International Aspects of the Study of High Altitude Medicine and Biology

Of course all science is international these days. Anyone who reads the weekly journal Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science knows that after three or four issues you have seen reports from almost every country in the world. However the field of high altitude medicine and biology seems to have a special international flavor. Perhaps this is because we are used to seeing the majority of scientific articles from Europe and North America, but most of the high altitude residents of the world live in South America or Tibet. The result is that many of the articles submitted to High Altitude Medicine & Biology come from China, South America, India, and Nepal.

Some of these articles pose problems because they come from remote regions where English is not commonly heard. As a consequence the standard of English writing is often lower than one expects from North America and Europe. Our attitude is that it is not necessary for the English to be perfect. As long as the meaning and scientific accuracy of an article are adequate, minor imperfections of grammar can be tolerated. Very occasionally an article is sent back to the authors requesting revision by a native English speaker before it can be properly peer reviewed. But we are proud of the international coverage of our journal and this calendar year for example we have published articles from 18 countries.

International science depends on the free movements of ideas around the world, and we need to be vigilant that this continues. Recently there have been some worrying trends. If readers will excuse a personal anecdote, last year I placed a series of video lectures on respiratory physiology and pathophysiology on the Web at http://meded.ucsd.edu/ifp/jwest/, and these have been popular. The first lecture on structure and function of the lung has had over 30,000 hits. I have had many emails from many countries thanking me for my efforts with one exception. The only email I have had from China was a plaintive request to put the lectures on something other than YouTube. It turns out that this medium is inaccessible in that country. I find this amazing because YouTube contains an enormous amount of valuable scientific information.

It could be argued that this is a trivial matter, but there are other more ominous trends. One of the most exciting areas of research in the whole field of high altitude medicine and biology at the present time has to do with genetic changes in high altitude residents. However this research is being impeded because biological material cannot be moved out of some countries including China and India. Of course one can understand a country with, say, a unique collection of fossils not allowing the material to be removed but biological samples can easily be shared. The bizarre consequence of these embargoes is that researchers are looking for Tibetans, for example, in the United Kingdom and United States so that their genome can be studied.

One hopes that these flaws in international collaboration will be smoothed over in time. Certainly we are all fortunate to be involved in such an exciting international field of high altitude medicine and biology.