Scientists Bend Sunlight to the Operating Theatre

Israeli scientists have devised the ultimate in blue sky thinking - a beam of sunlight as a surgeon's scalpel.

A team at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba report in Nature today that they used solar surgery to burn away a tumour-sized lesion on the liver of an anaesthetised rat.

Hospitals switched years ago to lasers as tools for intricate work in the operating theatre. But laser beams have to be generated by expensive equipment, and they can involve the risk of eye injury to the people who use them.

A group of engineers, solar physicist and clinicians at Beersheba turned to the renewable power source most available in the Negev desert: the sun. They devised a fibreoptic concentrator that will collect and focus sunlight and channel it into an operating theatre.

Then, having run surgical experiments on chicken breasts and livers, they made incisions in two healthy female rats.

They used a fibreoptic tip 1mm across to deliver two to three watts of concentrated sunlight for bursts of 40 to 180 seconds on lesions on the rat's livers.

They brought the animals round and watched them recover their normal functions. Then they killed them after variously 24 and 72 hours, and took another look inside to confirm that the surgery had worked.

It may be some time before British surgeons can rely on solar-power scalpels, but the technology could help developing-world hospitals.

"Though the deployment of solar radiation for surgery must be restricted to clear-sky periods in sunbelt climates, its appeal lies in its potentially low cost compared with conventional laser fibreoptic treatments," the team reports.