UCLA Launches First-Of-Its-Kind Space Training Program Just For Doctors
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — With more humans making their way into space, UCLA is launching a new medical fellowship just for space travelers.
The Space Medicine Fellowship, which will train surgeons to treat people in space, is the first of its kind in the nation. The two-year program will train its fellows with NASA and rotate them between SpaceX and JPL.
The program's first fellow is Dr. Haig Aintablian, who recently completed his residency in emergency medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He says his fascination with space was sparked by a hard-fought glimpse of Saturn's rings when he was a child. And even before being selected for the Space Medicine Fellowship, Aintablian was into astrophotography and did a rotation with NASA while he was in medical school.
"It's so cool to be able to take two of my biggest passions, space and medicine, and kind of merge them into one. I never really expected this to happen or something like this to exist," Aintablian said.
The program's training includes engineering courses customized for doctors, a mission in Utah that mimics the conditions and health risks space travelers would face on the surface of Mars, and time in an isolated polar environment with limited resources to get first-hand knowledge of how the body responds to such terrain. Fellows will continue to work as emergency doctors at UCLA in order to keep their skills sharp, Aintablian said.
"God forbid someone has appendicitis on Mars," Aintablian said. "You can't just send them back to get it repaired at a hospital."
Studies on twins who have gone into space have already shown researchers that the human body changes – the heart pumps differently without gravity, bone and muscle mass decrease, and there is an increased risk of exposure to radiation in space.
"Incredible just how many things can change in the human body when you go to space," Aintablian said.
The goal of the new program is to train doctors to become full flight surgeons, and also to give researchers an idea into what the human body needs to account for on a drastically different environment from Earth.
"A lot of new research that's to be in it to kind of determine what do we do to make sure that we can one day be a multi-planetary species, where people could survive on a place like Mars," he said.
