The Gallaudet 11

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode
was inspired by some conversation that followed a recent episode

(00:22):
of the podcast Radio Lab. That episode was titled The
Right Stuff, and it was about a parabolic flight that
was part of a project called Mission Astro Access. It's
the project that's working towards disability inclusion in space. We
will be talking about that some more at the end
of the episode, but I will say upfront that I

(00:44):
highly recommend that episode of Radio Lab. What we are
going to talk about today is a group of deaf
men who have become known as the Galladet eleven. They
were subjects and NASA's research into the human body in
the early years of the space program. Most of what
has been written about them in more recent years followed

(01:04):
the opening of an exhibit about them at Galadat University.
It was titled Deaf Difference plus Space Survival, and there
have been ongoing efforts since that exhibit opened to try
to make this story better known. Heads up, though, that
a lot of this episode is about experiments involving human subjects.

(01:26):
These are folks who consented to being involved in these
in this research, but still that's the whole purpose of
what was happening. Also, some of the language that was
used in that research, which still shows up in research today,
which we're going to mention very briefly, it comes across
as demeaning and so just a heads up on that.

(01:47):
So the galad At eleven were recruited for this research
due to differences in their inner ears, So we're gonna
start with those basics. The inner ear is made up
of two labyrinths, an outer bony labyrinth in an or
membranous labyrinth. Each of these labyrinths has three sections. The
bony labyrinth includes the vestibule, the semicircular canals, and the cochlea.

(02:10):
The membranous labyrinth includes the semicircular ducts, the odolith organs,
and the cochlear duct. All of this is lined with
a fluid either and a limph for para lymph depending
on exactly where in this system it is. In humans
and most other mammals, the inner ear is connected to
the sense of hearing and the sense of balance. Membranes

(02:33):
and sensory cells and tiny little hairs pass along information
from vibrations in the case of sound, or from gravity
and movement in the case of equilibrium and balance. More specifically,
the odolith organs are also called the utrical and secule,
and they detect the influence of gravity, while the semicircular
canals detect the position of the head. Sometimes these organs

(02:57):
are all grouped together as the vestibular system them and
they work together to help maintain the body's postural equilibrium.
In other words, all the little detections and movements that
helped keep a person's body stable, with one exception. The
men from galad At College now galad At University who
were recruited for this research all had meningitis as children.

(03:20):
Meningitis is an inflammation of the membranes around the spinal cord,
and sometimes the infection can spread beyond the spinal cord
and damage other parts of the body. This was especially
true before we had antibiotics that could treat bacterial meningitis.
Damage to a person's cochlea can cause deafness, and damage
to a person's vestibular system can affect their balance and

(03:43):
their coordination, and all of these men, meningitis had damaged
both their cochlea and their vestibular system, so sometimes they
are described as having been recruited because they were deaf,
but really the vestibular system was what was central to
this research. The one person from this group who did

(04:04):
not become deaf as a result of meningitis was Robert Greenman.
He was actually one of NASA's earliest subjects for this research,
before the rest of the gallad At eleven were recruited.
He had mastoiditis at the age of twelve, and he
had two ear surgeries later on. This damaged his cochlea
and his vestibular system, although based on some of his

(04:25):
test results it seemed like he might still have some
function in his odo lith organs. In nineteen fifty eight,
he offered to have his odo lith organs surgically removed
to ensure that there was no remaining function that might
affect the results of the tests. This research was a
joint project between NASA and the Navy, overseen by Dr
Ashton Grabiel. After four years of back and forth, the

(04:49):
Navy turned down Greenman's request for surgery, and Grabial advised
him not to try to have it done on his own. Yeah.
Greenman is no longer living, but people who knew him
have act about this as like an indication of how
dedicated he was to this research and its success. We
will be getting two more about what exactly the researchers

(05:10):
were hoping to learn through all of this. But when
this work started, people did already know that the ear
was involved in the sense of balance and equilibrium. In
eighteen twenty four, French neurologist Marie Jean Pierre Florent cut
the semicircular canals of pigeons. Afterwards, the pigeons could still hear,

(05:31):
but they started moving their heads in unusual ways. He
concluded that the semicircular canals were connected to the pigeon's
sense of balance, and that this disruption to that sense
was causing these unusual head movements. This was the first
published research to really suggest a connection between balance and
the inner ear. In eighteen sixty one, French physician Prospermin

(05:56):
Yeah described a disorder involving things like vertigo, usure in
ringing in the ears, and hearing loss, and he connected
all of that to the inner ear. This collection of
symptoms is still known as Miner's disease today. Minnere also
described a post mortem exam that revealed an inner ear
hemorrhage in a patient who had experienced vertigo. By a

(06:19):
little later in the nineteenth century, doctors had also started
connecting the inner ear to motion sickness. In eighteen eighty one,
a group of doctors published an article called the Pathology
of Sea Sickness in the Lancet. This article set, in
part quote, our bodies are endowed with what may be
termed a supplementary special sense, quite independent of, but at

(06:43):
the same time in the closest alliance with our other
special senses, the function of which is to determine the
position of the head in space, and to govern and
direct the aesthetico kinetic mechanism by which is maintained the
equal librium of the body. This faculty of equilibrium appears

(07:04):
to be more or less connected with the cerebellum, the
optic lobes, and possibly with other parts of the nervous organization,
but beyond doubt its principal seat is in the semi
circular canals of the internal ear, which may, for practical
purposes be regarded as the organs of equilibration. While this

(07:26):
paper definitely didn't have everything about motion sickness right, and
in fact it's not entirely understood even today, it did
correctly note that the inner ear was involved. It also
noted a parallel between motion sickness and labyrinthine vertigo, or
a sense of dizziness brought on by a disturbance in

(07:46):
the pressure inside the labyrinth of the ear. One of
the first people to publish research on a connection between
deafness and immunity to dizziness was Dr William James of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
whose paper The Sense of Dizziness and Deaf Mutes appeared
in the American Journal of Autology in eighteen eighty two.

(08:07):
According to James, at that point, it was already well
established that the semi circular canals were not organs of hearing,
but they quote served to convey to us the feeling
of movement of our head through space, a feeling which,
when very intensely excited, passes into that of vertigo or dizziness.

(08:29):
James suggested that schools for the deaf could be a
place to study whether deaf people were more likely to
be immune to dizziness. James examined some people himself, and
he also relied on reports from his colleagues. Altogether, they
examined five hundred nineteen deaf people basically by having them
spin around with their head in a variety of positions.

(08:51):
They found one six of their subjects were totally immune
to dizziness, and one thirty four became only slightly dizzy,
the other one did become dizzy, and a couple of
them even seemed unusually susceptible to dizziness. James also compared
this to two hundred hearing students and instructors at Harvard

(09:11):
College and found only one among that group who did
not experience dizziness. I really love the idea of just
making a whole bunch of Harvard people spin around untill
keep spinning, keep spinning it. Of course, James would not
have been the first person to observe that many deaf

(09:33):
people were immune to dizziness. The first people to make
that observation would have been deaf people themselves, but this
was the result that he expected from his research. He
noted that although more research was needed, his results backed
up the idea that the semi circular canals were organs
of balance rather than of hearing, and that whether a

(09:55):
deaf person was immune to dizziness depended on whether the
cause of their death fness had affected their semicircular canals
as well. James also grasped that other factors might also
affect a person's equilibrium, like what they could see and
their perception of gravity. He asked thirty three people who
either did not get dizzy or got only slightly dizzy,

(10:17):
to dive underwater with their eyes closed. He expected them
to report that this was very disorienting and that they
couldn't tell up from down or find their way to
the surface unless they opened their eyes. But that was
true of only fifteen out of the thirty three people. Yeah,
that's still a significant number, but it wasn't as across
the board as you might have thought it would be.

(10:40):
Researchers kept studying the connections among hearing and balance and
dizziness and motion sickness in the decades that followed. For example,
in nineteen nine, arna Axon Holberry published experimental studies of
the eliciting mechanism of sea sickness. He found that dogs
became motions if they were hoisted up and down by

(11:01):
a crane but then they seemed immune to that after
having their labyrinths removed. Other people built on this research,
eventually bringing us to the nineteen fifties and the research
that involved the galad At eleven. We're going to talk
more about that after a sponsor break. The Galada eleven

(11:28):
were part of the Vestibular Research program. This was a
joint project between NASA and the US Naval Aviation Medical
Center in Pensacola, Florida. Now that's known as the Naval
Aerospace Medical Institute. Since most of the Galada recruits were
college students and professors, some of them are grad students,

(11:48):
most of this work took place during their summer or
winter breaks. They got a perd M to cover their expenses.
But the Galada eleven weren't actually the first people to
be part of the research. We mentioned Robert Greenman earlier,
but before him, there was Pauline Hicks. Robert Greenman's letters
suggest that she was quote the original Pensacola guinea pig,

(12:11):
and that both of them were involved in research in
Pensacola in the early nineteen fifties. As we mentioned earlier,
this research was led by Dr Ashton Grabul. He had
originally trained as a cardiologist before joining the Naval Aviation
Medical Center during World War Two to study how factors
like fatigue and cardiovascular health affected military pilots. This eventually

(12:35):
grew into research connected to the space program and how
humans could react and adapt to space travel. Greenman's early
time in NASA's research included spending days at a stretch
in a slowly rotating room and carrying out various tasks
that were meant to measure how he was adapting to
that continual rotation. Some of them were things like throwing darts.

(12:59):
One of them the thing that involved setting a series
of dials to the correct positions, and he had to
reach like he had to reach way behind him and
way down and way over to the side. And as
a person who was is like, I'm prone to motion sickness,
the idea of doing all that head movements in a
slowly rotating room, I felt gross just thinking about it.

(13:23):
Um this was not an issue for Greenman at all,
though sometimes he was used as a control in experiments
on men who had working vestibular systems because they often
became very motionsick over the course of the experiment, and
he did not his immunity to motion sickness also meant
that sometimes he was the person administering the tests to

(13:47):
the other subjects in the room, doing everything from recording
how well they threw those darts to administering their electric cardiograms.
During these early years the research, Greenman also spent time
in the Human Disorientation device, which could move a person
around a horizontal or vertical axis, or both simultaneously. In

(14:08):
nineteen sixty Greenman and Hicks were flown to New York
City where they made repeated trips on the express elevator
at the Empire State Building. That sounds so fun to me,
I would also feel gross. Uh. In nineteen sixty one,
Grabial and a team of researchers went to Galadet to

(14:28):
try to recruit more participants for the vestibular research program.
Greenman was a Galudet alumnus, and this may have been
at his suggestion, but since Galadet was the only university
for the death, it also would have been a logical
place to recruit a group of adult men without working
vestibular systems. They also they needed people who could communicate

(14:51):
with researchers, and so picking people who had some college
education or a college degree was another important part of this.
Researchers started with a group of about one men, both
students and faculty, who had become deaf after having meningitis
as children. Then they conducted tests to confirm which of
them had functioning vestibular systems. Research reports described the people

(15:16):
who did not as having a labyrinthing defect and sometimes
describe the people as labyrinthine defectives. This is a term
that still shows up in research, but for the purpose
of this episode, we're going to stick to calling the
two groups of participants deaf and hearing. Yeah, calling somebody
a defective is not great. Just kind of get your

(15:39):
your yuck response up for sure. Yeah yeah. Two of
the surviving members gave an oral history of you in
in that will mention again at the end of the show,
and one of them was like, couldn't they have found
a better word? That just sounds sounds kind of insulting. Uh.
These tests also, they could be unpleasant. One of them
is called the color stimulation or caloric reflex test. This

(16:04):
involves irrigating a person's ear canal with warm or cold water,
and if a person's vestibular system and other parts of
the ear anatomy are working. Even a minor change in
the temperature of the water can cause involuntary eye movements
called nastagmus, as well as a feeling of motion, sickness,
or vertigo. If none of that happens, it's an indication

(16:27):
that these organs are not working. The water used in
these tests could be extremely cold. They were just they
were trying to verify that people had no vestibular function
at all, and so they would go to way more
extreme temperatures than a medical test today might. Uh. And
some of the participants described that water as just horribly painful. Yeah,

(16:50):
this test sense awful to me. That's like the one
where all of my anxiety goes no, no, no no, no,
don't do that. Yeah. Yeah, well, and it's I would say,
people I know who have had to have have this
test for whatever reason have described it as pretty unpleasant.
But like the typically in most medical tests to day,
they're not using water that's as cold as they were
using in this screening process. Gramil eventually selected a group

(17:14):
of ten men who met the research criteria. Harold Domick,
Baron Gulac, Raymond Harper, Gerald Jordan's, Harry Larson, David Myers,
Donald Peterson, Raymond Piper, Alvin Steele, and John Zaccutney. They
were between the ages of twenty five and forty eight,
and seven of them were current students. They plus Robert Greenman,

(17:36):
formed what has more recently become known as the gallot
At eleven. Another Gallutet student, James Bisher, also participated in
some tests in nineteen sixty five. It also seems as
though there were also other participants from time to time,
including Polly Hicks, although their participation is not as well
documented the galut At eleven. As we just said, we're

(17:58):
recruited in nineteen six one. That is the same year
human beings first went into space, So a lot was
still totally unknown about how space travel would affect the
human body and how the human body would adapt to
being in space. One thing that seemed really certain was
that people were likely to experience motion sickness during space travel,

(18:22):
and motion sickness in space could present a really serious problem,
both from being ill and from being able to do
your job in a situation where there's not a lot
of room for error. Before this point, medical science had
viewed motion sickness mostly as an annoying inconvenience, but the

(18:43):
possibility of human space travel turned it into a subject
that warranted in depth study. This work was also connected
to the development of drugs to prevent motion sickness. The
vestibular research program wasn't only about motion sickness, though. That
same sense of equilibrium that plays a part in motion
sickness also plays a part in balance and coordination, so

(19:06):
everything from orienting the body in space to being able
to reach for and press the correct button on a
control panel while essentially waitless. So researchers were trying to
figure out how exactly the vestibular system connected to all
of that, and what it took for the human body
to compensate for a lack of gravitation cues or the

(19:26):
ongoing rotation that might provide a sense of artificial gravity.
In addition to these kinds of questions, the galad At
eleven immunity to motion sickness also meant that they could
tolerate tests that most hearing people could not, and that
gave NASA and the Navy a broader range of data
to work with. And the words of Harry Larson, one

(19:47):
of the galat At eleven quote, we were different in
a way they needed. Between nineteen sixty one and nineteen
sixty eight, the galad At eleven participated in a lot
of research. They documented their subjective experiences and researchers tested
their blood and urine, monitored their blood pressure and pulse,
recorded their eye movements, recorded the details of how they

(20:11):
performed various tasks, and took other measurements. Robert Greenman's letters
described the use of threads on the eyes as part
of the eye movement studies. It is not entirely clear
how this was done, but it sure sounds uncomfortable. That
makes my my skin heave about a little bit. Yeah,

(20:31):
that's That's not something that was elucidated in any of
the research reports that I read. Even though researchers had
intentionally recruited a group of eleven deaf people for this research,
NASA and the US Naval Aviation Medical Center didn't provide
sign language interpreters for them. If hearing friends or family

(20:54):
members visited and also knew how to sign, sometimes they
would interpret the researchers instructions. Otherwise, though researchers gave the
deaf subjects brief instructions and writing and any other communication
about the test also happened in writing participants. Communication with
friends and family members back home also usually happened through writing.

(21:16):
The teletypewriter or t t Y also called a t
d D or telecommunications device for the death, made phone
calls more accessible to deaf people, but that was not
invented until nineteen sixty four, when this research had been
already going on for a few years. Here are some
examples of the kinds of research this group was part of,
starting with some that took place on airplanes. First flight

(21:40):
stress researchers knew that being on an airplane doing all
kinds of wild maneuvers was stressful, and they could measure
this by looking for stress hormones in people's urine after flights.
But was that also true of people who didn't have
a working vestibular system and didn't experience motion sickness. One
experiment that looked at this question involved seventeen total subjects,

(22:03):
six who had been recruited from Galladet and eleven who
were serving in the navy. Researchers first tested the eleven
hearing participants to make sure their vestibular systems were functioning,
and then they put all seventeen through a dramatic series
of in flight maneuvers. Here's how those maneuvers are described
in the research report. Quote take off and climb to

(22:26):
twelve thousand feet, three sixty degree turn at sixty degree
bank to left and right, two point zero to two
point five g wing over to left and right, three
aileron rolls to the left barrel, roll to the left
and right, three aileron rolls to the left barrel, roll

(22:46):
to the left and right, and a split s coming
out at approximately five thousand feet at four g's. The
sequence was carried out in a continuous manner, so that
the aircraft was in a straight and of all flight
for only very short periods of time. If at the
end of the first sequence the subject was ill, the

(23:07):
aerobatics were discontinued and the pilot returned the plane to
the field. If vomiting was not eminent, the pilot climbed
back to twelve thousand feet and repeated the same procedure.
These two sequences required approximately thirty minutes. I just want
to note here that a whole page of the research
report detailing this is an illustration of a tiny airplane

(23:30):
doing all of these maneuvers, and I found it incredibly charming.
The airplane looks like a like a little child's drawing
of an airplane. Almost it looks like something that would
be in a picture book, not something that would be
flying in these sorts of dramatic maneuvers. As expected, none
of the deaf men reported motion sickness during the flight,

(23:53):
and most of the hearing participants did. In a couple
of cases, the flight had to be stopped because hearing
participants became ill. Afterward, the researchers tested the participants urine
and found that the eleven people with working vestibular systems
had much higher levels of stress hormones than the other six,
but their levels of europepsin, which is a hormone associated

(24:15):
with digestive disorders, was the same. Researchers also tested the
participants urine on days when there was no flight, just
to make sure the differences they found were not from
other causes. On the non flight days, their stress hormone
levels were about the same. It was kind of ruling
out that there was some digestive involvement in what was happening.

(24:36):
Other experiments involved parabolic flights, also called zero G flights,
for their brief period of perceived weightlessness. Claims used for
flights like these are often called the vomit comet. One
parabolic flight study in nineteen sixty four was meant to
assess the death participants susceptibility to motion sickness as compared

(24:58):
to hearing people. The hearing people in this study were
nine medical students and ten enlisted men who had been
assigned to the Naval School of Aviation Medicine as research subjects. Unsurprisingly,
based on what was already known at the time, the
six members of the galad At eleven who participated experienced

(25:19):
no motion sickness and also seemed to genuinely enjoy the flight.
Well over half of the hearing subjects experienced some degree
of motion sickness, with the student's reactions seeming to be
more extreme than the enlisted men's. By this point in
the space race, human beings had been in orbit around
the Earth, and some of them had reported feeling motion

(25:41):
sickness while others had not, and so that was something
researchers were trying to understand through experiments like this one,
Like why did some people feel bad and other people
were fine? Researchers concluded that this was related to vestibular function,
but also that some people with functioning vestibular systems are
more resist stan to motion sickness, where they can adapt

(26:02):
to repeated exposure, like the enlisted men who had been
in those kinds of movement situations more often UH have
had more resistance to it. And we're going to get
to some research that did not involve airplanes after we
first take another quick sponsor break. Earlier in the episode,

(26:29):
we mentioned that Robert Greenman had spent days in a
slow rotating room as part of all of this research.
Other members of the gallut At eleven did this as well,
and so for a little bit more detail about what
this was about. As the name suggests, the pencacolist low
rotation room is an enclosed room that rotates around an axis.

(26:51):
The speed of that can vary based on the experiment
that's going on, including changing over the course of the experiment.
Research in this room could help predict how astronauts would
adapt to a continually moving environment, including if rotating platforms
are being used to simulate gravity in a space station.

(27:12):
The gallant At elevens work in the slow rotation room
helped researchers understand how the vestibular system was connected to
all of this. In one experiment, for deaf subjects and
four hearing subjects each spent twelve consecutive days living in
the rotation room with it rotating at ten revolutions per minute.

(27:33):
The four death subjects had been recruited from Galladet and
the four hearing subjects were recent Naval Academy graduates who
were waiting to receive assignments as student aviators. This is
the windowless room, and it was outfitted with everything that
participants would need to live, including toilets and showers, a kitchen,
and seating areas. They slept with their heads towards the

(27:55):
center of the room, and the room stopped only to
allow researchers to enter to on tests or to drop
off supplies at the start of the day. Anytime the
room was stopped, the participants had to hold still. They
didn't want to interrupt or affect their body's acclamation to
the room. In this particular experiment, participants had their balance
tested by walking heel to toe on a rail like

(28:18):
a balanced beam, and they also stood heel of one
foot to toe of the other with their arms folded
over their chests. They did this standing test with their
eyes open and with their eyes closed. Although the deaf
participants in this experiment were immune to the motion sickness
that could make it really unpleasant. For hearing participants, these

(28:38):
particular tasks were inherently challenging for them. Since their vestibular
systems weren't providing the feedback to help them keep their balance,
many of them had trouble. This is the case with
a lot of people who have vestibular issues. This was
especially true when they had their eyes closed, since their
bodies had adapted to using visual cues to help them

(29:00):
maintain their balance. So this experiment was exploring the differences
and how people adapted to the rotating room depending on
the state of their vestibular system. It also raised some
questions about how other appropri receptive systems in the body
might be involved in balance. One of the most dramatic

(29:20):
experiments involving the Galadat eleven took place at sea in
nineteen sixty four. Participants were flown to Nova Scotia and
from there they took a ship called the m S.
Miquelon to the island of Saint Pierre about two hundred
miles away. The plan was to spend a few rest
days on Saint Pierre. If the trip to the island
was a stormy one, they would be waiting for clear weather,

(29:42):
and if it had been clear, they would be waiting
for a storm. The m S. Miquelon was a supply ship.
It was around bottomed boats, narrow and light and shallow
in the draft, and it also had no stabilization gear.
And the words of the research report on this experiment quote,
when underway, these unusual dimensions occasioned a great deal of role.

(30:05):
But the ship was seaworthy. Um that's a little asterisk.
That's clarified what it meant by seaworthy. And it was
sort of like it's never sank, uh, but with more
detail to add to that. This stretch of the North
Atlantic between Halifax and Sampierre was notoriously prone to extreme storms,

(30:26):
and so the idea here was to take the death
and hearing research subjects on an innately unstable boat in
very choppy seas. Again, in the words of the research report, quote,
heavy seas are routine during the winter months, and on
some crossings even the ship's crew have reported seasickness. The

(30:46):
trip out was a calm one, so they waited for
a storm on the way back. The researchers hypothesis was
that in these conditions, of the twenty hearing test subjects
on the ship would experience motion sickness, but none of
the ten deaf subjects would. On the trip back, none
of the ten deaf men became motion sick, although one

(31:07):
did report feeling a little gassy and another reported a
quote constriction in the throat and slight nausea that the
researchers determined was not motion related. Of the twenty hearing participants,
fifteen threw up and five had moderate or severe malaise.
Nine of these men had also been described as highly
resistant to motion sickness based on their backgrounds. Two of

(31:31):
them were senior flight surgeons, two had retired from the Navy,
three were regular research subjects in vestibular studies, and one
had been an experimenter in the slow rotation room. In
interviews given in more recent years, members of the gallat
At eleven have described this as an adventure in which
they were hanging out and playing cards and eating while

(31:53):
the hearing participants were ill um One of them did
not that the cards kept falling off the table because
the role of the ship was so much. Baron Gulac
described the hearing participants getting sicker when they saw that
the deaf participants were eating, but as sort of jovial
as that sounds, this was also an ordeal. It was

(32:13):
winter and there was frozen spray all over the exterior
of the ship. As the researchers described it quote, the
sea condition was very rough. Waves were estimated at forty
feet and these produced an estimated roll of forty plus degrees.
The captain was requested to rate the sea state on
a ten point scale, using the first trip as one

(32:35):
the mildest and to consider ten the most severe. In
his experience, this trip was assigned seven. According to the researchers.
At some points all of the deaf participants and most
of the hearing participants reported being anxious or afraid. Initially,
this experiment was meant to look at some basic questions

(32:56):
beyond just did people get sea sick or not, But
as it was described in the research report quote, measurement
of cardiovascular changes, specifically orthostatic hypotension were intended. But we're
not done because the experimenters became incapacitated. The linear and
angular accelerations of the craft were also to be measured

(33:18):
at certain intervals, and these experimenters too became incapacitated. So,
in addition to all the hearing subjects of this research,
the experimenters themselves also having a lot of motion sickness.
The researchers did, however, conclude that even though it can
seem like anxiety has triggered a person's motion sickness, it

(33:39):
didn't appear that anxiety by itself was enough, because all
of the deaf participants reported feeling anxious, but none of
them became seasick. These are just a few examples of
the types of experiments that the Galada eleven were part of.
Over the course of about a decade, NASA hosted a
whole series of symposia on the role of vestibular organs

(34:01):
in space starting in nineteen sixty five, where researchers from
around the world presented this another research, and the researchers
seemed to have viewed the galut At elevens participation as
special and appreciated. In every research report that Tracy read,
the researchers thank the quote labyrinthine defective participants, but medical students,

(34:23):
enlisted personnel, and other hearing participants did not receive similar things.
The galad At elevens participation in this research contributed to
things like the development of antimotion sickness drugs, space suit design,
and the determination of safe flight parameters for spacecraft like
how many g's could people be subjected to, and it

(34:45):
also had applications well beyond the space program. A range
of illnesses and injuries can affect a person's vestibular function,
as can just the process of aging. Research into things
like balance and equilibrium and the vestibular system continues today,
including at the Ashton Grabial Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis

(35:07):
University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Galada elevens participation in this
research was not a secret. There were various articles about
it in Penci Coola newspapers in the nineteen sixties, but
there hasn't really been much formal acknowledgement of it by
NASA until very recently. Members of the Galada eleven who
have been interviewed in more recent years have talked about

(35:28):
seeing it as a way to serve their country. For example,
in an interview with the Washington Post, Baron Gulac talked
about being unable to join the military because he was deaf.
Deaf people still cannot enlist in the U S military,
and deaf people also could not be astronauts. The first
wave of astronaut candidates in the US were all military

(35:49):
test pilots and had to be quote in excellent physical condition,
which were criteria that excluded deaf people. I can't read
the minds of all the researchers, but based on the
things that they wrote down, it doesn't seem like it
ever occurred to anybody to be like, hey, it seems
like there are some uniquely suited to space attributes of

(36:11):
our deaf research candidates. Maybe we should revisit some of
these criteria. Uh. And at this point, space is still
largely inaccessible to deaf people and to disabled people more generally.
That has barely started to shift in more recent years,
largely through disabled people's own advocacy and also through the

(36:32):
rise of commercial space flight. Sort of similar to how
the shift in just air travel from like a largely
military experience to something that regular civilian people could be
participating in led to some shifts and who could fly
and who could become a pilot, although to be super
super clear, there's still an enormous way to go in

(36:54):
terms of accessibility of air travel. SpaceX is inspiration for
mission involved four civilian crew members. It was the first
human space flight to orbit the Earth with only private
citizens on board. One was Hailey Arsenal, who has an
internal prosthesis essentially a prosthetic bone. Arsenal is the first

(37:15):
person with a prosthesis to go to space, and one
of the candidates for that mission who wasn't ultimately selected
to go was Galludet graduate Julia Alaska's. In one, the
European Space Agency launched its Pair Astronaut Feasibility Project, which
is exploring the inclusion of astronauts with a specific set

(37:36):
of physical differences that previously would have excluded them from consideration.
These are a significant difference in leg length, a height
of under one thirty centimeters which is four ft three inches,
and a quote lower limb deficiency in other words, if
one or both of a person's legs stop at the
knee or at the ankle. And as we referenced at

(37:58):
the top of the show. In October of one, there
was a parabolic flight that had twelve disability ambassadors on
board that took place as part of Mission astro Access.
Mission astro Access describes itself as quote a project dedicated
to promoting disability inclusion in space by paving the way

(38:19):
for disabled astronauts in stem by launching disabled scientists, veterans, students, athletes,
and artists on parabolic flights with the Zero Gravity Corporation
zero G as the first step in a progression towards
flying a diverse range of people to space. So this
flight took place on Zero Gravity Corporation's G Force one,

(38:42):
and its participants included death, blind, and low vision people
as well as people with disabilities that affect their mobility.
These weren't the first disabled people ever to go on
a parabolic flight. As one example, the late Stephen Hawking,
who had a LS did a zero D flight in
two thousand seven. Radio Lamb covered this flight in the
episode that Tracy mentioned at the beginning of the show Today.

(39:06):
Reporter Andrew Leland was on the flight, and afterward Tracy
saw some conversations between him and Damien Williams, who is
a PhD candidate whose work is focused on science, technology,
and society. Williams praised Leland for his work, while also
noting that he wished the episode had discussed the gallad
at eleven, and Leland replied that so much material had

(39:27):
to be cut, but that the story of the Galada
eleven hurt the most and that is what inspired her
to research today's episode. Yeah, that conversation happened on Twitter. Also,
Radio Lab has taken more steps to make this episode. Again,
it was titled the Right Stuff Accessible than I think
I've ever seen, particularly in a podcast that as a

(39:49):
whole was not something that was conceived and produced by
and for disabled people. So not just a transcript but
also a brailready file and a video with an a
s L enter or we do have a transcript of
this episode of our show, and we will have the
link to it in the episode description for everybody to
be able to access. Also, there are several places where

(40:11):
you can find these men talking about their experiences in
this research in their own words. Robert Greenman died in
nineteen seventy, but his son donated a lot of his
letters describing these experiments to Galludet University. Selections are printed
as part of an article called Deaf Perspective Inside View
of early space research, which appeared in the journal quest

(40:33):
the History of Space Flight Quarterly. Harry Larson and David
Meyers were also part of a presentation called galut At
eleven The Deaf Right Stuff at Space Center Houston, and
that is available on Facebook and YouTube and Space Center
Houston's website. Yeah, the two of them also recorded an
oral history through the NASA Administrator's Oral History Project, and

(40:55):
that's available through NASA as well. I found that just
this morning. It was like cool more stuff. I love it. Um.
Do you also have listener mail today? I do. This
is from Jennifer. Jennifer wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I
had planned an epic trip for my fiftieth birthday in

(41:17):
to South Georgia Island. Needless to say, it was delayed
over and over due to COVID nineteen. I finally took
the trip last month March. I was standing at Peggotty
Bluff with an archaeologist at Shackleton's campsite the day the
Endurance was located and filmed. Now, I've read Endurance, and
I respect Shackleton's leadership, skills and luck, but I really

(41:41):
went on this trip to see King penguin's of course,
it was a very shackleton ey trip. Our first stop
was grit Vikin where we visited Shackleton's grave, but we
also visited King hack On Bay, Peggotty Bluff, Cave Cove
for the Eighth, the two Young Albatross, the waterfall, Shackleton's
slid down and of Strongness to round it out. Oh,

(42:03):
and so many king penguins, which are high in vitamin C.
If you eat penguins you will not get scurvy, so
I am told. Anyway. Sending some photos and also the
obligatory black cat photos of my besties kiddies, Rickets and Poe.
You are one of my favorite podcasts. I listened to
you while I'm gardening and doing other household chores. Keep

(42:25):
it up, Jennifer, Rickets and Poh, thank you so much,
Jennifer for these pictures and this email. I can totally
understand how, um a trip that was meant to be
about penguins but also somewhere that had all this Shackleton
stuff would become very shackletony. Also, yes, penguins are pretty
high environment vitamin C. A lot of meats are. You

(42:49):
can't cook them too much though, because that will if
you cook them too much, vitamin C will break down.
So one of the ways that they were able to
avoid scurvy was that they were eating like this really
fresh meat that they had just hunted themselves, um, and
then not cooking it to death. So, if you would
like to write to us about this or another podcast

(43:11):
where history podcast that i heart radio dot com. We're
all over social media and miss in history. That's where
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(43:32):
You Missed in History Class is a production of I
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