On a Wednesday morning like any other, a specialist military team is deployed to recover a satellite that has returned to Earth unexpectedly. At 11am they miss a scheduled check-in with mission control. By midday it’s established that they are dead, along with everyone else in the surrounding town. A new pandemic has reached earth and the rules of the game have changed…
The Andromeda Strain. Interplanetary contamination. Little green men. It makes for a fascinating science fiction thriller, especially in the hands of Michael Crichton. Science Fiction aside, could our increasingly frequent ventures into space lead to an extra-terrestrial contaminant? And what of the biospecimens returned to earth for scientific investigation? Are we as a species prepared to deal with the complexities of extra-terrestrial sample collection and biobanking?
Feature Image:
Date:
Document: