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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. How can the human body survive the extremes of the deep sea, whether it's deep sea divers or

people within the enclosed environment of a submarine, whether it's civilians or

special operations forces, how to blasts and bombs underwater affect the body compared to the impact of

blasts on land? These are some of the questions my guest Rachel Lance has researched for the military

and at Duke University. This is her last semester at Duke.

She's a biomedical engineer and blast injury specialist. For several years she was an

engineer for the US, researching and testing new underwater technology for Navy divers, seals, and Marine Force Recon personnel.

She currently conducts research at Duke University using their hyperbaric

chamber. It's an enclosed chamber in which the air pressure can be increased or

decreased along with the levels of oxygen and other gases to simulate the

extremes of underwater environments, monitor the negative impact on the

body and test solutions. Her new book, Chamber Divers, is about the research conducted by

obsessive scientists before and during World War II, which proved essential to the

successive D-Day when Allies had to conduct surveillance

searching for traps and mines underwater and on the beach before storming the

beach of Normandy on D-Day. In order to do the research, the scientists put themselves through

extremes in the hyperbaric chamber and sustained some pretty serious injuries.

Rachel Lance, welcome to Fresh Air.

What were you researching that made you interested in the World War II underwater research?

I read this paper about carbon dioxide and it wasn't extremely exciting it

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