William Siri, a leading biophysics researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who climbed some of the world’s tallest mountains in the name of science and was deputy leader and scientific coordinator of the first American expedition to reach the peak of Mt. Everest, in 1963, has died. He was 85.
Mr. Siri, a past president of the Sierra Club and a longtime environmental activist, died Aug. 24 of pneumonia in Berkeley, Calif., after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Jean.
Regarded as one of the world’s foremost mountain-climbing scientists, Mr. Siri participated in or led scientific expeditions to peaks around the world to study the effects of altitude and oxygen deprivation on the human body, including his own.
In 1957 he was the field leader for the International Physiological Expedition to Antarctica, a joint U.S. and British scientific expedition to study the effects of extreme cold on the blood and certain diseases of the blood.
Mr. Siri had two University of California mountain-climbing expeditions to the Peruvian Andes behind him when he led the 1954 California Himalayan Expedition, an effort to reach the top of 27,765-foot Makalu, the fifth-highest peak in the world. The 10-man party made it as high as 23,000 feet before adverse weather ended the effort.
Jean Siri recalled Friday that she hadn’t heard from her husband for six months when he sent runners down the mountain to deliver a message to her back home in California: He needed $10,000 immediately to pay the climbers’ team of Sherpa guides and porters.
“I raised it, but they came home looking awful hungry and skinny,” she said. “They must have been without food for a while. It was a very underfunded expedition.”
Ten years after Edmund Hillary and his Nepalese Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, became the first men to reach Everest’s summit, Mr. Siri made news himself with the 1963 expedition that succeeded in putting five Americans atop the 29,035-foot peak.
Mr. Siri, who did not attempt to reach the summit of the world’s tallest mountain, spent most of his time at the 22,000-foot base camp but was at the 24,000-foot level for several days.
“There are no trees, brush or animals up there,” he later said. “Just a few birds, which, from the looks of the way they acted around us, exist by living off expeditions.”
