Word: oxygenate
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...deep-sea divers working on the sunken British submarine Thetis were a scientific problem to famed Biologist J.B.S. Haldane. One day, early in World War II, Briton Haldane impetuously clapped on an oxygen mask and, breathing pure oxygen (to study its effects), "dived" in a pressure chamber to a depth of seven atmospheric pressures (200 feet). The experiment nearly killed the experimenter, but it proved to him that oxygen, under pressure, is a violent poison...
Inspired in part by Haldane's dive, the British Navy launched a full-dress study of oxygen poisoning, now reported in the British Medical Journal. Oxygen is essential to life, but it appears that the human body can stand just so much of it (not so much as biologists once supposed). The British Navy concludes that breathing pure oxygen under more than two atmospheres of pressure (or an oxygen dive of more than 25 feet under sea water) is dangerous...
Nervous Knockout. Deep-sea divers generally have been fed pure oxygen and helium, pumped to a pressure matching the depth of their dive. Divers sometimes unaccountably passed out during relatively shallow dives (up to four atmospheres of pressure used to be considered safe). The British study, involving some 2,000 tests, proved that oxygen, forced into the tissues under pressure, somehow intoxicates the central nervous system and poisons the brain cortex. (Whales, biologists have observed, bypass the whole oxygen problem by collapsing their lungs during deep dives...
...altitude does not bother the local Indians, who have long since adapted themselves to Andean life. They thrive and raise families in altitudes up to 17,000 feet, which is more than a mile above the altitude at which most U.S. Army airmen are required to use oxygen. Peruvian pilots of Indian blood fly their airplanes as high as 24,000 feet without extra oxygen...
...institute got help and money, it studied Andean Man in the flesh. The highland Indians, Dr. Monge found, get their resistance to altitude from definite physical differences. Their lungs are bigger than normal, with more blood vessels in them. Their blood is in greater volume and contains more oxygen per unit. Their hearts can do 12% more work than the hearts of sea-level men. Their nerve cells are less sensitive to anoxia (oxygen starvation...