Noted Scientist at UCI Receives $2 Million to Study Space Exercise

Jerrold Petrofsky, a nationally known scientist now affiliated with UC Irvine, has been awarded $2 million for a four-year study of how exercise in space affects astronauts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

Petrofsky, formerly of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, moved to El Toro last year and took a temporary appointment with UCI. He had become nationally known after a made-for-TV movie and the CBS program “60 Minutes” documented his success in using computer-generated electric currents to enable paraplegics to walk.

Petrofsky’s space-exercise project will involve a special computer he will design, NASA officials said. He will design equipment that will monitor and analyze isometric exercises to be performed by astronauts in a one-week space mission scheduled for May, 1991.

NASA officials in Houston said that the equipment will test “endurance and recovery from isometric exercise in a zero-gravity environment.” NASA officials said the experiments will provide more information about what happens to human muscles when they are exercised in space.

The equipment will be used on a space shuttle that has a built-in laboratory, NASA officials said. The 1991 mission, called “Space Lab J,” will carry five astronauts, plus one American and one Japanese scientist, said Dr. John Charles, a cardiovascular physiologist with NASA’s Space Biomedics Research Institute.

Petrofsky’s contract became effective April 15, UCI officials said. Linda Granell, a UCI spokeswoman, said that details of the contract are not known by the university and that it is not known how much, if any, of the research will be done on the Irvine campus.