Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/383

LIFE IN THE NEW BUILDING accidents, making detailed pathological studies to help determine the cause of unexplained aircraft accidents, improving flight safety by taking into account pathological conditions, and investigating factors which may result in pathological changes in flight personnel.

A prime purpose of the Committee is to insure, insofar as it may be possible to do so, that medical officers shall have full opportunity to participate in the investigations of aircraft accidents. From examinations made on the scene and pursued further in the laboratory, the pathologist may determine what part was played by human or environmental factors in causing the accident. He can weigh the evidence pointing to some medical condition, such as shortage of oxygen, presence of carbon monoxide, explosive decompression or pre-existent disease in the pilot, or he may note a pattern and sequence of injuries that point to some failure or improper design of the aircraft itself. For example, it was medical investigation of a commercial airliner crash near Bolivia, N.C., on 6 January i960, by representatives of the Joint Committee, that led other investigators to find that the accident was due to the explosion of a bomb smuggled aboard by a passenger.

Closely related to the work in aviation is that of aerospace pathology which, in the AFIP organizational setup, is one of three branches of the Division of Military Environmental Pathology. Aerospace pathology deals with the pathological conditions encountered in the flights into outer space by biopack mice and monkeys, and animals of various kinds, preparatory to flights by men, and the increasingly numerous flights by men themselves. 27

Not all of the adventure in such flights, by any means, is that of those who ride the vehicles into space, or at least into the extreme heights of rarefied atmosphere. There was, for example, the flight of the Air Force balloon to investigate the risks to future travelers in the stratosphere from cosmic rays, sent up from International Falls, Minn. The balloon carried a cargo of live mice and tissue cultures that would have to be examined immediately, or with- in a very few hours, after the return of the balloon from stratosphere to earth. For this reason, it was imperatively necessary that the pathologists who were to make the examination should reach the place where the balloon came down promptly after its descent. In an engagingly humorous account of "Operation