French Remove Tumor Sans Gravity

French doctors performed the first zero-gravity surgery on Wednesday inside an aircraft specially rigged for the occasion. They removed a tumor from a 46-year-old volunteer in preparation for extraterrestrial living to show it should be safe to operate on patients in space. The custom-designed Airbus 300 aircraft – dubbed Zero-G – performed a series of […]

French doctors performed the first zero-gravity surgery on Wednesday inside an aircraft specially rigged for the occasion.

They removed a tumor from a 46-year-old volunteer in preparation for extraterrestrial living to show it should be safe to operate on patients in space.

The custom-designed Airbus 300 aircraft - dubbed Zero-G - performed a series of parabolic swoops, creating about 20 seconds of weightlessness at the top of each curve. The process was repeated 32 times.

Strapped inside a custom-made operating block, three surgeons and two anaesthetists worked during these brief bursts, using magnets to hold their instruments in place around the patient's stretcher.

"If we'd had two hours of zero gravity at a stretch, we could have removed an appendix," Martin said.

In October 2003, surgeons mended a 0.5-millimetre-wide artery in a rat's tail in zero gravity. Next up is remote-controlled zero-gravity robot surgery.