Stephen Davis
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Stephen Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
NASA, when it wants to observe how people might react on a long mission to Mars, looks at what happens at the South Pole.
It's well known that there was a psychological condition of winter over that people really suffer. It's that people have been in conflict, in battle, have a thousand yard steer, which means you're trying to engage with them and they're just looking off like this. And people get that into Antarctica or they become obsessed with things or they become morose or isolated. They also can drink heavily.
Getting toasty is the favorite saying down there. Getting toasty is where you've kind of gone to another place and maybe you actually need help. You actually need counseling, but there's no counseling available because you're stuck there.
So a lot of people get toasty and numbers of people come out of the experience of wintering over having to get counseling when they return to the west of the world.
We spoke to one of the doctors who had been down there. He was a highly competent doctor, but he only discovered on the plane down there, they said, oh, and by the way, you also have to do dentistry, which he'd never done in his life.
Infamously, in the late 50s, at one of the Russian bases, this was a story I thought was an Antarctic myth and apocryphal, but actually turned out to be true. Two Russians were playing chess and also drinking heavily. One left and came back and accused the other of moving something while he was gone, and so he killed him. It was a murder. Then covered up by the Russian authorities,
who then, for a long time, I don't know whether they still do, banned the playing of chess in Antarctica. In another infamous incident, again involving Russians and drinking, two Russians were at a two-person base in the middle of nowhere. One liked to read books, and they weren't getting on these two guys.
And the other man, as his compatriot was getting to the end of the book, would tell him how it ended, give the plot away, again and again. Anyway, the other guy had had enough, so he attacked the other man with an axe.
There are only three potential ways that Marx died. At his own hand, accidental poisoning or deliberate poisoning. Now, having spent a long time and many interviews and many years thinking about it, I think he was deliberately poisoned.
I know for a fact that there was a conversation in the canteen about a day after it happened where people who knew Rodney were speculating that something quite untoward had happened. Because generally speaking, healthy people in their 30s don't suddenly die.
I personally think it was another excuse, really. The rest of the key evidence, sadly, it's gone. I mean, whatever he drank, touched, ate, whatever was at his workstation and at his sleeping station was deliberately sanitized rather than seal off. the area where he worked, somebody, one of his fellow scientists, went in and disposed of everything. You know, potential evidence in a crime.
He had been sent a bottle on his shelf with a strange prawn motif. Nobody really knew what was in it, some kind of spirit or liqueur, but this other man threw it away.
By the way, since the podcast came out, I've had people from all over the world contact me to say, we think this is the bottle, including some people from South America who said this is a liqueur we have in Peru and it has a prawn motif on the side. But the point is that the area was sanitized.
He didn't know what was wrong with him. He kept saying to the doctor, I feel terribly ill, find out what's wrong with me. Methanol, by the way... would be the last thing you would swallow if you wanted to kill yourself because it would be a horrendous way to die. It burns you inside, makes you blind. I found the fact that somebody quickly floated a suicide rumor very suspicious.
Often the first version of the story is the one that's believed.
Ironically enough, your listeners might not understand that if you poison yourself with methanol and you find out, ethanol is the solution.
One of the things that you absolutely ought to do in making this diagnosis is run a blood test. That's, you know, Medical 101. There was a machine there called the ECTCHEM machine for blood testing, but it wasn't working. It needed batteries and maintenance and had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Because it wasn't working, the blood test was never done and a proper diagnosis was never made.
And I've been informed by other experts who I've subsequently talked to that a blood test would clearly have shown what was wrong with him. Interestingly enough, I have spent years trying to find the doctor who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. And there were several things about his treatment which you might have questioned.
If anybody out there knows where Dr. Robert Thompson, formerly of the South Pole, is, please contact me and let me know.
I think there were two things at play here. First off, there was the odd territorial issue of Antarctica. Under the Antarctic Treaty, nobody can make territorial claims. You can have a base there, but it's not really yours. It's just a base that countries zealously guard their rights. for what might happen in the future.
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