Professor Niels Henry Secher: Celebrating success from boat to bench to bedside

[...]his first papers focused on the cardiopulmonary effects of rowing, with his very first paper entitled ‘Maximal oxygen uptake during arm cranking and combined arm plus leg exercise’ (Secher et al., 1974) and 2 years later, he, along with his colleague Roger Jackson, an Olympic gold medallist from Canada in 1964, published the pioneering paper on aerobic demands during rowing with data from pulmonary gases collected 'real-time' during on water rowing (Jackson & Secher, 1976). In a 1985 paper entitled ‘Vagal slowing of the heart during haemorrhage: observations from 20 consecutive hypotensive patients’ (Sander-Jensen et al., 1986), a ‘tell-tale’ table demonstrated that during the shock phase when the blood pressure was low, HR was also low (on average 73 beats/min) – not high as traditional dogma would have predicted. During the recovery phase when blood, albumin and crystalloids were supplied, and corresponding blood pressure increased, HR also increased (on average 102 beats/min). CONFLICT OF INTEREST D.M.B. is Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Physiology, Chair of the Life Sciences Working Group, member of the Human Spaceflight and Exploration Science Advisory Committee to the European Space Agency, member of the Space Exploration Advisory Committee to the UK Space Agency, member of the National Cardiovascular Network for Wales and South East Wales Vascular Network and is affiliated to the companies FloTBI, Inc. and Bexorg, Inc. focused on the technological development of novel biomarkers of brain injury in humans.