Dr Gilles Clement received Doctoral Degrees in Neurobiology from the University of Lyon in 1981 and in Natural Science from the University of Paris in 1986. He is Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) Toulouse, France.
Research in space life sciences has been his primary focus with experiments on Salyut-7 (1982), MIR (1988), and on more than 25 Space Shuttle flights (1985-present). His research topics include influence of microgravity on posture, eye movements, spatial orientation, and cognition in humans.
Dr Clement is currently the principal investigator of life sciences experiments being conducted before and after Space Shuttle flights, and onboard the International Space Station.
He recently published three books entitled Fundamentals of Space Medicine (Springer: Dordrecht, 2005), Fundamentals of Space Biology (Springer: New York, 2006), and Artificial Gravity (Springer: New York, 2007).
Professor Clement: your medical speciality is neuroscience and in particular, the effect of gravity (or its absence) on balance and spatial orientation in humans. You work has involved you with more than 70 astronauts. What are the particular problems encountered by astronauts during space missions and what countermeasures can minimize them?
Our studies have focused on the alterations in equilibrium, eye-head coordination, and spatial orientation during and immediately following space flight.
Typically, astronauts experience space motion sickness, reorientation illusions and navigation problems in-flight, as well as an impairment in visual stabilization and perception of motion during head and body movements when returning to Earth.
However, bone loss, muscle atrophy, and cardiovascular deconditioning are known challenges too. The longer the space flight, the more serious the after-effects of weightlessness. Current countermeasures have only limited effectiveness in countering the full range of deleterious effects of weightlessness, especially during long-duration space flights.
Your book Fundamentals of Space Medicine has become one of the seminal works in the field - indeed the International Academy of Astronautics presented you with the 2005 Luigi Napolitano Book Award for it. What exactly is "Space Medicine"?
Space Medicine tries to solve medical problems encountered during space missions.
These problems include some adaptive changes to the space environment (weightlessness, radiation, temperature, and pressure) and also some non-pathologic changes that become maladaptive on return to Earth (for example, bone loss).
Space Physiology is more investigational in nature and tries to characterise the body responses during space flight, especially due to weightlessness; it provides the necessary knowledge, hence the "fundamentals", required for an efficient space medicine.
Governments and agencies have been in space a long time but private space initiatives which involve sending the general public into space are on their way. Is this a special challenge?
The current plans for space tourism focus on sub-orbital flights of short duration.
The challenges that the sub-orbital flight participants will face are space motion sickness and spatial disorientation episodes, which typically begin during the first minutes in weightlessness, and cardiovascular adverse reactions to the high accelerations during reentry and immediately after landing when standing.
Various types of preflight adaptation training can be used to limit some of these effects, or to prepare the passengers to cope with these symptoms when they occur. For space flights of longer duration, however, it is likely that the required medical, physical, and mental fitness for flight participants will be close to that required for professional astronauts.
