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The Life Scientific

Hugh Montgomery

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.61.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2012

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Professor Hugh Montgomery is an intensive care physician and researcher at University College Hospital in London. His work has taken him to the Himalayas, where he and colleagues were studying the effect of oxygen uptake at high altitude. The findings were surprising and have implications for patients in intensive care. Jim al-Khalili talks to Hugh Montgomery about the gene for fitness and how mountaineers have influenced intensive care medicine.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult?

0:06.0

What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are?

0:10.0

I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas.

0:16.4

Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth.

0:23.0

Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003.

0:27.0

Listen on BBC Sounds.

0:29.0

Thank you for downloading The Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

0:34.0

How can understanding what it takes to climb Mount Everest

0:38.6

help to save lives on intensive care wards?

0:42.0

Hugh Montgomery is a professor of intensive care medicine at University College Hospital in London.

0:48.0

His breakthrough discovery was finding the first gene for fitness,

0:52.0

and he studies the effects of fitness or lack of it under duress,

0:57.2

be that at high altitude up a mountain or in a hospital ward, both situations where the body is being put under great pressure to cope.

1:06.5

Away from academia, he's written children's books and advises crime writer Linda La Plant.

1:12.1

But his driving goal is to find new treatments for people in

1:15.1

intensive care and to uncover why it is that some people do so much better than

1:20.1

others. Work on an intensive care unit, he says, brings home just how short life can be.

1:27.0

Hugh, at first glance it seems very counterintuitive, this idea to make the connection between intensive care

1:36.0

patients and mountaineers. Surely they're at opposite ends of the of the

1:41.6

health spectrum?

1:43.0

Well, remarkably not.

1:45.0

I suppose you could say you have to be pretty fit in some regards to climb a big hill,

...

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