That's One Small Cyst For Mankind

What if you're at the International Space Station, and you need your appendix taken out? Can doctors perform surgery in zero-G? Apparently they can... at least that's what a team of French doctors say.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that pioneering surgery -- performed in near-weightless conditions -- went exactly as Doctors had expected. Chief Surgeon Dominique Martin and a team of four other doctors completed the operation onboard a specially-equipped Airbus A300 aircraft as it made a series of 25 parabolic maneuvers to simulate weightlessness.

Team members were strapped down against the walls of the aircraft during the operation.

This was billed as the first near-weightless surgery performed on a human. The doctors only worked during the weightless periods of the flight... each of the 25 parabolas resulted in 20 to 25 seconds of weightlessness -- that's about 10 minutes total.

During a press conference in France, Martin said the procedure wasn't technically difficult -- they removed a cyst from the patient Philippe Sanchot's arm -- but was intended to break a barrier in medical expertise. Martin said the surgery went "exactly as we had expected."

"I'm just a little tired, but it's because my head is spinning," Sanchot said after the procedure.

"At times, we bantered to one another: 'Be careful! Don't twist it,'" Sanchot said. "It was to loosen up the atmosphere."

Like we said earlier, this was the first surgery performed on a human in near-weightless conditions... but it was not the first surgery done in those conditions. In 2003, Martin and his team performed microsurgery under zero-G conditions... mending an artery in a rat's tail. That operation was far more complex than the one performed on Sanchot.

The AP reports NASA has also carried out some robotic surgery experiments on animal models at an undersea laboratory off the Florida coast -- which is intended to simulate conditions on an orbital outpost.

FMI: www.nasa.gov