Extreme science
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Extreme science Vanessa Heggie: Higher and colder: a history of extreme physiology and exploration. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019, 253pp, CDN$51.48 HB Patricia Vertinsky1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Vanessa Heggie has produced an innovative and stimulating contribution to the history of science with her investigations into extreme physiology and exploration. She describes how twentieth-century explorers traveled in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest and highest points of the globe to test their physical limits through adventures in the most extreme conditions. With the focus squarely upon the critical importance of breath and blood to human health and survival, she takes the reader out of the laboratory and into the real world to show how our understandings about the effects of extreme environments upon explorers were many times learned the hard way—on the mountain tops and across the Arctic ice, often with dire consequences. Her main message, illuminated by stories of adventures in the three poles—the high Arctic, Antarctica and high altitude in South America and the Himalayas— is that the field ends up as the ultimate arbiter of scientific facts. Laboratories, she argues, have been framed as co-constructors of the definition of science itself, an embodiment of the boundaries that scientific practitioners create between the uninitiated and themselves, the creators of knowledge. In this sense, they enable claims of control over environments. Yet, while laboratories provided the groundwork, time and again it was the mountain and the mountaineer, the ice- and the arctic-explorer that confirmed, denied or created new facts about the human body. Taking fieldwork in exploration science out of the shadow of the laboratory, Heggie thus examines it in its own right as a scientific practice. Her project is to demonstrate how the physiologists and biomedical researchers involved in the various expeditions argued for the value of whole-body field site studies as the way to consider the multi-factorial issues of stress, fatigue and imbalance, thus creating complex spaces for knowledge production and blurring the boundaries between laboratory and fieldwork. It’s a fascinating story, or set of stories, that includes animals, * Patricia Vertinsky [email protected] 1
School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, Canada
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Metascience
foodstuffs and material objects such as gas masks, clothing and medical equipment and points to their use in short-term adaptation or acclimatization to extreme environments. The intersections between survival science, the physiology of white bodies in non–temperate environments, and racialized science all play out in the background of the twentieth-century examples that Heggie explores. Higher and colder is, unsurprisingly, a deeply masculine story. It is the white adult male body which became the norm for research on the limits of human performance and survival. In seeking understandings of extreme physiolog
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