Meet Prof. Popsicle (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2003

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Meet Prof. Popsicle (Cont.)

TO GORDON GIESBRECHT, the world's leading authority on freezing to death, a midwinter dip is just another day at the office. Believing that the best way to study the effects of cold on the human body is to get intimate with the elements, this 45-year-old physiologist and director of the University of Manitoba's Laboratory for Exercise and Environmental Medicine has lowered his body temperature below 95 degrees, the threshold of hypothermia, a mind- and body-numbing 33 times.

The masochism doesn't stop there.

"If he needs to take it to the edge, he does it himself," says one of Giesbrecht's peers. "While the risk is controlled, it's still dangerous stuff."

In March 2001, to learn more about how the body metabolizes various energy sources in subfreezing temperatures, Giesbrecht and four other men each dragged 180 pounds of gear across the frozen surface of Lake Winnipeg, a body of water roughly the size of New Hampshire, for 19 days. Then there was that winter 1999 experiment during which, in an effort to cool his body core while keeping his skin temperature constant, he had a colleague inject, over a one-hour period, more than a gallon of nearly frozen saline directly into his bloodstream. "He's a risk taker," says William Forgey, a 60-year-old physician who is the past president of the Colorado Springs-based Wilderness Medical Society. "If he needs to take it to the edge, he does it himself. While the expertise is there and the risk is controlled, it's still dangerous stuff. He's like a race-car driver."

There is, of course, a very good reason why Giesbrecht keeps getting behind the wheel: This winter, like every winter, athletes, adventurers, and hapless innocents will get themselves into trouble in the cold. While no organization keeps detailed statistics on cold-related deaths in the outdoors, each year hypothermia kills an estimated 700 Americans. An additional 1,800 or so are thought to perish in cold-water drownings.

Giesbrecht has devoted his academic career to improving the odds for such victims of exposure. He is Professor Popsicle, the King of Chill. He may have a cliché for every occasion—"Keep cool, but don't freeze," he'll say, smirking like Mister Rogers—but he is one of a kind. Or at least a few: There are roughly a dozen scientists worldwide who specialize in human thermoregulation, the study of how the body responds to temperature changes. Only a handful undertake human experiments, and no one goes as far as Giesbrecht, who has intentionally taken his core temp lower—down to 88.2 degrees—than any other researcher. "I'm the scientist who does things for real," he says, "to make sure I really know what I'm talking about."

Though many of Giesbrecht's achievements are strictly academic, some of his scientific discoveries are already helping to save lives. His greatest contribution to the world of hypothermia treatment is the concept of immediate rewarming. It used to be that if you were found cold, stiff, and barely alive on a lonely mountainside, rescuers would leave you chilling until they got you to the nearest emergency room. The fear was that immediate rewarming could shock the body badly enough to cause death. But after five years of study, Giesbrecht determined that it is almost impossible to warm someone up too quickly. Now many first responders, from Coast Guard techs to those trained by the Wilderness Medical Society, have started rewarming victims in the field.

Giesbrecht himself has a charming habit of not always following his own instructions. Sitting in his cluttered university lab one afternoon last April, dressed in black polyester pants and a black pullover like a casual-Friday ninja warrior, he places a finger beneath his cheekbone and points out a small spot of blackened flesh. He'd felt the exposed triangle of skin begin to freeze during his Lake Winnipeg trek, but pressed on anyway. "I shouldn't have tried to be a hero," he says sheepishly.

The frostbite will eventually fade, but such battle scars have become his trademark, a kind of tattoo signifying a new phase in Giesbrecht's career. "When you meet the world-famous hypothermia expert and his nose and ears are black with frostbite," jokes Forgey, "well, you know he practices what he preaches." Giesbrecht has reached the rescuers and trauma doctors and military men, but he knows they are only half the battle. Now he is bringing his message to the general public. His latest goal is to get through to Joe Snowshoe about what to do, and what not to do, when the blizzard hits. "I'm on a campaign to reeducate the entire known universe," he says.

Which is why, on an ordinary Tuesday, he signs in at the front desk of his university's pool, changes into his black swim trunks, laces up a pair of Bauer hockey skates, and climbs up onto a diving platform. Something a Mountie said after discovering the body of a 65-year-old man in a nearby lake has been bothering him. The victim had been skating and, apparently blinded by the setting sun, he sailed right off the edge of the ice into deep water. "It was the skates that did him in," the officer told Giesbrecht. But Professor Popsicle has his doubts.

"Check out the latest Canadian Olympic sport," he calls out. He jumps into the pool with gusto, then toodles about in the water, trying out different strokes, pulling a lap or two. He stops to tread water. "That's interesting," he says. "I'm not drowning yet."

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