Peter Brian Bennett, PhD, DSc, is the founder of DAN, or Divers Alert Network, an organisation that people know as an international force for recreational dive safety, and one that continues its research into human physiology in divingrelated activities. Dive physicians today continue to reference the book, Physiology and Medicine of Diving, which Bennett co-edited with the late David Elliott, PhD.
Bennett earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from the University of London in 1951. While working for the Royal Navy Physiological Laboratory, he completed a doctorate in physiology and biochemistry at the University of Southampton in 1964. He moved to the US in 1972 to be a professor of anaesthesiology at Duke University Medical Center, where he eventually became the senior director of the F.G. Hall Laboratory for Environmental Research, Duke’s hyperbaric chamber facility.
DIVE RESEARCH COMMENCES
While at the Royal Navy Physiological Laboratory and Duke University, Bennett planned and conducted a long list of dive research projects that included almost everything relevant to dive physiology. He studied nitrogen narcosis,
