RESULTS OF SPACE EXPERIMENTS

Life science research in space was started in Europe with the first Bi ostack experiment flown onboard Apollo 16 in 1972. Biostack was design ed to investigate the biological effects of single heavy ions of cosmi c radiation. Among several undertakings towards this goal, the Biostac k achieved the highest precision in the determination of the spatial c orrelation of the observed biological response of single test organism s to the passage of single heavy ions, which is the mandatory requirem ent, It also provided information on the influence of additional space -flight factors, such as microgravity, on radiation effects and measur ements of the spectrum of charge and energy of the cosmic radiation. T he experiment was performed as an international cooperation effort. Th is report gives a summary of the biological data accumulated in this a nd the follow-on experiments of the Biostack program.