"To the conquest of the unknown and the advancement of knowledge."
The motto on the masthead of the Explorers Club newsletter (above) epitomizes quite tidily the modus Vivendi of its president, GEORGE VAN BRUNT COCHRAN M.D. '53 in the parallel threads of his professional life and his avocational enthusiasms.
As director of the Orthopaedic Engineering and Research Center at Helen Hayes Hospital north of New York City, professor of clinical orthopaedic surgery at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he exercises what one colleague called "an extraordinary mixture of ingenuity, imagination, and patience" in learning how and why human tissue reacts as it does to stress and applying that knowledge to the rehabilitation and well-being of the handicapped.
As long-time member and current president of the Explorers Club, an international organization of some 3,000 "men and women of diverse and unusual attainment ... in field sciences ranging from Astronomy to Zoology," Van Cochran might be called the quintessential chubber. That term he once found it necessary to define as "Dartmouth slang" in a footnote to a magazine article on climbing 20,000-plusfoot peaks in the Bolivian Andes. From its headquarters in New York in the Lowell Thomas Building, named for its 20-year honorary president, the club administers a wide array of educational grants, public programs, and active sponsorship of field research and exploration. Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral Peary, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson were members; Thor Heyerdahl, Sen. John Glenn, Carl Sagan, Sir Edmund Hillary, astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young, and a clutch of Nobel laureates are on the current rolls.
As Dr. Cochran speaks, he roves easily back and forth between anecdotes about experiences in uncharted regions of the world and the direction of his research in biomechanics. Not only are the two parts of his life strikingly harmonious, but the motivation seems analogous. "Exploration is kind of like research," he explains.
"You identify a problem with some place no one has ever been, then figure out how you're going to get yourself there and do whatever it is you want to do. . . . I'm goal-oriented. I like to work on projects of different kinds and see identifiable, usually publishable results. Whether it's published in a scientific journal or a mountaineering journal doesn't make all that much difference to me."
The origins of both phases go far back into Cochran's childhood. He was both the incipient chubber fascinated with "remote places, camping, that sort of thing" and the prototypical kid with the chemistry set who never quite blew up the house. His love of the outdoors guided his choice of a college; his scientific bent carried him through Dartmouth's two-year medical program and on to Columbia P & S for his M.D. degree. He got involved in research as a resident at New York Orthopaedic Hospital, after a tour of duty as an Air Force flight surgeon and a brief dalliance with thoughts of a north country practice specializing in ski injuries.
Following his residency, Cochran earned a doctor of science degree from Columbia for his work in biomechanics and electrophysiology of bone, then spent a year in Switzerland on another fellowship. In 1970, he set up the Orthopaedic Research Laboratory at St. Luke's Hospital in New York and first became a consultant at what was then the New York State Rehabilitation and Research Hospital, which was embarking on residency programs in both areas. He accepted a full-time appointment in 1974, the year the hospital's name Was changed in recognition of the devoted service of Helen Hayes McArthur, a member of its board of visitors since her daughter's death from polio in 1949.
W hen Cochran is not in his laboratory or working with patients in the 200-bed hospital, he is likely to be found either on a mountaineering expedition to the Arctic or planning one. Since the turn of the century, the Explorers Club has awarded flags to members for expeditions deemed scientifically worthy, and Van Cochran has carried several to the frigid mountains of the far north. Club flags, which have been borne proudly on underseas explorations, mountain ascents, archeological digs, and into space on the shuttle Columbia, are returned to the club, along with a full report of the expedition, to be awarded in due course to other explorers on other investigations.
In April 1982, Flag #200 accompanied Cochran's "Polar Mountains" expedition to Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada, at 82°17'N, less than 500 miles from the North Pole. There the party (which included John Stix '80) achieved the first ascent by ski and crampon of peaks almost 6,000 feet in altitude "just about the farthest north mountains ever climbed," the doctor maintains.
Last spring, in a fortuitous blend of profession and avocation, Van Cochran "deviated to the Himalayas" on an expedition organized to train emergency medical technicians in Bhutan, a mountainous country of 1.2 million people, 18,000 square miles, and only 60 physicians. A joint project of the Explorers Club and Aid for International Medicine, it counted among its instructors Edgar Miller '51, a Pennsylvania surgeon.
One of his first and perhaps the most arduous of his expeditions remains, in Cochran's estimation, the most significant. It was the exploration of the high desolate snowfields known as the "Mysterious Plateau" in British Columbia's coastal range that he and Richard Beatty '53 undertook in 1957. In the course of this expedition, they made the first ascent of the 10,000-foot peak they later named "Mt. Dartmouth." Cochran credits open stacks in Baker Library in large part for the discovery of the mountain. "It was at Dartmouth I got interested in that whole area," he recalls. "Just wandering around Baker, I happened on the mountaineering section, where I found books I never would have known about. It's not the sort of thing you look up in the card catalogue."
The miseries of hacking through swamps, brush, and thickets to reach that high country probably bear directly on Cochran's preoccupation with the Canadian polar regions. "I really got taken with mountains people hadn't climbed before and large areas no one had been into. But I decided in 1957 that if I wanted to enjoy myself in the mountains without killing myself struggling through trees, the Arctic was the place to go."
And the Arctic it's been, almost annually over the last 15 years. Since 1970, his wife, Caroline (an artist who illustrated his recent textbook, A Primer of Orthopaedic Biomechanics), has accompanied Cochran more often than not. Their first-born made her first expedition to Ellesmere Island in 1976 at age 16 months.
In a family notable for firsts, Caroline Cochran, one of the first women elected a member of the Explorers Club, achieved a spectacular: On October 27, when their second son arrived, she became the first member of the club to bear a child.
Mary Ross, former Associate Editor ofthe DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, now lives year-round in Waterford,Maine, with her husband, Bob Ross'38, himself a former Reviews Editorwith the Magazine.
