Wu Tianyi is a Chinese Academy of Engineering member based in Qinghai province. (PHOTO / XINHUA)

Some of the extremely harsh natural environments that entail studies of high altitude medicine often place researchers in risky situations, and things can, occasionally, even be life-threatening. Living in tents, drinking melted ice, or riding on yaks in deep mountains are par for the course.

With complicated natural conditions including deserts, highlands, ice glaciers and pastures, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China, known as the “the roof of the world”, is an area with high altitude and less oxygen.

To study the causes of high altitude sickness and acquire reliable data, Wu Tianyi, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, or CAE, has made numerous field trips to the remote areas of the plateau over many decades. 

During the trips, he suffered car accidents that fractured 14 of his bones, including those on his shoulders, back, limbs and hips. Two crashes, one of which involved falling in a car from a mountain cliff, were deemed narrow escapes from death.

In one accident, in addition to injuring both his legs, Wu saw four broken ribs on the left side of his body, with one of them nearly piercing his heart. His hearing got severely impaired during experiments that he volunteered to take part in, and his eyesight suffered from cataracts due to prolonged worktime on the plateau. 

However, Wu, who is now aged 86 and is the only CAE member of Tajik ethnicity, said the studies and research efforts require devotion and that the sacrifices were worth it.

“Without dedication and devotion, there is no way to obtain any scientific evidence and conduct first-class research,” Wu said. “(The) sacrifices have been worth it.”

Wu is a pioneer of high-altitude medicine, as well as an expert in hypoxic physiology, in China. 

For Wu, the unique geographical setting of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau renders it the most ideal laboratory for studying high altitude medicine, so he has visited people, animals and plants in most areas on it, and gathered lot of scientific information to facilitate research on the topic.

Riding horses across the grasslands for 20 to 25 kilometers a day was a daily routine for him. “I am a good rider,” said Wu, who won the nickname “a doctor on horseback” from the Tibetans villagers on the plateau.

His hard work paid off. During the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world’s highest railway, in the early 2000s, Wu and his team devised a protection-and-first-aid protocol that allowed all 140,000 workers to avoid suffering the effects of acute altitude sickness.

Liu Fengyun, deputy director of the central laboratory of the Qinghai Province Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease Specialist Hospital, said absence of casualties during the construction was a “miracle”.

During an international conference on mountain medicine held in Xining, Qinghai province in 2004, which drew the participation of 160 top experts from abroad, representatives from 13 nations put forward their own quantitative diagnostic standards for chronic mountain sickness to be applied as the international standard.

But a research team led by Wu displayed high confidence over its own standard, developed after 7 years of solid research utilizing a vast trove of data collected on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Speaking at the conference, Wu said, “The Chinese standard that I am proposing is the best standard in the world.”

Heated debates about the standard went back and forth four times, and the last round went late into the night. Finally, it was agreed by the majority that the standard put forth by Wu’s team would be accepted as the international standard by the International Society for Mountain Medicine. 

When asked if the standard should be named after Xining, Wu proudly insisted on using Qinghai, which stands for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. And the decision was passed by the conference. The next year, the “Qinghai standard” began to be picked up across the world.

Earlier, in 1992, Wu designed a comprehensive hypobaric-hyperbaric chamber, the first one ever in the world to simulate air pressure at altitudes ranging from 12,000 meters above the sea level and 30 meters underneath it. But his right eardrum ruptured four times as he volunteered to be the first human being to enter the chamber that simulated the air pressure at an altitude of about 8,000 meters.

Wu checks his students’ work at a laboratory in Xining, Qinghai province, on June 17. (ZHANG HONGXIANG / XINHUA)

With his efforts, the experiment results of the hypobaric-hyperbaric chambers later played a big role in the construction process of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. As a matter of fact, 17 oxygen generation stations and 25 hyperbaric chambers initiated by Wu and built along the railway route, proved to be the most effective way to treat emergent syndromes of mountain sickness and save many workers’ lives during the construction period. 

For more than 60 years, Wu has used his medical knowledge to protect the lives and well-being of the people on the plateau. He is regarded as a hero for his outstanding protective and preventive measures to reduce mountain sickness.

In April, 2010, after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake wrecked Yushu county in Qinghai, the health conditions of rescue team members that came from different regions of the country were severely threatened by mountain sickness at a high altitude of 4,000 meters. 

In less than two days, a medical team led by Wu in his 70s arrived in Yushu, becoming the first one to come to the disaster-hit area to treat and prevent high altitude sickness. Every day he got up at 5 am to check on all the patients. He also offered to do psychological counseling with the locals in Tibetan language.

As the only CAE member living in Northwest China’s Qinghai province, Wu said dealing with lack of oxygen has become normal for him.

Wu was born in a family in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in 1935. He began studying at the China Medical University in Northeast China’s Liaoning province in 1951. Seven years later, in 1958, he left for Qinghai as the country was encouraging young people from more prosperous provinces to get involved in the development of the northwest.

Along with many of the other young arrivals, Wu soon began to experience symptoms of altitude sickness, such as breathing difficulty, headaches and fatigue.

While altitude sickness commonly affects people new to living at high elevations and usually goes away as their bodies adapt, it can also affect those born and brought up at such heights, a progressive condition that is known as chronic mountain sickness.

When he noticed that altitude sickness was also common among border soldiers and other migrants who came to take part in the region’s economic development, Wu decided to look for a solution.

“To develop the region, you first had to solve the problem of adaptation to the high altitude,” he said.

Over many decades, Wu spent time observing and surveying the local population. He learnt to speak the Tibet dialect and he also dressed up in the Tibetan style. In this way, he could integrate into the local life to collect data from the Tibetan villagers and treat their illness.

According to him, the Tibetans, who became the ethnic group most adaptable to life on the plateau after inhabiting the region for thousands of years, and people of Han ethnicity who migrated to the area serve as two separate groups for medical scientists for contradistinctive research. They discovered that the rate of the mountain sickness among Han people was 70 percent higher than that of the Tibetans.

Apart from that, the plateau also has an extensive range of fauna and flora species, including the Tibetan antelopes, yaks and rare plants, which both become research samples and possible raw materials for developing and producing drugs to treat mountain sickness.

Li Yuxian, an assistant researcher at the laboratory, said she has been studying with Wu for more than a decade since she joined his team in 2011.

Between 2012 and 2013, she joined an international project in which a hyperbaric chamber simulated conditions at 5,000 meters above sea level, allowing researchers to better study the function of the hearts and lungs.

Wu was the project leader and helped solve the problems the researchers encountered during the experiment.

“His dedication to altitude sickness research really touched me,” Li said.

On June 29, during celebrations for the Communist Party of China’s 100th anniversary, Wu was awarded the July 1 Medal, an honor given to outstanding Party members.

“The plateau is part of my life. It is the root of my life and my science. I feel no regret for having chosen to stay here,” Wu said. “I am old. My responsibility now is to lead the team and train tomorrow’s doctors to ensure the health of people on the plateau gets better and better.”

Xinhua contributed to this story.