Article ID: CBB001252461

Experimental Physiology, Everest and Oxygen: From the Ghastly Kitchens to the Gasping Lung (2013)

unapi

Often the truth value of a scientific claim is dependent on our faith that laboratory experiments can model nature. When the nature that you are modelling is something as large as the tallest terrestrial mountain on earth, and as mysterious (at least until 1953) as the reaction of the human body to the highest point on the earth's surface, mapping between laboratory and `real world' is a tricky process. The so-called `death zone' of Mount Everest is a liminal space; a change in weather could make the difference between a survivable mountaintop and a site where the human respiratory system cannot maintain basic biological functions. Predicting what would happen to the first human beings to climb that high was therefore literally a matter of life or death -- here inaccurate models could kill. Consequently, high-altitude respiratory physiology has prioritized not the laboratory, but the field. A holistic, environmentally situated sort of science used a range of (often non-scientific) expertise to prove the laboratory wrong time after time. In so doing, Everest was constructed paradoxically both as a unique field site which needed to be studied in vivo, and as a `natural laboratory' which could produce generalizable knowledge about the human (male) body.

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Description On the laboratory and field modeling of respiration physiology in preparation for human ascent to Mount Everest.


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Authors & Contributors
Luzzini, Francesco
Alfonso De Nardo
Clements, Philip William
Dabrowski, Patrice M.
Master, Sharad
Chetan Singh
Concepts
Mountains
Environmental history
Geology
Field work
Mountaineering
Science and politics
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, early
Places
Italy
Alps (Europe)
United States
Himalayan Mountains (Nepal)
Austro-hungary
Apennines
Institutions
East India Company (English)
United States. National Park Service
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