He’s less mouse, more human guinea pig. On the day we spoke he was enjoying his 33rd consecutive day underwater in a 9.3 square metre (100 sq ft) pressurised habitat nearly 7 metres (22 feet) below the surface at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, in the US state of Florida.
Dituri, 55, spent 28 years as a diving officer with the United States Navy, and, following his retirement as a commander in 2012, enrolled at the University of South Florida.
After seeing a number of fellow officers sustain life-altering brain damage, he wanted to learn about helping people with traumatic brain injuries to heal.
He earned a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering and is now an assistant professor; he is teaching virtual classes from his underwater abode during his mission.
How the brain works and how to keep it healthier for longer
Dituri is attempting to break the world record for living in a fixed underwater habitat. Academics and dive masters Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain set the current record of 73 days, 2 hours and 34 minutes in 2014. Dituri plans to spend 100 days under the sea.
Throughout his mission – dubbed Project Neptune 100 – he will conduct experiments in human physiology, demonstrate new technology and further underwater research.
The enclosed ecosystem in which we live on earth creates countless diseases, but it also holds the cures for them, Dituri says. We just need to find them, and “everything we need is on this planet”.
He won’t be entirely alone in his quest. Lucky students will have a chance to visit. Medics will drop by to check his vitals. And he is hosting live-streamed conversations with visiting marine scientists including oceanographer Sylvia Earle.
“How cool is that?” he asks of being able to spend hours with Earle, the founder of Mission Blue, dedicated to protecting the ocean from climate change and other threats.
The more we know about the laws of physics and physiology and the ways in which the two interact, he believes, the more we will know about the human body’s needs, limits and capabilities. That is why he is collecting some data on himself for biomedical research.
Dituri has his blood, urine and saliva, blood pressure and brain function tested on a regular basis in the hope of understanding the impact on the human body when it exists in an isolated, inhospitable environment.He is checking how far he can push the body (and mind) without any supplementation – apart from taking 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily to make up for the lack of sunshine.He also checks in with a psychologist online once a week, and will have a session once every other day towards the end of the project, to see how he is holding up mentally and emotionally in his damp, cramped quarters.
Dituri wants this mission to spark scientific curiosity, and to get more children interested in STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and maths.
“I want to incentivise children to explore our world and help solve our problems. STEM is one of the things that we need to start popularising science,” he says.
“If we make kids excited about science, we will have a better group of people in the scientists’ realm.”
Dituri, who is himself the opposite of boring, wants to make science sexy again.
The two environments have much in common. They are both isolated, extreme, lonely places that are capable of pushing people to their physiological and psychological limits.
In the deep sea environment, scientists can adjust nitric oxide levels and examine its role in building muscle in aquanauts.
Dituri is doing many of the same sorts of exercises they do in space despite being 1.85 metres (6 feet, 1 inch) tall in the confines of a 4 metre by 2.48 metre (13 feet by 8 feet) “tin can”.
To prevent muscle atrophy his daily routine includes 100 sit-ups, 100 push-ups, squats and bicep curls and overhead presses (while kneeling) with the help of resistance bands – the same kind they use on the International Space Station.He can leave the habitat to greet students diving underwater or go for a swim but must stay below the water.
“I have a personal desire to live longer and I also have a personal desire to get the most out of my body,” he says.
How medical research for trips to Mars could benefit patients on Earth
Traumatic brain injury has been shown to respond well to HBOT.
An exciting discovery is that HBOT “extends telomeres, which are the things chromosomes use to basically replicate themselves in a cell”, Dituri says. Longer telomeres are linked to greater longevity.
He refers to Israeli researcher Shai Efrati, who found that exposing someone to hyperbaric pressure for over an hour a day for 60 days was linked to a 20 per cent extension in the length of their telomeres.
Dituri wonders what effect 24-hour daily exposure to hyperbaric pressure over 100 days will have on his telomeres.
Is he confident of seeing out the 100 days? Most definitely.
If he had the time, he would spend 200 days underwater. No one can accuse Dr Deep Sea of not being committed to his longevity-inspired goals.
When Dituri vacates Jules’ Undersea Lodge in May, it will reopen for tourists as the first and only underwater hotel in which you arrive at your room by scuba diving.
