Meet Prof. Popsicle (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2003

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Meet Prof. Popsicle (Cont.)


	The charismatic Giesbrecht claims he has no trouble recruiting human guinea pigs: "people are clamoring to do my experiments," he says.

GIESBRECHT'S TACTICS may at times seem slapstick, but the annals of thermoregulation research encompass some of history's darkest horrors. Although British physician James Currie undertook the first hypothermia studies using volunteers in the late 1700s, the term did not appear in scientific literature until 1886. And a half-century later, the still-budding field would be swept into the moral abyss of the Holocaust.

In 1942 and 1943, in an effort to determine the rescue time frames for Luftwaffe pilots shot down in the North Sea, Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher supervised the murder of as many as 90 people imprisoned at Dachau by having them immersed in freezing water and then recording their vital signs as they perished. Some were kept in the tubs until they could no longer be revived; others were first chilled and then plunged into scalding water.

Much of Rascher's data was destroyed before the Allies could recover it. But in 1946, Leo Alexander, a U.S. psychologist and consultant to the American Chief of Counsel for War Crimes—a federal department established to prosecute Germans at the Nuremberg Trials—wrote up what remained in an intelligence summary now known as the Alexander Report. For decades it formed an indelible part of physiology's body of knowledge. But that changed in 1989, when an international group of about 60 researchers, physicians, and students met in Minneapolis with representatives from Jewish organizations to discuss the ethics of citing the Dachau data in scientific research. Though the attendees did not publicly announce any conclusions, a New England Journal of Medicine paper published the following year determined that Rascher's data "cannot advance science or save human lives." To this day, by unspoken consensus, many scientists will not reference the Alexander Report.

Giesbrecht, who at the time was only just starting to publish his own papers, calls the Nazi experiments "horrible" and flawed by poor methodology. (Apart from being motivated by sadism and ethnic hatred, Rascher's procedures were far from scientific.) But he insists on his right to refer to them if necessary, and did so in a 1994 study of body-to-body rewarming. "I don't write based on the data," he says. "I just say [the Nazis] did it, they should be shot for it, and we're redoing it."

After the war, human hypothermia trials did not resume until 1971, when John Hayward, then a physiologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, repeatedly dropped his own body temperature to a cautious 94 degrees, and followed that by testing a series of volunteers. In 1985, six years before Hayward retired, Giesbrecht began pursuing a master's of physical education at the University of Manitoba. His thesis supervisor was Gerry Bristow, a physician at the university hospital who had treated hundreds of hypothermia patients. Bristow, 63, felt there were serious gaps in medicine's knowledge of the condition and no way to close them with the research methods then in use.

Ninety-five degrees "was felt to be the 'do not cross' line with human subjects," says Bristow, now an associate dean in the school's Faculty of Medicine. "But how can you learn about hypothermia by stopping cooling there, which by definition isn't even hypothermic?" He and Giesbrecht decided to cross the line. Bristow had never seen serious heart troubles—the final, and usually fatal, stage of advanced hypothermia—occur above a body-core temperature of 86 degrees. He figured they could safely go to 89.6. Giesbrecht volunteered to go first.

In a way, Giesbrecht was living out a thwarted, slightly wacky teenage dream. Born in Winnipeg, he had learned outdoor skills from his Swedish grandfather, who spent his winters plying the backwoods of Manitoba as a fur trapper. But life north of the border was seriously lacking in adrenaline for young Gordon. Inspired in part by the 1978 Burt Reynolds movie Hooper—in which the mustachioed one plays an aging stuntman working toward his last big "gag"—Giesbrecht enrolled in a California stunt school at 21. He never got there; a skiing injury ended his Hollywood career before it began. Still, he clearly felt no need to repress his hot-dogging tendencies when it came to intellectual curiosity.

He vividly remembers that day in April 1986 when he first submerged himself in the university's cold-water tank. "It was unbelievable," he recalls. "You had to get slowly into eight...degree...water." (That is, 46 degrees Fahrenheit.) Based on the success of that initial trial—the pair proved that such dunkings were medically safe—and Bristow's reputation for resuscitating victims of advanced accidental hypothermia, the University of Manitoba's Committee for Research Involving Human Subjects gave them the green light to drop human volunteers to 91.4 degrees. Amazingly, students were soon lining up to chill out.

Today, Giesbrecht's office wall is plastered with plaques honoring volunteers who have each gone hypothermic more than ten times, for a mere $64 per dunking. "I never have to advertise," he says. "People are clamoring to do my experiments." People like 30-year-old Jeff Froese, an auto-body-shop assistant manager who has gone into the tank on a dozen or so occasions, and holds the record for longest submersion: six and a half hours.

"After that long, your hip flexors get really sore from shivering," Froese notes. "You're in this semifetal position. Other than that, the pain didn't really bother me. Well, the esophageal probe isn't really that great. And there was no food or drink, because I was wearing an oxygen mask."

Why on earth do it? "You definitely learn what you can handle," says Froese.

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