This book is an informal autobiography by John West MD PhD. He obtained
his medical degree in Adelaide, Australia and then spent 15 years mainly
at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital in London
where he, with others, used radioactive oxygen-15 to make the first
description of the uneven regional distribution of blood flow in the
lung.
In 1960-1961, he was a member of the Himalayan Scientific and
Mountaineering Expedition led by Sir Edmund Hillary who had made the
first ascent of Mt Everest 7 years before. During the expedition about 6
scientists spent up to three months at an altitude of 5800 m studying
the effects of this very high altitude on human physiology.
Because of his interests in the effects of gravity on the lung, Dr. West
spent a year at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View,
California in 1967-1968. While there he submitted a proposal to NASA to
measure pulmonary function of astronauts in space, and this was funded.
Later, in 1981 he organized the American Medical Research Expedition to
Everest during which the first measurements of human physiology on the
summit, altitude 8848 m, were obtained. In the 1990's, Dr. West's team
made the first comprehensive measurements of pulmonary function of
astronauts in space using SpaceLab which was taken up in the Shuttle.