Ozone – 42 Years Later

which the present article summarizes, included the suggestion that I should select some topic that I had been interested in for most of my professional life, and follow its development to the present.I chose to talk about ozone because I do have some milestones to chart the progress of my interest, and because, as I shall show you, it is becoming more relevant, rather than less, as time goes on.I shall also provide some notes on the development of interest in the small airways of the lung; the reason for this parallel history will become evident as we come up to date.The story of the 'discovery' of ozone by Schonbein in Basel, Switzerland, in the middle of the 19th century is an interesting one.He had worked in England teaching German at a boarding school, and at that time, he met Michael Faraday.Here he must have learned that an electric spark is often followed by a curious smell; when he got back to Basel he later became a professor of chemistry and was able to show that it was ozone (O 3 ) that was being formed.He did a very thorough job of investigating the properties of this gas, and discovered that it was intensely irritant.Its bactericidal properties became the centre of attention later in the century, and WS Gilbert wrote some doggerel verse calling it "Nature's Great Cleanser".This was unearthed by Bill Linn.I believe it was the German V2 rocket program that led to the recognition of the ozone layer, starting at approximately 30,000 feet (9144 m) and rapidly increasing to a maximum at approximately 50,000 km before waning.I am not sure of the history of this, but I was first shown German data on the ozone layer on a visit to the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough.Our research group, led by Ronald Christie at Bart's Hospital (Farnborough, United Kingdom), was one of the few research groups with an interest in the lung, and we exchanged relevant information.It was there that I learned that the foam rubber in the passenger oxygen masks in the de Havilland Comet had deteriorated rapidly, and that the Dunlop company had suggested that it must be ozone that had caused this disintegration.The 'Comet' was the first aircraft to fly routinely above 30,000 feet.We all realized that we knew nothing of the toxicity of ozone if inhaled at sea level; however, this research was made difficult by the lack of any reliable instrument to measure the gas concentration.

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