We had few physiology problems in SeaLab III but we lost Barry Canon because, owing to sabotage or negligence, there was no barlyme in his CO2 scrubber canister. As a result there was a Navy and National perception that saturation diving had a long way to go before it could provide an operational capability and the program was relegated to the shallow waters of Panama City Florida.
As many of you know if you have read the sensational Best seller Blind Man's Bluff or my own more well tempered follow on "The Silent War" this misfortune provided the opportunity to initiate a completely classified operational program of submarine based saturation diving for the purpose of undersea espionage. As indicated in those books I was program manager for the development and initial deployments of these now highly classified programs. Security was such that the identity of others in the program was unknown to each other unless there was a need to know. As a result I was unaware that Commander Jack Tomsky my SeaLab program manager who had retired after receiving a letter of reprimand was called back into service to set up the diving school at a location that is still unknown to me.
This caused me a personal dilemma because I did not know who in the diving physiology world was involved and who was not and I did not want to inadvertently divulge my own participation. So I moved away from your community and began other pursuits. In 1974 Governor Burns and I wrote the legislation that established the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii at Ke-aohle Point on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was established as a state corporation and I was President from 1974 to 1990. It was designed to examine the potential use of deep ocean water as a major resource of cheap cold, organically stoichiometric nutrients, and biological purity. Initially it was thought that the difference in temperature between surface water and deep ocean water would provide the thermodynamic energy to produce electricity but subsequently it was found the deep ocean water could play a role in air conditioning, industrial cooling, aquaculture and even agriculture. By 1990 some of us realized that most of products and functions required for an environmentally sustainable habitat could be realized on a coastal desert having access to deep ocean water. Thus in 1990 I established a corporation called the Common Heritage Corp. dedicated to managing innovation for the benefit of the Common Heritage of Humanit and in particular for impoverished coastal nations such as Haiti, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. We decided to establish a demonstration habitat utilizing the sun and deep ocean water for as many functions as we could imagine. The late Professor Sanford Siegal introduce us to the notion that we could do agriculture with the condensate produced on pipes buried in the ground through which deep cold ocean water was pumped. We believed this to be marginal and peripheral to any habitat system but went ahead with experiments and to our shock and surprise discovered that we could produce every imaginable farm and garden produce of high quality 365 days of the year. The factor which had escaped plant physiologists was thermodynamics and we discovered the rate at which nutrients were fed into the plant was a function of the difference between the root and the fruit. Most of all we discovered that "delta T" was virtually ignored by the plant physiologists. This led us into an examination of the role of thermodynamics in fish physiology . I will not be discuss those results here. They are featured in a talk entitled "An isothermal fish is a dead fish". This in led to an examination of the role of temperature differences and temperature gradients in human physiology and we made a discovery which should be of great significance to this community.
I stand before you today as a living example of the efficacy of what we call cold water physiology. At the age of seventy seven my hands are not seventy seven year old hands. There is no evidence of any form of arthritis or arteriosclerosis. My dermatologist made his own observation and asked me how I did it. I explained that everyone who visits my facility has the opportunity to immerse their hands in deep ocean water at a temperature of 7o C. The heat is removed the hands and blood rushes in to warm them. My overly simplified and incorrect explanation was that the blood was carrying oxygen to the peripheral vascular system and as a result metabolic processes could repair and maintain healthy hands. Members of the medical profession who participated in this exercise disagreed. They pointed out that the immersion of hands in hot water would similarly make them red. This sent me to the physiology and anatomy books and web sites which clarified the situation As we all know we breathe oxygen laden air into out lungs where it comes in contact with small blood vessels called alveoli. Hemoglobin molecules that are depleted are refreshed with from one to four atoms of oxygen depending on the health of the lung and of the hemoglobin molecule. The oxygen is attached to an ionized atom of iron which is contained by four nitrogen atoms. The saturation of the hemoglobin is a function of the temperature. The lower the temperature the higher the amount of oxygen. Healthy hemoglobin is accompanied by a protein which has a nitrogen "basket" which detaches the oxygen from the hemoglobin and employs it in the metabolic process. Thus the blood which reaches the peripheral vascular system may arrive with most of the oxygen depleted. This is particularly aggravated in the case of runners where heat is generated at the knees. This heat releases hemoglobin oxygen as free oxygen which is deleterious.The presence of free oxygen in a world where people engage in aerobics and has now produced a fad of anti-oxidant foods. When hemoglobin oxygen is not available oxygen is provided by the muscle. We are aware of this when we feel the sensation lactic acid formation. Unless repaired by hemoglobin oxygen these muscles will atrophy. Thus marathon runners are plagued with knee and foot problems while long distance swimmers are not. The essence of cold water therapy is now clear. There must be a cold temperature at the region to be repaired which acts as a heat pump to bring blood to the area. This blood must be oxygen rich to be effective therefore the therapy must be applied at a time when there are not other demands on hemoglobin oxygen (e. g. the morning before breakfast).
This is was all very theoretically interesting until a skeptic at the beach took a look at my feet. There be no part of the human anatomy that is more ugly than an old mans feet. Mine were no exception and after long plane rides, the congealed pools of venous blood and the blackened thickened dead toenails were masked by ankles swollen with edema. On October 11th in Washington D. C. I took one look and said "Physician heal thyself" From that day until this day I have soaked my feet in a bucket of ice water in the morning or evening or during the day in the deep ocean cold water at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii. I can now report that today my feet are as healthy as my hands although new toe nails have not yet fully replaced the gnarled shells that fully occupied my big toes and although my feet are still not things of beauty I have the prospect that they will be, for me, a joy forever.
What more can I say than that one atmosphere human physiologists have neglected thermodynamic gradients in the human body in their analysis of human performance and my guess is that the diving physiologists have similarly neglected this dynamic energy process. I can assure you that research in macro thermodynamics will be the newest field for advancement in plant physiology; I have reason to believe that it will be a new field in fish physiology; and I think it is a good bet, and I am a betting man, that it will be an important new component for man in the sea.