Banned: unlike the early 1960s (above), primates can no longer fly in the US.

European life scientists conducting research on the space station may have to work with a severe handicap compared with their international colleagues: they may not be allowed to use laboratory animals.

Although experiments organized through the European Space Agency (ESA) are paid for by individual member states, the agency itself administers the research programme. And because Germany, the biggest European contributor to the station, is refusing to support the use of animals for experiments in space, ESA has imposed an unwritten rule: no rats, no frogs, no animals of any kind.

“This is a great pity for our [research] community,” says Alain Berthoz, a neuroscientist from the College de France in Paris and a veteran space experimenter. One key topic for space biology, he says, is the influence of gravity on neurological development. And that topic, he says, can only be addressed by flying living animals in space.

Didier Schmitt, director of ESA's life sciences department, considers the implications of the moratorium sufficiently problematic to have formed a small task force to consider the issue, and hopes to have it lifted as a general principle. “If we don't do [animal experiments], we will not be able to catch up with the United States and Japan,” he says. He wants to convince Germany that scientists from other ESA states should not be prevented from carrying out animal experiments — even if Germany chooses not to fund such experiments itself.

European scientists have flown animals on past space missions through agreements with either the United States or Russia. Now that all ESA partners have to agree on rules for the use of ESA facilities on the space station, the issue is more complicated. Schmitt fears that European researchers may react to the moratorium by reaching bilateral agreements with the United States, Russia, or Japan, and that the coherence of ESA's research could suffer.

US researchers, meanwhile, will have to operate under separate restrictions. For political reasons, no non-human primates will be allowed on the space station. And that, say life scientists, will rob them of an important research tool, particularly for cardiovascular studies.