Spinning for Dear Life

For a man who had been shot once in the stomach and once in the head, Joseph Barrios, a California cook, seemed to be making a remarkable recovery. The shooting occurred early in October, when robbers held up the restaurant where Barrios worked. Doctors at San Jose's O'Connor Hospital patched up his abdominal flesh wound, removed most of a shattered .22-cal. bullet from his brain, leaving him with only a slight headache and blurred vision. At that point, follow-up X rays sent Barrios into a spin for-dear life.

The pictures showed that a tiny fragment of the bullet was wandering about in his ventricles, the fluid-containing cavities deep inside the brain. When Barrios lay flat on his back, the fragment stayed in an upper ventricle. When he stood up, it went into a smaller, lower ventricle. When he lay down again, it tended to drift back up. The great danger was that it would get stuck in the narrow passage between the ventricles, thereby cutting off the fluid that drains into the spinal canal, and causing fatal pressure within Barrios' skull.

Orthodox surgery was considered far too risky. But Neurosurgeon Philipp M. Lippe, a former Air Force flight surgeon, recalled that centrifuges--the contraptions that spin pilots and astronauts in order to test their reaction to the pull of extra gravity--had occasionally been used in delicate eye operations. He wondered if the same process might not be used to force the bullet fragment within Barrios' brain into a safe spot in the soft tissue surrounding the upper ventricle. Lippe took the problem to NASA's nearby Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, where tests were made by whirling a bullet fragment through gelatin of approximately the brain's consistency. Researchers decided that the idea was worth a try.

Barrios was taken to Ames and strapped into the NASA centrifuge. He was spun for half a minute at 4 Gs. X rays showed that nothing had happened, so he was whipped around again, this time for 20 seconds at 5 Gs, with a final spurt of 6 Gs. This time the experiment seemed successful: X rays indicated that the little piece of lead was safely embedded in the brain tissue around the upper ventricle. But Barrios was still being closely watched--in case he needs another trip to the centrifuge.

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