Word: oxygenate
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...With Oxygen. Drs. Harold Atkins and William Seaman of New York's Colum bia-Presbyterian Medical Center told of progress toward licking a basic problem-radiosensitivity. Since Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X rays, in 1895, radiotherapists have been trying to get radiation to destroy diseased tissue while letting healthy nearby tissue survive...
First at London's St. Thomas's Hospital, and lately at Columbia-Presbyterian, plain oxygen has proved to be a useful ally toward this goal. Cells are more easily destroyed if they have a large supply of oxygen, but tumor cells are frequently oxygen-starved; they grow so rapidly that they outstrip their blood supply. Radiotherapists speculated that they might make up the deficiency by putting the patient in a chamber where he could breathe oxygen at a pressure four times that of the atmosphere. A high concentration of oxygen could then be carried in the bloodstream...
...practice, Drs. Atkins and Seaman and others on the Columbia-Presbyterian team, pick patients with advanced cancer to treat with oxygen and radiation. According to a carefully devised procedure, such a patient gets an anesthetic injected into his veins, and a rubber hose is threaded down his windpipe so that he will not choke while asleep. His eardrums are pricked so that oxygen pressure will not perforate them. Monitoring devices, including a microphone that allows the anesthesiologist to listen to respiration, are attached to the body. The patient is put on a stretcher that is placed in the oxygen chamber...
...team of six doctors, nurses, and technicians hover at chamber-side, the radiologist maneuvers a betatron into position. After slamming shut a hatch at the end of the chamber, technicians force oxygen in. After 15 minutes under full pressure, during which the patient's body is closely watched by means of closed-circuit television, the radiologist turns on the betatron, shoots radiation at the tumor. Following treatment, the patient is decompressed in deep-sea-diver fashion and taken to the recovery room...
...Conference. NASA officials reported that almost everything on the capsule had worked perfectly. One electrical part (an alternator) had misbehaved, but its functions were taken over by a backup duplicate. The oxygen system leaked a little, but not enough to matter. The "man" on board survived the trip, exactly as a human would have, but since he was only a simulated astronaut, he could not hold a press conference...