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## Gustavo Zerbino and the Medical Questions
Gustavo Zerbino was, alongside Roberto Canessa, one of the two medical students in the group. Where Canessa’s contributions focused particularly on the triage in the immediate aftermath of the crash and the later decision-making around the food question, Zerbino’s contributions spanned the medical care throughout the entire survival period and extended into leadership after the crash.
After rescue, Zerbino became a physician, though accounts differ on his eventual specialty. What is clear is that he returned to rugby within ten months of the rescue, went on to lead a team to twelve Uruguayan rugby championships over fourteen years, and then moved into leadership of the Uruguayan Rugby Federation. He also founded Rugby Sin Fronteras — Rugby Without Borders — a charity that uses rugby as a vehicle for social development.
He met Pope Francis in 2015, an encounter that connects the survival experience’s religious dimension to its ongoing public significance.
Zerbino’s post-survival career is notable for the way it integrated all three elements that the survival experience had concentrated: medicine, sport, and social commitment. The rugby championship wins came from the same competitive discipline that had been present in the athletic members of the group throughout the survival period. The charity work expressed the survivor obligation that multiple members of the group have articulated: the sense that having survived when others did not requires a life that justifies the survival.
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## Pedro Algorta and the Years of Silence
Pedro Algorta survived the crash and the 72 days in the Andes and then spent approximately thirty years saying very little about it.