First Weightless Operation Will Aid Astronauts

French surgeons have performed the first operation on a person in weightless conditions. In the 10-minute procedure yesterday, four doctors cut out a cyst from a patient's arm aboard a free-falling aircraft.

The experiments will help to develop surgical procedures for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and, further in the future, for longer missions to the moon and Mars.

Dominique Martin, head of Bordeaux University hospital's plastic surgery unit and the doctor who led the operation, said the experiment had gone perfectly to plan. "All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems," he said.

The surgery was performed during a parabolic flight - 25 rollercoaster-like manoeuvres inside a converted Airbus A300 aircraft. Each arc recreates weightlessness for 22 seconds as the plane free-falls to the ground. The surgeons, who only operated in these 22-second windows, were held in place with harnesses and their instruments fixed by magnets inside a specially-constructed operating theatre measuring two metres by two metres.

The surgical facility has been designed for the space station or a future Moon base. "Today, if there's an absolute emergency up there ... we can't do anything," said Dr Martin. "And sooner or later, we are going to face the problem."

His team became the first doctors to perform microsurgery under zero gravity earlier this year, mending a 0.5mm-wide artery in a rat's tail.

Yesterday's operation is a routine procedure on the ground, performed under a local anaesthetic. In weightless conditions, although the body behaves differently, the principles of the surgery are the same.

"It is much less traumatic than you might think," said Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine at University College London.

"Surgery in space is evocative - people think if you make a hole in your belly all your guts will fly out everywhere. But actually, what they know from studies elsewhere is that if you make a big incision on your arm, as long as the blood isn't being pumped physically out, it tends to pool on your arm under surface tension."

Dr Martin said he would use yesterday's experiments to inform design of robots, controlled by humans on the ground, that could carry out surgery in space.

While such robots might prove useful on the ISS, Dr Fong said they may not have much use on trips to the moon or Mars. "Once you go beyond Earth orbit, you have significant communications delay so the picture you're seeing is not necessarily what's happening at that moment."