Paul Bert (17 October 1833 – 11 November 1886) was a French zoologist, physiologist and politician. He is sometimes given the sobriquet "Father of Aviation Medicine". Life Bert was born at Auxerre (Yonne). He studied law, earning a doctorate in Paris; then, under the influence of the zoologist Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815–1865), he took up physiology, becoming one of Claude Bernard's most brilliant students. After graduating at Paris as doctor of medicine in 1863, and doctor of science in 1866, he was appointed professor of physiology successively at Bordeaux (1866) and the Sorbonne (1869). After the "Commune de Paris" (1870) he began to take part in politics as a supporter of Gambetta. In 1874 he was elected to the Assembly, where he sat on the extreme left, and in 1876 to the chamber of deputies. He was one of the most determined enemies of clericalism, and an ardent advocate of "liberating national education from religious sects, while rendering it accessible to every citizen." From 14 November 1881 to 30 January 1882 he was minister of education and worship in Gambetta's short-lived cabinet, and in 1881 he created a great sensation by a lecture on modern Catholicism, delivered in a Paris theatre, in which he poured ridicule on the fables and follies of the chief religious tracts and handbooks that circulated especially in the south of France. Bert was unexpectedly named resident general of the French Republic in Annam and Tonkin on 31 January 1886. He left France in February 1886 accompanied by a dozen people including Antony Klobukowski, former chief of staff of Charles Thomson, and Charles François Laurent, inspector of finances. Bert died of dysentery at Hanoi on 11 November 1886. After Bert's death Klobukowski and Laurent were listed among the subscribers in Tonkin to a fund to erect a statue in Bert's honour. Works He was more distinguished as a man of science than as a politician or administrator. His classical work, La Pression barometrique (1878), embodies researches that gained him the biennial prize of 20,000 francs from the Academy of Sciences in 1875, and is a comprehensive investigation on the physiological effects of air-pressure, both above and below the normal. Central nervous system oxygen toxicity was first described in this publication and is sometimes referred to as the "Paul Bert effect". He showed that oxygen was toxic to insects, arachnids, myriapods, molluscs, earthworms, fungi, germinating seeds, birds,