Professor John West
John is a Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Physiology, University of California San Diego and a world renowned altitude physiologist, author and expert on ventilation-perfusion relationships in the lung.
With others he described the uneven distribution of blood flow in the upright human lung and went on to explore other effects of gravity on respiration.
In 1960 he was invited by Sir Edmund Hillary to take part in the Silver Hut Expedition near Mt. Everest where a group of physiologists lived for several months at an altitude of 19000 ft. He continued his interest in high altitude medicine by leading the 1981 American Medical Research Expedition to Everest which obtained the first measurements of human physiology on the summit.
His interests in the effects of gravity on the lung led him to work with NASA and he was the Principal Investigator on a series of experiments on orbiting astronauts to describe the effects of weightlessness on pulmonary function.
