Breathing on the roof of the world: memoir of a respiratory physiologist

This text 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 5800m 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.