Russian experiments on animals in space

Control medical examination of the two rhesus macaques, which were members of the Russian 'Bion 10' space mission. Both animals spent almost 12 days in the spacecraft orbiting the Earth. Zvyozdny Gorodok, Moscow Oblast, Russia on January 18th,1993 Pictured: a research team with a capsule in which two monkeys traveled The Bion program, which began in 1966, included a series of missions that flew biological experiments using primates, rodents, insects, cells, and plants on a biosatellite in near-earth orbit. After the European Parliament's 2010 directive to stop using animals for scientific purposes, the Russians gave up sending monkeys and dogs to space, and experiments limited them to small animals. (Photo by Wojtek Laski/Getty Images)