Harold Klein, a specialist in microbial physiology, served as Assistant Director for Life Sciences at ARC from 1964 to 1968, and Director of Life Sciences from 1968 to 1984. He is now Scientist-in-Residence at Santa Clara University, California, and a research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California.
During the 1970s and 1980s, life sciences research at ARC was concentrated in three major areas. Aeronautical research focused on the behavioral aspects of aviation and on man-machine integration. Space biology and medicine research covered studies ranging from smaller organisms to human physiology. Exobiology research focused on investigating the prospects for life in the universe. "All three areas were constant themes throughout this whole period," Klein says.
Although animal experiments were conducted on the ground by the life sciences group at ARC to study the effects of hypergravity and radiation, space flight experiments were not conducted until the early 1970s. Until then, the group was mainly concerned with basic research rather than space flight experiment development. Because of this, the life sciences research agenda was not affected by the failure of the Biosatellite III mission, despite the fact that a good deal of adverse public attention was directed at ARC after the mission. "You have to understand the organization at Ames during the period when the biosatellites were flown," Klein explains. "There was a separate organization for biosatellite missions, basically dealing with engineering and management areas. They managed all the flight experiments from ARC, whether they were life sciences experiments or astrophysics experiments. So the life sciences group had no direct responsibility for the Biosatellite program." Klein and his colleagues were interested in the Biosatellite program, but somewhat pessimistic with regard to the Biosatellite III outcome since "there was only a single animal, very heavily instrumented..., and likely to be stressed to a degree that would make it difficult to dissociate any weightlessness or space-related effects."
Klein was involved with the joint U.S./Soviet activities on the Cosmos project from the very beginning of cooperation in the early 1970s. He recalls that the first time the two sides interacted in the area of space biology was in 1971, when the newly formed Joint Working Group for Space Biology and Medicine met for the first time. "Most of the discussion at the time centered around biomedical and life support issues. But I had some informal conversations with Gazenko (see p. 148) and Genin about what they were investigating with lower organisms. I think the seeds for what was to become the Cosmos interaction were sowed at that time. If we had not gotten along so well then, there would have been nothing." By 1974, the plans for cooperation had solidified into an invitation to the U.S. from the Soviet Union to participate in the Cosmos program. "At first, we didn't know there would be a continuing series of Cosmos flights on which we could participate. We were just invited onto one flight. The Soviets probably wanted to see how things would go from their side. Since the first time worked out well and the results were interesting, they invited us onto the next flight two years later." Klein describes the first U.S. experiments on Cosmos as being very simple. "They were not anything like the later experiments. There were no announcements of opportunity, no big peer reviews. We just did them because the spacecraft was available, specimens were going to be available, and we saw a chance to get some work done."