Career perspective: John W. Severinghaus

After training in physics during World War II, I spent 2 years designing radar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then switched to biophysics. After medical school and a residency, I was doctor drafted to National Institutes of Health where I studied blood gas transport in hypothermia and developed the carbon dioxide electrode and the blood gas analyzer (pH, partial pressure of O(2), and partial pressure of CO(2)). I joined the University of California San Francisco in 1958 in a new anesthesia department and new Cardiovascular Research Institute. My research aims were anesthesia patient monitoring, respiratory physiology, blood gas transport, and high-altitude acclimatization and pathology.