MERIGNAC,
France (AP) -- 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
experiment is part of a broader effort to develop robots for future surgeries
from a distance--in space or on Earth.
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
operation, announced Monday by Martin and the French National Center for Space Studies, is 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.
The cyst
removal operation was chosen because it is relatively simple and involves a
local anesthetic, Martin said, adding that the procedure was mainly used as a
"feasibility study" for possible surgery in space one day.
Martin and
his team became the first doctors to perform microsurgery under zero-gravity
conditions in 2003, mending the artery in a rat's tail--an operation far more
complex than the one Wednesday.
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.
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