Rachel Lance

Whenever people have an accident in the real world, that's a big part of data collection.

That's a big part of what I study.

And then when we're in a

Use what we do know in order to subject people to perhaps more than what we consider to be totally safe, but stop short of what is dangerous with the knowledge that we're literally in the exact right facility to treat them if something bad does happen.

That was true with the chamber divers as well.

When they got decompression sickness, when they had major problems, they were already in the chamber, which is also the exact right way to treat these problems.

And so it was better for them to experience it than for the World War II military personnel to get it out in the field.

Yes, that's exactly right.

So if someone comes up and they start to show signs or symptoms of decompression sickness, they can be recompressed in a hyperbaric chamber.

Now we're increasing that pressure around them back to a higher level.

And the theory is that shrinks the bubbles in their bodies back down so that we can bring them up more slowly at a safer and more prolonged rate and let the nitrogen come out in a harmless fashion.

Oh, my gosh.

They put themselves in there for things that would not be legal today.

If I tried to do that, even if I had subjects who consented, I would possibly be criminally prosecuted.

They were putting themselves in there and breathing pure oxygen and rocketing the chamber down as quickly as they go to see if they could kind of outrun the negative effects.

They were taking some of these gases like oxygen down to depths that we now know are extremely dangerous and toxic.

And they were continuing to do this even after they were having severe injuries.

With modern research, we have what are called serious adverse event reporting requirements.

So if something bad happens in our research, we have to sit down and have a conversation about the ethics of asking people to continue.

Whereas this group, because their goal was to prevent military deaths during the invasion of Normandy, they figured, better we do it here in the lab.