MARTIN GOODMAN WINS BMA PRIZE

At Super Saturation, a Centenary Celebration of Modern Diving, on Saturday 1 November 2008 in the Roland Levinsky Building at the University, Martin Goodman (on the left of this picture, with Richard Dawkins) gave a talk on the remarkable life story of scientist and inventor John Scott Haldane, the world's greatest serial self-experimenter who first put canaries into mines. In 1908, Haldane's diving tables were adopted by the Admiralty and modern diving began, allowing divers to reach much greater depths in a controlled and safe way, without suffering 'the bends'. Martin's biography of Haldane, Suffer and Survive (now in paperback from Simon & Schuster, 2008), which got rave reviews from both specialist medical journals and the national press, recently won the British Medical Association's Basis of Medicine prize. Martin Goodman is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth.