COLUMN: Penn's science guinea pigs

Scott Miller, Commentary Scott Miller, CommentaryResearchers learned about humans under pressure from athletes. Not coincidentally, the Athletic Department was heavily involved in these summer experiments, and Red and Blue athletes -- some very prominent -- were tested after being submerged in dive tanks for up to 25 days. Tektite I and Tektite II were experiments sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, testing human physiology, reaction to drugs protecting against environmental stress, control of respiration, etc., in deep-water situations up to 5,000 feet below sea level. The results of these experiments helped the Department of the Interior construct submerged laboratories around the U.S. Virgin Islands. So on June 22, 1970, six people -- five of whom were Athletic Department representatives -- were stuffed in a special hyperbaric tank to simulate the conditions. Included in those five were Quakers ice hockey coach James Salfi, Ronald Billingslea, a 6'4" men's basketball player (and present Athletic Director Steve Bilsky's teammate), men's soccer player Thomas Lieberman, Bernie Zbrzeznj, the Quakers' star quarterback in 1969, and Steve Kowal, a record-setter for the men's swimming team. The tank was set at a simulated depth of 100 feet -- 50 feet deeper than 1969's Tektite I experiment. Researchers tested the athletes' hearing, effect of nitrogen pressure on respiration and the central nervous system, changes in blood pressure, whether breathing would differ and whether decompression would "cause bubbles to form in the lens or fluids of the eye." The tank could accommodate atmospheric pressures from 150,000 feet above seas level to 1,800 below, so it was no surprise that one year later, essentially the same team went for another round of the same experiments -- this time exceeding 1,200 feet in depth, 1,100 feet deeper than the year before. The experiments in the summer of 1970 had little effect on the athletes and coach; in fact, those tests proved that humans could withstand far greater pressures than expected before the Tektite II tests. On Aug. 31, 1971, the subjects emerged from the tank after 25 days in simulated depths over 5,000 feet of seawater. The tank was filled with a helium/oxygen mixture, still used today in deep-sea exploration. Nitrogen and neon were added to the mix via facemask to simulate the density of helium at depths below 2,000 feet. Put through extreme exertion in the simulated depths, some of the athletes were unable to complete the experiments due to trouble in breathing the neon and nitrogen -- both considered narcotic. Christian Lambertsen, former director of the University's Institute for Environmental Medicine, conducted the experiments after having been involved in NASA's Man in Space environment studies in the 1960s. The Tektite laboratory eventually erected around the Virgin Islands were destroyed in 1996's Hurricane Marilyn, and the program's financial difficulties made it infeasible to rebuild the undersea lab. Results from the long-term Virgin Islands experiments are used in management of the Virgin Islands National Park and Biosphere Reserve.