During his graduate-student and postdoctoral years (1959–66) at Dalhousie and Duke universities, Hochachka was subjected to the influences of enzymology and metabolic regulation as well as comparative and environmental physiology. The field of 'adaptational biochemistry' was born of the marriage between these disciplines.
In 1966, he moved to the University of British Columbia, where he spent his entire career. There, he embarked on breathtaking and original research that resulted in the development of entirely new lines of inquiry. The world was both his laboratory and his lecture hall — species, lifestyles and habitats were his variables. He led, or participated in, at least nine research expeditions on the RV Alpha Helix, to regions as diverse as the Amazon and the Arctic. He also took part in six expeditions to the Antarctic, four to the high Andes and one to the Himalayas. He was the biochemist in what was perhaps the first collaboration (along with specialists in engineering, anaesthesiology, paediatrics and surgery) to study metabolism in Weddell seals, free-diving from a hole in the Antarctic ice. He assembled research teams to study Andean Quechuas and Himalayan Sherpas, the first to be conducted in modern laboratories, and identified the adaptations that allow Quechuas and Sherpas to function normally at high altitude.
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