Having worked as a journalist for more than 20 years I’ve come across my fair share of impressive figures – including several heads of government – but no one quite measures up to Scott Parazynski. The renowned American physician is a former NASA astronaut and a veteran of five Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks. He is also the only man to have ever flown into space and climbed to the summit of Mount Everest.
I’ll admit to having approached the prospect of interviewing this goliath of a man with some trepidation, but within seconds of our online meeting starting, Scott had dispelled my fears. Even though – for Scott at least – our interview began at around 6am due to his busy schedule, he greeted me from his office in Houston, USA, with a warm and easy smile.
We began by talking about his childhood. He explained to me how it was his love of reading about explorers such as Captain Meriwether Lewis, Second Lieutenant William Clark and Jacques Cousteau that had sparked his lifelong love of adventure. As the son of an engineer working on the Apollo programme, Scott also witnessed major historical events at a young age, including some of the programme’s early missions including the launch of Apollo 9 from the beach in Florida which he says had a lasting impact on him and strengthened his love of space.
I wondered whether this fascination with exploration and innovation had also triggered his interest in medicine but it turns out the inspiration for his surgical career is even more heart-warming.
“My mother’s father died before my parents met but he had been a surgeon and his wife, my grandmother, was a nurse so I grew up listening to stories about healthcare and helping people in their times of greatest needs,” explained Scott.
“From a young age I knew that it would be a meaningful life to live in service of others and be a healer, so I always had that in the back of my head.
“When I went to college that was one of my primary ambitions along with flying in space and lo and behold I found a way to do both.”
Scott took his first steps to achieving his dreams when he went to Stanford Medical School in the Bay Area of California. Only 20 minutes down the road was NASA’s Ames Research Center which has been conducting world-class research and development in aeronautics, exploration technology and science since 1939.
Whilst attending medical school, Scott secured an opportunity to undertake space physiology research at the centre and worked on long duration exercise devices for astronauts who were preparing to board the International Space Station.
Working at the centre presented Scott with the perfect opportunity to marry his two greatest interests and gave him strong credentials when he went on to successfully apply to join NASA’s Astronaut Corps in 1992.
Highlights during his time in space included leading the first joint US-Russian spacewalk while docked to the Russian space station Mir, serving as Senator John Glenn’s crewmate and ‘personal physician’ and the assembly of the Canadian-built space station robotic arm.
Scott, who has been inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame, also led the spacewalking team on STS-120 in 2007 during which he performed four extravehicular activity (EVA).
The final EVA of the mission is regarded by many people as one of the most challenging and dangerous ever performed. The coordinated effort in orbit and on the ground by Mission Control has been compared to the Space Shuttle and Space Station era’s ‘Apollo 13 moment’.
Scott’s love of space continues to grow to this day and he’s clearly thrilled by the amazing images currently coming from the James Webb Space Telescope which he is confident will ‘rewrite the textbooks of astronomy forever’.
His excitement about space not only stems from his passion for exploration but because it has led to huge steps forward in medicine and surgery.
When he speaks of how early forays into space exploration led to significant developments in intensive care medicine and cardiovascular medicine it is clear he is enthralled by the subject.
“In the early days they wanted to make sure the astronaut was still alive so essentially they invented the Holter monitor,” Scott explained.
“It was the very beginning of tele-physiological monitoring and at the time it was driven by the need to address that ‘cutting edge’ challenge. Now, we see the Holter monitor as just a fundamental part of medicine.
“When humans take on enormous challenges and lofty goals like going into space, and they spend lots of money to figure out how to do that safely, inevitably wonderful technologies find their way into our everyday lives and in particular into medicine.
“The miniaturisation of sensors that are now at the tips of scopes and catheters, the algorithms that are used to detect rhythm abnormalities, all these different capabilities actually have their pedigree in the space programme.”
Scott is not content to simply make use of such technologies – he is leading the way in creating innovative products with his new organisation Fluidity Technologies and is involved in a UK company called 3D LifePrints. The latter is a digital planning platform which aims to personalise and individualise surgical interventions. It relies on incredibly detailed anatomical imaging which can be used to develop and plan complex operations to optimise patient outcomes.
Scott said: “It’s an extraordinary capability where we’re actually leveraging a patient’s own anatomy to help perform the very best surgery possible.
“We’re using 3D imaging and 3D printing technologies to visualise it and do pre-operative planning and even to create specialised tools for that surgery. We’ve really got pretty cool stuff happening right now.”
With an astronaut’s perspective on intuitive motion through space, Fluidity Technologies has patented an intuitive drone controller anyone can use called the FT Aviator. It could play a role in the tele-delivery of healthcare in the future and other technologies being developed by the company are of interest to surgeons.
“I’m really excited about minimally invasive surgery, natural orifice surgery and anything that we can do that reduces the toll of surgery on recovery and discomfort and so on,” said Scott.
“At Fluidity Technologies we’ve developed things to be able to precisely target the tip of a surgical instrument. Whether it’s an articulating scope of some sort that you’re navigating through the belly or the GI tract or through the lung to be able to get to your target, effect a repair and then come out the way you entered – that’s going to be really game changing in many different applications.
“We’re also in simulation mode right now on a project where our goal is to have a flying vehicle that is very efficient and very easy to fly but also very safe, within two years.
“We’re trying to create a two-person aircraft to begin with – something that you would feel comfortable sending your kids to school in alone.
“We’re also having serious conversations with several surgical robotics companies about our unique capabilities.
“Looking ahead I’m sure there will also be other things that will start to happen in and around the space programme as we begin to think about moving from near earth to actually living on Mars.
“It could take 21 minutes for a transmission to get from Earth to Mars and then another 21 minutes to get back, so you won’t be able to rely upon Mission Control, or even a robotic surgeon.
“We’re going to have to train robotic assets with machine learning and deep learning to virtually operate scripts and perhaps have a trained observer so that if something isn’t looking right they can stop the procedure and ask questions. It’s going to press the boundaries of automation in surgery.”
Scott’s talk of pushing boundaries in surgery made me question whether the 61-year-old has any personal challenges he still wants to conquer.
As well as being a highly respected surgeon, astronaut, company founder and accomplished mountaineer, Scott is also a prolific inventor, diver, serves on the boards of several companies and is a commercial, instrument, multiengine and seaplane-rated pilot.
Recently, he and a colleague became the first people to set bootprints next to the world’s youngest lava lake inside the crater of Massaya Volcano in Nicaragua.
Scott pauses to ponder my question about personal challenges for a second before addressing some of the toughest feats he has already conquered. Unsurprisingly, it’s a list unlike anyone else’s featuring his ‘really wild space walk’ to repair a solar ray and climbing Mount Everest but he says his toughest challenge is what he’s doing right now – building and growing a tech start-up.
Laughing, he said: “I always simplistically thought all you need to do is have a really great idea and all this other stuff will magically happen. The easy part is coming up with the cool idea; the execution is very difficult.
“It’s not just having a good idea and building a team around you to do it; it’s the fundraising, the manufacturing, the regulatory, the marketing – there’s so many different parts in and around doing that.”
Almost as an afterthought he adds that he has also always wanted to go to Challenger Deep – the deepest known part of the earth’s seabed – located in the Mariana Trench.
“I have a number of friends who’ve recently done that. There’s a submersible that goes to the full ocean depth – in fact the crew is out there right now doing multiple dives so I’m very jealous of that,” Scott said.
“That’s one part of our planet that I would love to see with my own eyes. I’ve done some deep dives down to the Titanic but never to those depths. That’s the one big adventure that I’ve got left.”
It’s a challenge that would be well out of the reach of most people but with Scott’s track record, it can surely only be a matter of time before he achieves that dream too.
