Emergency Medicine in Space
Before ketamine, I studied how to perform emergency surgery in microgravity. A detour into space medicine at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow that shaped how I think about working at the edges of what is known. This talk connects the thread from primate laughter research at UT Austin, to zero-gravity trauma care, to the frontier of psychedelic medicine.
In 2007 I published research on emergency medical procedures in microgravity at Oregon Health and Science University. The question was practical: if an astronaut needs surgery during a long-duration mission, how do you operate when blood does not fall, instruments do not stay put, and the nearest hospital is months away?
This talk connects the space medicine work to my broader trajectory. Working at the frontier of what is medically possible, whether in orbit or in psychedelic therapy, requires the same core skill: designing protocols for situations where the textbook has not been written yet.