Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (60 page)

43 “Olympic Games in Mexico—Effects of High Altitude,”
The Times,
April 16, 1966.

44 Quoted from Patrick Smith’s “Dispatch from Rome,” April 21, 1966 (Transcribed by Bush House Transcribing Unit) YFN 24697.

29.
Going for Gold

1 NIMR.AR 17-AR33: Laboratory for Field Physiology. Manuscript, “Review of Research” for MRC Annual Report.

2 “Training Camps,”
Olympic Review,
October 1, 1967, p. 22.

3 A copy of lecture delivered to the Fencing Association is in BOA 1.109.

4 Ibid., p. 15.

5 Font Romeu is at 6,000 feet.

6 The 7.5 percent decrease in performance was similar to that in Mexico City in 1965 (8.5 percent). The small difference is probably accounted for by the fact that Font Romeu is 1,500 feet lower than Mexico City.

7 BOA LM 1212: Letter, Pugh to Duncan, May 25, 1967. Pugh wrote, “The extra strain on the respiratory and circulatory systems at altitude may well increase the development of these systems, which would result in lasting improvement at sea level. No satisfactory data are available on this question at present.”

8
Observer,
May 28, 1967, “Let’s stop being gentlemen!”

9 BOA LM 1213: Letter, Duncan to Owen, May 30, 1967.

10 Ibid.: Letter, Owen to Duncan, May 31, 1967.

11 PP 62.10: 453, See IAC statement dated September 12, 1967.

12 MRC P28/311: Pugh, Dr. L. G. C. E., Lush to Medawar, July 12, 1967.

13 BOA LM 1252: Letter, Edholm to Duncan, April 5, 1967. Also BOA LM1247 shows they gave Edholm the Olympic Medical Archives and various foreign reports on altitude research to consider. He happily agreed to take on the role of their altitude adviser.

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

15 Pugh 1970 and Pugh 1971.

16 That is to say, they could save the amount of energy used by running for 1 second.

17 Born in 1949, David Bedford was a top distance runner in the 1970s who set a new world record for the 10,000 meters in 1973, which he held until 1977. In the 1972 Olympics he was twelfth in the 5,000 meters and sixth in the 10,000 meters. He is currently one of the directors of the London Marathon.

18 Wallechinsky 2000.

19 See Menier and Pugh 1968. Pugh’s MRC colleague R. H. Fox had discussed the thermal aspects of marathon running at the time of the Rome Olympics (see Fox 1960 and Bannister 1959). But no research had been done on marathon runners in the field, and very little was known about the physiological factors limiting athletic performance in endurance running.

20 Pugh, Corbett, and Johnston 1967b.

21 TNA FD23/88 and 89. Duncan ignored warnings about the need for acclimatization to heat from Roger Bannister, John Cotes, and others before the Rome Olympics.

22 Tim Johnston of Portsmouth Athletic Club represented England in the International Cross-Country Championships seven times, coming second in 1967. He broke the world track record for 30 kilometers in 1965 and came eighth in the 1968 Olympic marathon. He was ranked tenth-best marathon runner in the world, and eighth in the world for the 10,000 meters in 1968.

23 Pugh 1972 and manuscript report in HTP: “International Athletes Club Altitude Research Projects, 1967, Font Romeu, Mexico City,” p. 32. Once having stopped running due to incipient heat exhaustion, the runners could still walk unaided, but if they tried to stand still they collapsed.

24 See “Beat this for courage!,”
Sunday Mirror,
November 5, 1967.

25 PP 58.6.271, BOA 1.

26 BOA 1 32: Duncan’s handwritten comments on the IAC leaflet.

27 “The Bracknell Tests” in
Road Runner’s News Letter
No. 65, April 1968, and No. 68, April 1969.

28 Pugh 1972a.

29 NIMR.AR17-AR33 Laboratory for Field Physiology.

30 World records were achieved in the men’s 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, and both relay races (see Wallechinsky 2000).

31 Wilber 2004, p. xvi, writes of Beaman’s jump, which beat the world record by 22 inches: “Years later, biomechanical engineers calculated that about 5.9 inches of the margin by which Beaman broke the long jump world record was due solely to altitude and its favourable effect on approach speed and reduction of aerodynamic drag during the aerial phase of the jump.”

32
Athletics Weekly,
November 9, 1968.

33 Wallechinsky 2000, p. xxviii.

34 Frisancho 1993, p. 269, writes of the 10,000-meter race, “First was Naftali Temu from Kenya (1500m–2000m), second Mamo Wolde from Ethiopia (2000m–2500m), third Mohamed Gammoudi from Tunisia (1500m–2000m), fourth Juan Martinez from Mexico (2380m), and fifth Nikolay Sviridov from Leninakan [USSR] (1500m).”

30.
The Restless Sharpshooter

1 NIMR.AR17-AR33 Laboratory for Field Physiology.

2 This idea was reaffirmed in “Memorandum on the Provisions of the Ministry of Health Bill 1919 Cmd. 69, 1919,” in which Lord Addison wrote, “Any body of men engaged upon scientific research in medicine or in any other field should be given the widest possible freedom to make their new discoveries.”

3 The Nobel Prize winners included: Martin 1952, Krebs 1953, and Sanger 1958; Medawar 1960 (shared with Australian immunologist, Sir MacFarlane Burnet); Crick and Watson 1962; and Perutz and Kendrew 1962.

4 “National Institute of Medical Research Annual Report,” 1973–74, p. 9.

5 The review of the way the government funded and organized pure and applied research was carried out by Lord Victor Rothschild, chairman of Edward Heath’s Central Policy Review Staff. Rothschild introduced the idea that government departments should enter into a “customer contractor” relationship with the science councils, commissioning their own applied research to meet their needs. In the first instance this led to 25 percent of the MRC’s budget being taken away and given to the Department of Health and Social Services.

6 NIMR. Future of Human Physiology: Council Sub-Committee on Human Physiology Report, June 17, 1970, paragraph 13.

7 Pugh, Turner, and Johnston 1968b, Pugh 1969a.

8 See examples in NIMR. AR17-AR33 Laboratory for Field Physiology: Manuscript “Review of Research” for MRC Annual Report.

9 Professor John Scales (1920–2004) developed this system at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, and the Institute of Orthopaedics, University of London. The first hip replacement using this method was carried out in 1963.

10 Pugh 1973.

11 In the project Pugh calculated mean, overall skin temperatures from the thermocouple readings of the exercising subjects in the normal way, while Clark estimated average skin temperatures from the thermo-vision images, and they were able to show the two methods yielded comparable results, confirming the validity of the technique (see Clark, Mullan, and Pugh 1974 and 1977).

12 Helped by his research assistant John Brotherhood and a group of competition cyclists, Pugh (1974a) published the first-ever assessments of the energy saved by slipstreaming in cycling.

13 Archie Young, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at University of Edinburgh Medical School, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, kindly told me about his memories of Pugh in 2007, and made this point to me.

14 TNA 23/88 809 Morris 1957. This study of London busmen revealed a substantial difference in risk between drivers (sedentary) and conductors (who ran up and down the stairs of London’s double-decker buses).

15 TNA FD 23/89 777. The letter, dated February 14, 1963, continued, “. . . and whether indulgence in exercise of various kinds has any notable effect on morbidity rates, life expectancies, etc.”

16 TNA FD 23/89 781: Meeting between Himsworth, Edholm, and Whitney to discuss future work on human physiology, May 16, 1963.

17 See Messner 1979, p. 172, and Habeler 1979, p. 164.

18 PP 42.10.756.

19 Hunt 1978, p. 115.

Epilogue: Expecting the Lion’s Share

1 Besides the main farm at Putteridge, which was about 350 acres, Pugh persuaded Doey and Hermione to buy a second, similar-size farm in 1973 at Eltisley, near Cambridge, in order to introduce economies of scale. The two garages were “twins” on either side of the A404 main road between Luton and Hitchin. They had four petrol pumps each.

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