newscientistspace.com — French doctors carried out the world's first ever operation on a human in zero gravity today, using a specially adapted aircraft to simulate conditions in space.During a 3-hour flight from Bordeaux in southwest France, the team of surgeons and anaesthetists successfully removed a benign tumour from the forearm of a 46-year-old volunteer.
Sep 27, 2006 View in Crawl 4
edge001Sep 27, 2006
article from FOX news with a picture... <a class="user" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,216027,00.html">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,216027,00.html</a>
nickerbockerSep 27, 2006
In other news, weightless surgery is not covered in HMO plan.
zefram12Sep 27, 2006
FTA:"performed a series of parabolic swoops, creating about 20 seconds of weightlessness at the top of each curve. The process was repeated 32 times."I think that means that for 32 times during the 3 hour flight they had normal (or even stronger than normal) gravity. Must be pretty irritating doing complex surgery under such circumstances.
milkmageSep 27, 2006
@honaverypointless? no.. how does blood behave in zero gravity? how do you keep it from floating about the cabin? On earth you rely on gravity to hold things in place.. what's holding your guts in when everything else is floating around. surgery in space could be necessary if/when we need to spend months in transit. i think this serves a valuable purpose.. and if you RTFA, the European Space agency did it to test feasability of remote surgeries (can't always send a trained surgeon on every mission)
xxosirisxxSep 27, 2006
Seriously... do any of you morons actually READ the articles, or do you see the headline and have some sort of ignorant field day with it?The THIRD paragraph tells you what the reasoning was for the experiment:"The experiment was part of a programme backed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop techniques for performing robotic surgery aboard the International Space Station or at a future Moon base."Seriously, the level of ignorance on here is damn near unfathomable, it seems.You can mod me down, if you want... it's not like I'm coming back to check on my comment.
milkmageSep 27, 2006
google vomit comet (nasa's been training in one for years) - Tom Hanks and crew did some filming for Apollo 13 in one I belive.. you can't seriously belive the vomit comet is actually a substitue for actual space travel, can you?
systmbetatesterSep 28, 2006
lmfao, damn are the french this desperate? lol. damn come on america we got a race going now. lets do the first brain surgery in space!
astromattSep 28, 2006
I just got back from Bordeaux and here are some pictures I took on the Zero-G A-300. I flew an experiment on Tuesday, but didn't get to fly during the Wednesday operation. <a class="user" href="http://matthewjason.blogspot.com/2006/09/french-surgery-in-micro-g.html">http://matthewjason.blogspot.com/2006/09/french-surgery-in-micro-g.html</a>
pinanomandaSep 28, 2006
As many objects have been lost in space lately, I don't know if I'd trust a doctor to operate on me out there.
humanwasteSep 29, 2006
The whole point is to prove that in case something were to happen in space, doctors have the ability to perform the operation in zero gravity. This experiment was created to make sure it worked before anybody did it without knowing if it was even possible.