The Problem With Food Allergies on Mars

Life on Earth can be difficult — we have wars, poverty, famine, and all sorts of other problems. But in space is worse. There’s no water, no food, and no breathable air. Oh, and there’s lots of cosmic radiation, too, and that can be pretty awful. As NASA explains, “energetic particles can be dangerous to humans because they pass right through the skin, depositing energy and damaging cells or DNA along the way. This damage can mean an increased risk for cancer later in life or, at its worst, acute radiation sickness during the mission if the dose of energetic particles is large enough.” On Earth, that’s not a problem — as NASA notes, “a huge magnetic bubble, called the magnetosphere, which deflects the vast majority of these particles, protects our planet. And our atmosphere subsequently absorbs the majority of particles that do make it through this bubble.”

But go outside the atmosphere and things can get dicey. Especially — as some elementary school students discovered — if you have food allergies.

In 2015, a nonprofit named iEDU created a cool little (literally) program for school kids aged 11-18 called “Cubes in Space.” Students who want to run science experiments in space. Cubes in Space partners with NASA to send containers measuring four centimeters in each direction up toward the heavens, using either high-altitude balloons or rockets. Students come up with hypotheses for what would happen to whatever stuff they send skyward, and Cubes in Space works with labs to measure the impact of space travel on that stuff.

During the 2022-2023 school year, students at St. Brother André Elementary School in Ottawa, Canada, were one of the groups to come up with something to test — something NASA had, apparently, never considered. If you’re a student (or anyone else, really) who has a food allergy, accidental ingestion can be a life-or-death situation. Many emergency protocols call for a quick dose of epinephrine, which is typically administered using an autoinjector marketed under the brand name EpiPen. For those with serious food allergies, a working EpiPen is something you’ll always have at the ready, just in case. But, the students wondered: would it work in space?

Their theory was simple: cosmic radiation does all sorts of awful things to people, and when NASA and other space agencies send people into rocket ships and the like, they take significant steps to limit how much radiation those people are exposed to. Chemical concoctions, like epinephrine, may be even more susceptible. The professors they were working with were skeptical — they saw no reason why epinephrine would have worse interactions with cosmic rays than other chemicals — but they figured testing it was in order. So the students, working with Cubes in Space, sent two samples to the outer reaches of our atmosphere. One sample was pure epinephrine and the other was the cocktail found in EpiPens.

Both came back as something else.

Raina Smith, one of the students, told CTVNews Ottawa that “for the pure epinephrine, when we sent it on the research balloon, it came back but only 87 percent of it was actually epinephrine. Thirteen percent of it turned into benzoic acid, which is extremely poisonous [if injected].” The EpiPens fared even worse; the sample that returned to Earth had no epinephrine remaining at all.

For now, this isn’t a big problem. We send so few people to space that there’s no need for space-ready epinephrine. But if we want to encourage space tourism or, one day, have a colony on Mars (as unlikely as that may ever be), we’ll need to solve for this. Don’t worry: that’s the project the kids at St. Brother André Elementary School have decided to tackle next.

Bonus fact: Cosmic radiation may be visible, even if you have your eyes closed. Some astronauts have reported seeing what Wikipedia’s editors describe as “spontaneous flashes of light,” especially while outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere. The cause of the phenomenon, sometimes called “Astronaut’s Eye,” is not yet known, but a prevailing theory is that photons from cosmic rays are penetrating the eyelid and are detected by the astronauts’ retinas.

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