Sukhamay Lahiri
April 1, 1933 - May 2, 2009
As posted on The Philadelphia
Inquirer webstie on May 6, 2009.
Sukhamay
Lahiri, 76, physiology professor
By Walter
F. Naedele
Inquirer Staff Writer
Sukhamay Lahiri, 76, of Bala Cynwyd, physiology professor at the University
of Pennsylvania Medical School from 1969 to last year, died of prostate
cancer Saturday at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse in Center City.
As a researcher of high altitude conditions, Mr. Lahiri made seven research
trips to camps on, but below the summit of, Mount Everest.
On his 1960 climb, he accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 was one of
the men to first reach the top.
In his trips to the Himalayas and to the Peruvian Andes, his work explored
"how human beings react to less oxygen pressure," said his wife, Krishna.
Though he tried to simulate high-altitude conditions in the laboratory, Mr.
Lahiri said inaccuracies sometimes resulted.
"It's better to do the real thing," he told The Inquirer in a front-page
article last year. "You go to the mountains."
Mr. Lahiri made his final trip up Everest in 1981.
His wife said that he "didn't climb to the top, because there, they couldn't
do any experiments."
Instead he was part of a team that constructed what came to be known as the
Silver Hut, which, she said, was "a cylinder room which was
temperature-controlled where they did experiments."
Mr. Lahiri earned the MERIT Award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood
Institute in order to do research from 1996 to 2006 and the Humboldt
Research Award for a Senior U.S. Scientist from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation in Germany for research from 1997 to 2002.
Two of the organizations of which he was a member defined his specialty -
the International Society for Arterial Chemoreceptors and the International
Society for Oxygen Transport to Tissues.
Seven publications to which he contributed are listed in his online Penn
biography.
Born in Natore in what is now Bangladesh, he earned his bachelor's with
physiology honors from Presidency College in Calcutta in 1951.
At Calcutta University, he earned his master's in 1953 and his doctorate in
physiology in 1956 as a Jubilee scholar. And, his wife said, with a
scholarship from the state of Bengal, he gained a second doctorate in
physiology from Oxford University in 1959.
Entering the United States in 1965, his wife said, he worked at the
Downstate Medical Center in New York City until 1967, and then worked in the
cardiovascular department at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago before coming
to Penn in 1969.
His wife said she is his only survivor.
A funeral service was set for 3 p.m. today at the Bringhurst Funeral Home at
West Laurel Hill Cemetery, 225 Belmont Ave., Bala Cynwyd.
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