The big ideas of Edgar Alexander Pask (1912–66)

Abstract

Edgar Pask worked before, during and after World War II with the anaesthetist Robert Macintosh. Both were ranking officers and engaged in work with the Royal Air Force Physiological Laboratories at Farnborough, then in the charge of Dr Bryan Matthews. Pask submitted as a Doctorate Thesis a compilation of much of the experimental work in which he was the main subject, most of the data being acquired while he was unconscious. Experiments in which the Farnborough Team were engaged form a central core to the Thesis and relate to the development of life jackets. The information is well known and has been widely publicized, along with most of the biography of Pask. However, some extreme physiological experiments, again with Pask as the test subject and which probably were not conducted at Farnborough, are less well known but in their own way even more extraordinary. The theme in common is Pask's ideas to use the anaesthetized state and the properties of anaesthetic agents as surrogates to the extreme situations Royal Air Force pilots were subject to in modern warfare. There is no purpose to detract from Pask's ideas and selfless heroism by digressions into parallel processes conducted by the opposing Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL) research establishments, but it is evident these were known and had shocked the Farnborough Team (including Pask) before revelation at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.