Nello Pace served as the Director of the Environmental Physiology Laboratory in Berkeley from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the cofounder of the International Union of Physiological Sciences Commission on Gravitational Physiology and of the Galileo Foundation, dedicated to the support of gravitational physiology research.
As Director of the Environmental Physiology Laboratory in Berkeley, Pace received several NASA grants to conduct primate physiology research projects. One was a study of primate calcium balance during space flight conducted on the Biosatellite III mission.
Pace's team had originally intended to design a unit that would collect urine samples at intervals during the mission. They had planned to analyze the samples after the biosatellite was recovered. Then they heard about a miniaturized soil analyzer being developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the Viking Mars missions. They approached JPL about the possibility of conducting a joint venture. JPL was very interested because this would allow a flight test of the analyzer before the Mars missions. The JPL device was converted into a urine analyzer that allowed collected urine to be automatically analyzed while the spacecraft was still in orbit, rather than postflight. The resulting data could be down-linked to the ground, and summary data could be stored in the spacecraft's recovery capsule. Pace describes the urine analyzer as a remarkable piece of work. It worked flawlessly during the mission. There were many such engineering successes on the mission, but these were eclipsed by the furor over the death of the monkey subject.
According to Pace, the Biosatellite III experience strongly influenced the primate research program at NASA. Pace had proposed the Automated Primate Research Lab (APRL) in 1968, one year before the Biosatellite III flight. The objective of the project was to fly two adult pigtailed monkeys in Earth-orbit for 60 days. APRL was an offshoot of the Primate Hemodynamics and Metabolism on an Orbiting Satellite (PHAMOS) program, begun in 1958, which was one of the very first projects to come out of NASA. APRL never progressed to a flight stage because there was heavy opposition to flying primates in the aftermath of Biosatellite III. But several other programs and concepts grew out of it. Researchers became interested in ways of shrinking the "envelope" around the animal to protect it during space flight. Pace's team developed a "monkey pod," an enclosure that could safely house a restrained pigtailed monkey. The monkey pod was one of the primate experiments on NASA's SMD III, a Spacelab flight simulation test. It was proposed that the monkey pod be flown in the Shuttle middeck in the mid-1980s. This project was never completed, although several of its elements were incorporated into later primate flight programs.
French and Russian teams visited Pace's laboratory in the early 1970s to study the monkey pod system. Their willingness to fly primates in space increased as a consequence of these visits. It had long been known that many experiment results could only be extrapolated to humans if primates were flown. But until that time, both the French and the Soviets had not thought it possible to maintain a primate in comfortable restraint for long time periods.