Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (48 page)

For the first twenty years after the war the MRC’s budget had increased by roughly 10 percent a year. But with the economic decline of the late 1960s, its lavish funding was reduced.
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At the same time, the Rothschild Report, a highly critical government review of scientific research in Britain, rejected the Haldane Principle and demanded that scientists be made more accountable for the public money spent on them.
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The era when it had been possible for MRC researchers to behave like freewheeling gentlemen scientists was ending. Pugh was profoundly lucky to have worked in an age of scientific laissez-faire that suited his individualistic personality. Today scientists have to spend a great deal of their time justifying every penny they want to spend.

Another issue was the MRC’s traditional attitude to Pugh’s field of research, which it had always regarded as somewhat low-level and unscientific. It accepted that problem-solving, applied human physiology was essential to support the armed services in wartime and in the aftermath of war. In peacetime, however, it was less enthusiastic about human physiology, and since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, the scientific fashion had been swinging ever more strongly toward pure research. Moving with the times, the MRC was enthusiastically “going molecular.” Edholm’s department, with its expensive cold chambers and large studies, seemed an ideal candidate for elimination. “This area of research appears to have acquired . . . an unfashionable image,” an MRC committee reported. “It is widely but erroneously supposed to be concerned with ad hoc research on somewhat dull problems.” This, they regretted, had resulted in “a shortage of able young recruits to the field.”
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While Medawar was away after his stroke, the MRC quietly decided to accept the committee’s recommendation that Edholm’s division be closed down when he retired in 1974. It was left up to the new director of the NIMR to decide what to do about Pugh’s tiny unit.

Soon after Sir Arnold Burgen took over, a freeze on recruitment was imposed on Edholm and Pugh alike. Pugh was permitted just one short-term junior research assistant—John Brotherhood.

Undeterred, Pugh had continued his research into the energetics of walking and running, heat stress, the changes the body goes through while exercising for long periods outdoors, and many other topics.
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Athletes, cyclists, and skiers regularly trooped to his laboratory for tests and met him at various sports grounds for outdoor trials, and he continued to publish highly original academic papers up to his retirement in 1975.
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However, in the late 1960s the hip he injured when he crashed his car in 1961 developed severe arthritis, causing him constant pain. Stoical and uncomplaining, he took to walking with a stick. His face, which had always looked remarkably young, became lined and weary, and he seemed to grow smaller, as if the pain was making him shrink into his body. By 1971 the hip had become so painful that he decided to have a hip replacement.

The way he made the decision typified his character. He visited the bioengineering unit at the Institute of Orthopaedics at Stanmore Hospital to inspect the various joint systems and talk them over with the surgeon, Professor John Scales, who had developed the “Stanmore Hip System.”
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The two men emerged not only friends but also full of ideas about joint ventures.

Finding it both awkward and painful to walk with his stick, Pugh had allowed himself to become rather unfit. Yet he considered it physiologically inappropriate to go into a major operation in an unfit state, so he got himself a pair of crutches and trained himself to walk with them.

After the operation, Pugh followed his own rehabilitation program, which included exercises derived from an ancient leather-bound book of Cecchetti ballet exercises he had learned about in his youth from my mother, who had wanted to be a ballet dancer. Adapting the exercises to help him train for ski-racing in the 1930s, he had later employed them to train his commando soldiers in the Lebanon.

When he took to crutches, Pugh immediately became curious about the physiology involved. Did walking with crutches use more energy than walking normally? Did walking with a stiff leg and a stick use more energy than walking normally with an artificial hip? He found from his experiments that walking with crutches used more energy than walking normally, up to a cut-off point of 5 miles per hour, above which crutching and running used similar amounts of energy. More importantly, he demonstrated that walking with his arthritic hip consumed 50 percent more energy than walking normally after the operation. As Pugh realized, the fact that older people would need less energy to walk if they had a hip replacement could be a decisive factor in deciding whether or not to have the operation—particularly for people with afflictions like chronic lung or heart disease, which restrict oxygen intake and energy levels.

The results of the studies were published in the
Journal of Joint and Bone Surgery.
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Although it would be hard in today’s climate to persuade an elite academic journal to publish an article about an experiment with only one subject, his findings stimulated great interest, and helped to persuade the rising generation of clinical doctors specializing in the care of older people that exercise science could be used to help orthopedic and rheumatologic patients.

In Britain today, research that does not involve large numbers of randomly selected subjects tends to be considered not worth doing. And yet much of the research carried out by physiologists of Pugh’s ilk was done with only a few experimental subjects. It wasn’t practical to study large numbers in the high Himalayas or Antarctica, and Pugh often deliberately chose to study small groups of exceptional people like Channel swimmers and Olympic athletes, who were not available in large numbers. His research assistant John Brotherhood remembered him saying of Edholm’s huge projects: “Those people take a scatter gun approach, John, but we use a rifle. We are sharpshooters.” The findings from Pugh’s cold-water studies and from much of his groundbreaking work on sport and recreation were later replicated in much larger studies.

Equally characteristic of Pugh’s work was the simplicity of his equipment. He preferred lightweight equipment he could carry around easily and calibrate himself to ensure that it was accurate. He aimed to be flexible, able to seize unexpected research opportunities when they came up, without sacrificing rigor. Richard Edwards, who worked with Pugh in the 1960s, told me that nowadays it would be highly unusual to embark on Pugh’s type of research without having “thousands of pounds of equipment . . . and a big lot of staff.” Pugh, he said, “was able to do amazing things with extremely simple equipment, through good experimental design and careful measurement.” “There was something lovely about the austerity of his approach to studying things,” he added a little wistfully.

Pugh returned to work after his operation, ready as ever to try out new ideas and methods. In 1972 he embarked on a highly original study of heat stress with Ray Clark, a bright young MRC researcher. Clark had used thermal photographic techniques to study aerodynamics at City University in London. Aerodynamic concepts were central to Pugh’s work on the energetics of running, and the two were soon spotted deep in conversation. This provoked Clark’s boss, Harold Lewis, to call the young man into his office. Pulling the door shut he told Clark, “We don’t work with Griffith Pugh!” Pugh’s split from Edholm’s division had engendered great resentment. He and Edholm no longer spoke, and Pugh’s relations with senior members of Edholm’s department were frosty in the extreme.

After Lewis died in 1972, Pugh and Clark used thermal photography to make a film showing what happened to the temperature of marathon runners on a treadmill running to the point of collapse from heat exhaustion.
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The film, which was shown on television, used nine colors for nine temperatures—from white, representing great heat, through to blue, black, and purple, representing the cooler areas. At first the runner’s body was a kaleidoscope of brightly colored contours. As he exercised, the area over his abdomen could be seen cooling as the blood moved away to the working leg muscles, where the heat became concentrated. When he succumbed to heat exhaustion, his body suddenly changed color dramatically, becoming sheer dazzling white all over.

Pugh had long since given up skiing, but after his hip operation he started cycling. It gave him a joyful sense of liberation from the fetters that had curtailed his movement for the previous five years. Once again his restless mind immediately turned to the physiology of the activity. Realizing that the energy costs of cycling had not been studied since the famous physiologist Nathan Zuntz did so in 1920s, and that no one had yet measured the impact of slipstreaming on cycling—as Pugh already had on running—he was soon investigating both.
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As was his wont, he also wanted to measure the impact of his new hobby on his own fitness and found, to his delight, that he had lost weight and gotten fitter. Previously he could only walk at 4 miles per hour; now his stride had lengthened and he could walk at 6 miles per hour. It had always been assumed that the physical atrophy suffered by the elderly was an inevitable result of aging, but Pugh saw that despite his age, his body had responded in the same way to exercise as a young person’s. This suggested that the physical decline experienced by older people might be partly due to inactivity. His calls for more research and for greater attention to be given to ensuring that middle-aged and elderly people got adequate exercise was inspirational to geriatricians.
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In the 1960s and 1970s there were still no agreed-upon objective measures of fitness. The first study linking coronary heart disease to physical inactivity had been published as early as 1953, but the idea that exercise was necessary for health would not gain a hold on the public mind until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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Even in the MRC the subject was hardly taken seriously. Indeed, in 1963 Sir Peter Medawar wrote to Sir Harry Himsworth, the head of the MRC, to say that he found it “quite absurd that we should not know how important physical exercise is or even whether it is good for one.”
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Himsworth was decidedly unenthusiastic; in his view the evidence that physical exercise was necessary for health was “not really anything more than folklore.”
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Less than a year before he was due to retire, Pugh was riding his bike up a hill near Hatching Green when he crashed into a motorcycle and broke the leg with the artificial hip. The operation to repair the damage was not a success, and Pugh ended up permanently disabled, with no proper hip joint and one leg four inches shorter than the other—not an easy situation for a man whose life had revolved around physical activity.

He disliked being confined to a bed in the hospital with his patched-up leg in traction. Having worked out that the weight of the leg itself was greater than the traction weight, he discharged himself and hobbled about on crutches with the leg dangling freely. Dedicating himself to a second program of rehabilitation, he took to elbow crutches, and eventually succeeded in going on long walks to keep fit. It was, he said, a bit like cross-country skiing. I never heard him complain about his affliction, except once, when, after being particularly nasty to my mother, he shouted at her in my hearing: “Now I’m a cripple, I suppose you’re going to leave me.”

The date for Pugh’s retirement from the MRC came and went while he was still recovering. He returned only once to the MRC HQ on Mill Hill for a rather unceremonious farewell drinks party shared with another member of staff from a different department. Sir Arnold Burgen presided and spoke briefly about Pugh’s career, and Pugh made a 5-minute speech about how the study of extremes had been the theme that had linked all his research: either extreme environmental conditions, or extreme properties in individuals. And so his career ended.

Three years later, he was sitting in the dining room at home eating lunch when he heard the news on the radio that Everest had been climbed without oxygen for the first time. He had just been telling us that they would never make it. However, when he learned that they had succeeded, he was quick to point out that Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner had many advantages over the amateur British Everest team of 1953, as well as over Hillary and his fellow climbers on Makalu in 1961.

Habeler and Messner were professional climbers, born and bred at intermediate altitude in the Tyrolean mountains, who climbed together for fifteen years before attempting their oxygen-free ascent of Everest. During that time they had become legendary for their speed of ascent on some of the most difficult Alpine routes, frequently halving the best times achieved by their predecessors. Their superb climbing skills, speed, and strength gave them a greater margin for error by reducing the time they needed to reach a summit and get back down in relative safety.