"Sir Eddie, that whole "respect for human life" thing went out with the Sixties."
There are a whole bunch of Freepers who argued with me and others, and I'm sure would like a chance to lay into Sir Eddie too.
Click here to see the shame: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1636848/posts
Having never climbed and seeing nothing more than a documentary or two on the subject, I'm not going to judge on the rightness or wrongness of the other climbers. It is akin to the person faced with saving people in a burning building. At what point do you abandon a rescue in order to save yourself?
How much time and resources would have been needed to rescue the dying man and would doing so have jeopardized more people, turning a small tragedy into a much larger one? I can't answer that question. I do know that if it came down to reaching the peak or saving a fellow climber, they should have saved the climber. But if attempting the rescue would have cost so much in time and resources that other climbers might have died, I can see the logic in leaving the first man behind.
They say you are facing an oxygen deficit with every breath at that elevation and who knows how much would be spent trying to bring the man down? I presume that the bodies littered around Everest remain there for a reason - that the corpses are too risky to retrieve. That alone would tell me that attempting a rescue at that height is not one that should be tried haphazardly.