The Sex Geckos' Sacrifice

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/opinion/the-sex-geckos-sacrifice.html

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BLACKSBURG, Va. — The Russian sex geckos didn’t make it. Launched into space in July with a mission to procreate for the cameras, they never got to first base. It was too cold.

Their life-support system is suspected of having malfunctioned, and the lizard quintet died within a few hours. When the Russian space agency Roscosmos lost touch with the satellite soon after its launch, HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver spoofed the #BringBackOurGirls campaign to rescue Nigerian schoolgirls by using #GoGetThoseGeckos to raise awareness of the lizards’ plight. After the spacecraft landed and the geckos’ mortal remains were recovered on Sept. 1, news outlets echoed The Onion’s headline: “Russian Mating Geckos Didn’t Survive Trip To Space.”

Captivating as they were, the sex geckos joined a diverse and distinguished company as the latest animal martyrs in humanity’s ongoing quest to understand how we might live and reproduce beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Ever since the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster aloft in a hot-air balloon in 1783, a veritable Noah’s Ark of animals have been marshaled as our proxies for high-altitude flights and served as model organisms to allow us to study the dynamics of life in space.

Some have survived, and many have not. Why we choose the creatures we do is, you would think, a business of cool practical and scientific consideration. Why some capture our imaginations and hearts is a less clinical matter.

To understand how life-forms that are adapted to Earth’s environment might function elsewhere, we have enlisted everything from rats, fruit flies and worms to fish, tortoises and spiders. Yes, we learn about the effects of radiation and prolonged weightlessness on various metabolic processes, but scientific reasons are enmeshed with cultural notions about the species in question. That context makes some animal astronauts more resonant than others.

Many oppose using animals in biomedical research, but there is little groundswell of opposition to using rats, fruit flies and frogs to learn more about humans’ long-term prospects in outer space. No hashtag circulated on social media for the fruit flies that did successfully procreate on the geckos’ ill-fated mission. And few lament the countless mice and nameless fish rocketed into the cosmos.

At least 32 monkeys and apes have traveled on rockets since 1949. During his flight in 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham received a food reward when he pressed a lever on cue, and a shock to his feet if he failed to do so. His performance indicated that humans would be able to perform tasks and remain mentally stable when it was their turn.

Attitudes have changed since then, and we’ve had enough experience of human cosmonauts to know how they perform. No monkeys were launched into space after 1997 and the end of the Russian Bion program, until Iran claimed to have launched two monkey-manned missions last year.

The other animals we don’t send anymore are our oldest domesticates: dogs. Their use as stand-ins for humans at the dawn of the space age made these space pioneers enduring celebrities.

As the Cold War superpowers competed to send men into space, different criteria informed their choices of test animals. The Americans thought our closest animal relatives would provide the best evidence of our ability to function in space. The Soviets chose small stray dogs because they were hardy, cheap and tractable. Thanks to the behavioral scientist Ivan Pavlov, the Soviets also had an unrivaled knowledge of canine physiology and experience with dogs as research subjects.

Concerned chiefly with the prospects for human survival, the Soviets prepared their experimental subjects with clinical mercilessness, implanting heartbeat and respiration monitors and rerouting the carotid artery so a blood pressure cuff could be positioned on it. They spun the dogs in centrifuges, shook them on vibrostands and used catapults to simulate extreme G-forces.

Although Laika, the first living creature to orbit Earth, in 1957, was the only space dog deliberately sent to certain death, many of her comrades perished in the lab or on rocket flights that went awry. But the dogs went into space with relationships with their caretakers, as well as the hopes of the engineers seeking to send humans after them. Some survived their rocket flights and left the vivarium as the pets of generals, doctors and engineers. Others became the researchers’ doomed darlings.

In his memoirs, the Russian rocket scientist Boris Chertok recalled his colleague Sergei Korolev’s affection for a dog named Lisichka (“Little Fox”), who was assigned to the first orbital flight intended to return safely to Earth. One day in 1960, Korolev interrupted testing to pull the dog out of her ejection seat and pet her.

“I so want you to come back,” said the famously gruff chief designer. A few days later, Lisichka and her fellow space dog, Chaika, perished when the booster rocket exploded during the launch of their spacecraft.

That failed flight remained secret for years, but the successful launch and return of the dogs Belka and Strelka a month later set a new high-water mark for space dog fame and glory. They made headlines, barked on the radio and paraded at news conferences. Their images adorned postcards, postage stamps and commemorative pins.

The sex gecko experiment was part of a quest to understand the challenges humans might face reproducing in conditions of zero gravity and ionizing radiation. Despite the dead lizards’ celebrity, conditioned by the anthropomorphizing influence of popular culture (wherein geckos sell insurance with a Cockney accent), we place geckos in a fundamentally different category than dogs, whose sacrifice in the name of scientific discovery gives most of us pause.

The sex geckos’ brief fame may have occasioned more punch lines than sincere sorrow, but their death should prompt us to reconsider the ethics of using other creatures to advance our own purposes. Will we be honoring the geckos’ loss 50 years from now? On another planet, perhaps.

Amy Nelson, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, is the co-author of “Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History.”