is with multidisciplinary research consortia. My work focuses on societal attitudes towards scientific innovation and the development of practical tools as for example with consent and data sharing models. I focus on how we conduct science with more ethical and moral integrity and how standards have changed over time.
What is the ultimate goal of ethics when it comes to medical research?
Science has to reflect society. A scientific foundation without a socio-moral context is just an academic exercise, almost like it lives in the cloud. So, we try to be practical in evaluating the proper context of science within society to foster innovation.
Let’s transition to the work that’s led to your paper. And when I was thinking about it, I had one very rudimentary question. What is suspended animation?
Suspended animation is encompassed within an overall framework of biopreservation technologies to preserve or maintain isolated organs and tissue cells. Scientists deliberately slow down or halt the life process by external means without causing death and allowing for later reanimation. You go into this inertia space and later they bring back the individual to full human function.
Can you talk about the design of the study and some of your conclusions?
With Roel Feys, an ELSI research associate at the Hussman Institute, and the team from the ATP-Bio consortium, we thought to look at how emerging biopreservation technologies could be applied to astronauts in space. As a lawyer and bioethicist, the immediate question that came to me was, ‘What could be the socio-ethical and legal implications of this? And do we have fit-for-purpose ethics and legal frameworks?’ These are timely issues to discuss, as space ELSI research is still a novel and fertile area.
Then the next question, which seems obvious for many, was, “Who is an astronaut?” The concept has been challenged. We have professional astronauts that come from NASA or a career that is very predetermined, predefined and homogenous. But there are individuals who want to be astronauts but have not had that training: space tourists. They go up in space. Are they astronauts?
And the question is not trivial. Who they are determines what rights they have, what responsibilities and safeguards they have.
When astronauts go up in space, they face hazards. It’s incredibly hectic. There’s not much privacy. They’re confined. They stay for a long time, and when they come back, astronauts suffer from a number of health conditions. Generally, they recover, but there are implications for longer missions that are nowhere near understood.
What role does suspended animation play?
When you suspend animation, you minimize the effects of space travel, such as radiation, isolation/confinement gravity, distance from earth and hostile environment (RIDGE). Right now, it’s not possible, with the state of science, but biopreservation technologies are advancing rapidly and one day these technologies will enable humans to undertake space missions beyond low-Earth orbit. This is exciting! But we must ask ourselves about the first time it’s used. There’s a lot of uncertainty about risks, about the potential for harm and about the benefits, too,
We talked about who is actually an astronaut. That’s important, because the legal framework to establish protections is currently employment. Those protections would be contractual and under an occupational health model, in which the thresholds for safety are sometimes lower when compared to other contexts, such as human subjects’ protections. So, the issue here is, if suspended animation were to be used in astronauts for the first time, is this professional practice, human experimentation or scientific research?
We need to think about issues of informed consent. How voluntary is the consent? What about managing conflict of interest or privacy? We volunteer for a job or to be a research participant, but we don’t necessarily volunteer for certain tasks that might involve disproportionate and uncertain risks.
Autonomy is the most important principle, to use your own judgment to balance the benefits and risks, to decide what is best for you. But for an astronaut — considered as a government employee in this scenario — there will be limits to their individual, autonomous decision making, for example. They will be unable decline to be under suspended animation or, once up in space in this state, unable to withdraw consent.
The bottom line is, right now we do not have an ethical and legal framework for these types of scenarios and there’s very little policy within NASA and other entities guiding how to look at this. Our paper is the first paper published in this area and its great contribution is that it proposes a framework.
Can you describe that framework?
Our ELSI framework, which comes from the Human Genome Project, is prospective and multidisciplinary. We have to always be looking forward to make sure the framework is flexible and bold, so as to be applied to different areas related to space exploration.
I’ve talked a lot about individual implications in terms of the astronaut or the employee or research participant, but there are other social and cultural considerations, as well. If rival countries want to colonize space, how do we talk about the stewardship of resources?
Different cultures value astrological entities differently. For some Native American communities, the moon has a special connotation. And some other people want their ashes scattered on the moon when they die. But that’s really disrespectful for communities that see the moon as a sacred entity, as part of the cultural, historical values that define who they are and where their community came from.
Our paper is saying, “Let’s start thinking about these issues.” Let’s start using a framework that we understand to talk about governance, trustworthiness, public engagement and autonomy.
Tags: bioethics, medical ethics, Rosario Isasi