Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (59 page)

28 WL SA/MWF/F20/1: Medical Committee on Accident Prevention: Annual Report 1964–1965.

29 Ibid., p. 12.

30 MRC P28/311: Pugh, Dr. L. G. C. E.: Letter, Peter Medawar to J. C. R. Hudson, June 3, 1964; letter Peter Medawar to D. J. Cawthron, July 13, 1964.

31 Pugh 1966a, p. 123. Pugh’s informant was Dr. I. Jones, resident casualty officer at the Caernarvon and Anglesey General Hospital in 1966.

32 PP 6.43.

33 Pugh collaborated on hypothermia with Kenneth Cooper of the MRC’s Body Temperature Research Unit at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, with whom he discussed methods of resuscitation (PP 6.43), and Cooper also helped with some of Pugh’s field studies. The results were published in Pugh 1964, 1966a, 1966b, 1968, and 1969.

34 Pugh 1966a, p. 29.

35 PP 61.6.

36 Ibid.

37 Pugh 1967, p. 336.

38 Pugh 1966, p. 129.

39 Pugh 1967c, p. 333. Pugh also criticized the youth-adventure community for subjecting young people to exhausting trials of strength beyond their physical abilities. See letter to
The Times,
PP 10.16.

40 PP 59.8.367: Letter from Jack Longland to Pugh, October 2, 1964. See also correspondence in PP 7.16. Most often cited were: Pugh’s insistence that walkers and hikers should always carry suitable protective clothing; his advice to set up an emergency camp and wait to be rescued when problems arose; and his suggestions for the treatment and resuscitation of exposure cases on the spot, by mountain rescue teams.

27.
“Good Science and Bad Science”

1 Pugh 1968, pp. 826–27.

2 Ibid., p. 829.

3
Times Saturday Review,
February 24, 1968.

4 PP 8.39.255: February 26, 1968.

5 Medawar, Sir Peter (1915–1987). Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Medawar was educated in England at Marlborough College (in common with Geoffrey Winthrop Young, John Hunt, Michael Ward, and Charles Wylie). He said of his former school, “I was uniformly unhappy from beginning to end surrounded by pedants and pederasts” (Temple 1984, p. 14). He went on to gain a first-class degree in zoology at Oxford in 1935, and it was at Oxford that he later carried out the research that won him the Nobel Prize he shared with Australian immunologist Sir MacFarlane Burnet. Medawar was a Fellow of the Royal Society, receiving its Copley Medal in 1969, and was knighted in 1965.

6 MRC P28/311 Pugh, Dr. L. G. C. E. Harington described Pugh as “a highly individualist worker who pursues his own line. Pugh’s work is in my opinion of high value and his reputation as an authority on respiratory physiology in connection with high-altitude work speaks for itself.”

7 Mitchison 1990, p. 284.

8 Taped interview which Professor Rainer Goldsmith kindly gave me at his home in Derby in July 2004.

9 The baton was taken up by W. R. Keatinge at the MRC’s Body Temperature Unit in Oxford. Keatinge later moved to the London Hospital, where he had large water tanks installed in his laboratory and continued the immersion research under the sponsorship of the MRC’s Royal Navy Personnel Research Committee. The experiments which Keatinge, who became a world expert on hypothermia, did at the end of the 1960s confirmed many of Pugh’s earlier findings, such as the importance of subcutaneous fat in insulating the body against cold in water, and the finding that heat was better conserved if people kept still rather than attempting to swim. See Keatinge 1969. (Information from a taped personal interview the late W. R. Keatinge kindly gave me at his home in November 2007.)

10 They included Professor Heinz Wolff, Professor Rainer Goldsmith, Jim Adam, Professor Ray Clark, John Brotherhood, Professor Mervyn Davies, and Dr. David Jones.

11 See examples in NIMR.PF43 640/2 Pugh Personal File.

12 PP 8.39.249: Letter, Pugh to Medawar, April 26, 1967.

13 MRC P28/311 Pugh, Dr. L. G. C. E.

14 Ibid.

28. The “Boffin” and the Altitude Olympics

1 The IOC is the self-appointed, self-recruited voluntary body which governs the worldwide Olympic movement. The Olympic movement embraces individual national Olympic associations, such as the British Olympic Association, in each of the participating countries, though these associations are not “represented” on the central governing committee. The movement also embraces a plethora of voluntary bodies representing individual sports in each country, such as the Amateur Athletics Association and the Amateur Rowing Association in the UK, as well as a series of umbrella federations representing the individual sports at an international level (see Krotee 1988).

2 B. Glanville, “The Old Men of the IOC,”
Sunday Times,
June 11, 1961.

3 Peter Wilson, “Our Boxers May Pull Out of the Olympics,”
Sunday Mirror,
January 1966.

4 Duncan 1967. Wrynn 2006, pp. 1156–57, describes the bidding process. The Mexicans accompanied their bid with a plethora of research results, which purported to refute any possibility that the athletes could be harmed by the intermediate altitude of Mexico, and explicitly claimed, “The altitude of Mexico City permits a rapid adaptation of normal persons and does not impair in any way the capacity to carry out physical work or sporting events” (
The Organisation,
Organising Committee of the Games of the XIX Olympiad). This was not in line with conventional medical opinion about the effects of altitude on physical performance, so the committee cannot have consulted very widely.

5 Quoted from BBC interview with Patrick Smith; see Smith 1966.

6 Examples of researchers are Margaria and Cerretelli in Italy; Per-Olaf Astrand, Christensen, and Avrill Karlsson in Scandinavia; Karpovich, Jokl and others in the United States. In the UK, MRC HQ files at the National Archives (FD23/88 and 89) show sports science was patchy, uncoordinated, and limited in scope.

7 BOA LM “Minutes of the Meeting of the Medical Advisory Committee held at St. Mary’s Hospital on Monday, March 8, 1965.” The committee was set up at the request of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games Council for England and the BOA, and its initial remit was to give advice on the Commonwealth Games due to be held in Jamaica in 1966, and the Mexico Olympics of 1968. Porritt was elected onto the IOC in 1934 and retired in 1967. He was also involved with the British Association of Sport and Medicine under the auspices of which the BOA’s medical committee was formed.

8 In the wider medical community it had long been taken for granted that acclimatization improved physical performance at altitude, as the normal processes such as increase in breathing rates, increased blood volume, and numbers of red blood cells, etc., brought about a corresponding increase in maximum oxygen intake. But this view had been challenged by Italian physiologists Cerretelli and Margaria 1961, and Cerretelli 1964, who had compared published data on the maximum oxygen uptakes of groups of people exposed to simulated altitudes in pressure chambers with the maximum oxygen uptakes of acclimatized visitors to altitude, such as mountaineers. According to their findings, as altitude increased, there were greater reductions in the maximum oxygen uptakes in the acclimatized subjects than in the unacclimatized subjects. This implied that the limitation of performance imposed by altitude was not influenced by acclimatization. Pugh in Pugh 1967 objected that different groups of subjects were compared at sea level and at altitude. The BOA’s Medical Advisory Committee decided to commission Pugh’s Mexico study in preference to joining in with the so-called experimental “little Olympics,” which were staged in Mexico City by the Mexican organizing committee in 1965, 1966, and 1967, to try to offset some of the criticism of the 1968 Olympic venue.

9 Out of Portsmouth’s total membership of thirty-four distance runners—which included Hyman, Tulloh, the Cooke brothers, Tim Johnston, and other top-grade athletes—seventeen represented either Great Britain or England or both. In the International European Cross-Country Championships of January 1963, Portsmouth’s A team took 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th places, and Portsmouth’s B team won the “open” race at the end, for which all the teams were eligible. See James Coote, “Portsmouth Snatch all the Honours,”
Daily Telegraph,
January 25, 1963. A profile of the club, “Take Eight Good Runners,” was published in
World Sports
(1965).

10 Martin Hyman kindly gave me two taped interviews in Edinburgh, as well as several written communications. The quotations attributed to him come from the interviews.

11 See, for example, Berryman 1992, p. 83 and p. 88.

12 Bannister 1954, p. 62.

13 Booth 1999, p. 96.

14 Bannister 1955, p. 121.

15 Mike Turner described them respectively as: a professional student, a bricklayer, an area sales manager, a salesman, a local government officer, and a schoolteacher. Turner himself was an English cross-country international and vice president of Cambridge University Hare and Hounds Cross-Country Club; he used to be described as “just below” Olympic standard. The North brothers were members of the Belgrave Harriers. In April 1975
Athletics Weekly
dubbed Gerry North Britain’s most consistently successful cross-country runner since the war. Dominic Kelly, youngest of three famous running brothers, was also a cross-country international for Derby. Hyman and Cooke, who came third in the International Cross-Country Championship in 1964, ran for Portsmouth Athletics Club.

16 Pugh described these contrasting processes in an article (Pugh 1967, p. 629), on the effect of altitude on athletic performance, written explicitly for laypeople, as follows: “The energy released in muscular work is supplied by the chemical breakdown of adenosine-triphosphate (ATP) in the muscles. The breakdown process does not require oxygen, but oxygen is used in the complex series of chemical reactions associated with recovery. In continuous ‘steady state’ exercise the processes of breakdown and recovery balance [each other], and oxygen is absorbed by the body at a steady rate, which is directly proportional to the work rate. This is known as aerobic metabolism. In short-term high-intensity exercise the release of energy by breakdown of ATP far outstrips the body’s capacity to absorb oxygen, and the oxygen needed for recovery is absorbed mainly after the exercise. This type of metabolism is known as anaerobic metabolism. The extra oxygen absorbed during recovery, which is in excess of normal resting oxygen consumption, is known as the recovery oxygen, and is equal to the ‘oxygen debt’ incurred during the exercise. In most athletic events energy is provided by a combination of anaerobic and aerobic metabolism; the shorter the event, the greater the anaerobic component; the longer the event, the greater the dependence on aerobic metabolism and oxygen intake.” The “oxygen debt” can be measured by comparing the athlete’s oxygen intake in a given time of 40 to 50 minutes, while he is at rest before and after the race. Pugh’s measurements of this aspect of post-race recovery suggested that the process of building up oxygen debt was not significantly altered in Mexico City, as compared with sea level, which tended to confirm that sprint athletes would be relatively unaffected by the lower atmospheric pressure of Mexico City.

17 Pugh,
Nature,
1965, pp. 1397–98. Pugh emphasized that these figures should be treated as a rough estimation.

18 Cervantes and Karpovich 1964.

19 One of Pugh’s most comprehensive accounts of the Mexico study is an article entitled “Athletes at Altitude,” published in the
Journal of Physiology
(Pugh 1967, pp. 619–45). Pugh took advice from the Amateur Athletics Association coach John Le Masurier and from the athletes themselves about the best way to estimate their average running performances at sea level for comparison with those at altitude in Mexico, taking into account factors like the weather, the state of the track, and the athlete’s physical condition. The results were then tested in two timed 3-mile trials over the next four weeks so Pugh could satisfy himself that his athletes really could produce repeatable performances.

20 Carried out with the help of the Amateur Athletics Association’s senior coach John Le Masurier.

21 As Martin Hyman put it, “To race to the limits of his ability, a distance runner needs to endure progressively increasing discomfort and to concentrate increasingly hard to avoid slowing down.” Turner described athletes like himself as people who could endure a greater degree of pain than the man in the street.

22 Karpovich 1956.

23 For an academic account of the difficulties between Pugh and the BOA, see Heggie 2008.

24 BOA LM 157: Letter, Owen to Duncan, May 5, 1965.

25 These letters, mostly handwritten, are in the BOA archives.

26 BOA 1.6.

27 BOA 3.26: “I had a real upper and downer with Pugh on the phone and we both agreed we were quite intolerable to each other. Then he quietened down,” Duncan reported to Owen.

28
The Times,
November 20, 1965.

29 BOA 1.47: Letter, Duncan to Pugh, November 22, 1965.

30 BOA 1.81: Letter, Pugh to Duncan, November 24, 1965 and BSC SC1/2 1834.

31 BOA 1.58.

32 Brasher, “The Tragi-Comedy of Mexico,”
Observer,
January 2, 1966.

33 Dudley Doust, “Olympic Hazard: High-Altitude Tests in Mexico,”
Illustrated London News,
January 1, 1966.

34 BOA LM: Minutes of a meeting of the Medical Advisory Committee to the British Olympic Association, January 19, 1966.

35 HTP: (Manuscript) copy of Pugh’s report, “British Olympic Association Investigation into Mexico City: Preliminary Report to the Medical Committee,” 1965.

36 BOA 2.

37 BOA LM 1372 Minutes of the Medical Advisory Committee, January 19, 1966.

38 “Britain Calls for Limit on High-Altitude Training,”
The Times,
February 3, 1966.

39 BOA 2.108. BOA Report Conclusion No. 4.

40
Daily Telegraph,
April 11, 1966;
Sunday Times,
April 16, 1966.

41 MRC P28/311 Pugh, Dr. L. G. C. E.

42 Symposium on Sports in Medium Altitude, Magglingen, Switzerland, December 15–19, 1965.