Sept. 27, 2006 — A French medical team hailed as a success pioneering surgery Wednesday on a man in near zero-gravity conditions on a flight looping in the air like a roller coaster to mimic weightlessness.
The five-man team of doctors and a patient landed safely at an airport in southwest France after a three-hour flight, but the mid-air surgery to remove a cyst from the man's arm took only about 10 minutes.
Chief surgeon Dominique Martin said the near zero-gravity operation, the first ever on a human, was not technically difficult, but was aimed at breaking a barrier in medical expertise.
The surgery went "exactly as we had expected," Martin told reporters near Merignac airport, outside Bordeaux. "All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems."
The medical team was strapped down to the walls of the Airbus 300 Zero-G plane as it looped up and down in a total of 25 roller coaster-like maneuvers, called parabolas.
Each dive, creating conditions close to weightlessness, lasted 22 seconds — and the doctors operated during those intervals only.
The experiment was part of a broader effort to develop robots for future surgeries from a distance, in space or on Earth, the doctors said.
The plane landed after noon at Institute for Aeronautic Maintenance in Merignac, adjacent to Bordeaux in southwest France, according to Novespace, the agency that operates the plane. A news conference was set for later in the day.
The operation, announced Monday by chief surgeon Dominique Martin and the French National Center for Space Studies, was part of a project backed by the European Space Agency that aims to develop Earth-guided surgical space robots.
The patient, Philippe Sanchot, was chosen because he is an avid bungee-jumper, and accustomed to dramatic gravitational shifts, said Frederique Albertoni, a spokeswoman for the Bordeaux hospital where Martin works.
Sanchot and the six-member medical team underwent training in zero-gravity machines — much like astronauts use — to prepare for the operation.
Albertoni said the cyst removal operation was chosen because it is relatively simple and involves a local anesthetic.
"There are all sorts of interesting dilemmas with surgery in space," said Dr. Joseph LoCicero, chief of thoracic surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, who is not involved in the project. "Without gravity, things could float around," he said, referring to blood and surgical instruments.
From a surgeon's perspective, LoCicero said the application of force and precise surgical movements could be compromised in a weightless atmosphere.
Martin and his team became the first doctors to perform microsurgery under zero-gravity conditions earlier this year, mending the artery in a rat's tail.
NASA has carried out some robotic surgery experiments on animal models at its undersea lab off the coast of Florida, which recreates what life would be like at an orbital outpost.
