Vital Times 2021 - 100

To this day, I don't see how he did it. Rarely did
he suffer the fate so many of us have to endure
with endless re-writes, letters of rejection,
or requests for revisions. I think that when a
journal editor saw a paper coming from John,
it was a no-brainer to accept it, knowing that
John's pen always had an outsized impact. Oh,
how we all long for that kind of grace!
John was a tinkerer. Although his lab looked
like a garage full of junk most of the time, it
contained amazing stuff: old home-made bloodgas
electrodes, various mercury-filled tubes
and flasks, miles of errant wires, a huge stash
of magnetic tape from experimental data, and
even the OR mass spectrometer. John was the
world's best mass spectrometer repairman. We
all knew that when it came to rebuilding these
washing-machine-sized contraptions, there was
nobody better.
Long after he retired, it fell to me to clean
out his lab-a project that actually took about
a decade because I simply did not have the
heart to part with things that he cared so
much about. Among the treasures were over
50 pounds of mercury, certainly a toxic-waste
disposal nightmare. We initially considered
selling it on eBay, but then thought that it might
not be a good idea.
I remember working with John in the O.R. on a
few occasions when I was a resident. A patient
asked me who John was, impressed with his
explanation of how anesthesia worked. After
John had left, I told the patient, proudly, that
Dr. Severinghaus was probably the smartest
and most famous anesthesiologist in the world.
Even at that early stage in my career, John
inspired that kind of awe from me!
On another OR day with John, he came in to
give me a lunch break. When I returned, there
was a smell of an electrical fire in the air.
The patient was stable and safely asleep.
It wasn't actually a fire, but John was holding
a soldering iron, and smoke was rising from
a piece of equipment that was undergoing an
intricate electronics repair.
Trips to high altitude with John were really
special. He continued to come with us to White
Mountain long after his official retirement.
His last visit was made around 2015, at age
92 or so.
One trip that I remember quite well involved
bringing along the washing-machine-sized
mass spectrometer, about a dozen large gas
cylinders, a huge blood-gas machine, and all
manner of ancillary equipment like breathing
circuits and pneumotachs. All of this material
was flung into the back of a pick-up truck from
the UCSF motor pool. I remember that the ride
to the Barcroft Lab was particularly bumpy that
year, and the vibrations and impacts caused
problems in just about all of the equipment.
John basically spent the next week fixing
everything that broke during the trip. The
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