Word: oxygenate
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...Mount Everest was a colossal mistake, an act of Daedalian hubris for which he would be punished. There are so many ways to die on that mountain, spanning the spectacular (fall through an ice shelf into a crevasse, get waylaid by an avalanche, develop cerebral edema from lack of oxygen and have your brain literally swell out of your skull) and the banal (become disoriented because of oxygen deprivation and decide you'll take a little nap, right here, in the snow, which becomes a forever...
...blind guy can do it, anyone can. And indeed, improved gear has made Everest, at least in some people's minds, a bit smaller. In the climbing season there's a conga line to the top, or so it seems, and the trail is a junkyard of discarded oxygen tanks and other debris. But Everest eats the unready and the unlucky. Almost 90% of Everest climbers fail to reach the summit. Many--at least 165 since 1953--never come home at all, their bodies lying uncollected where they fell. Four died in May. "People think because I'm blind...
...Oxygen deprivation does strange things to the human body. Heart rates go haywire, brain function decreases, blood thickens, intestines shut down. Bad ideas inexplicably pop into your head, especially above 25,000 ft., where, as Krakauer famously wrote in Into Thin Air, climbers have the "mind of a reptile...
...cancerous cells to self-destruct. Still others block enzymes that cancer cells use to chew openings in normal tissues and give themselves room to expand. And, most famously, the class of compounds known as angiogenesis inhibitors keep tumors from building new blood vessels to supply themselves with food and oxygen. Three years ago, Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was quoted as saying Dr. Judah Folkman, the Harvard researcher, would use these inhibitors to "cure cancer within two years...
Indeed, while the execution has proved difficult, the idea is very simple. Tumors, like any other cells, need oxygen and nutrients to survive. At first they eat their way through healthy tissue, looking for blood vessels to tap for these essentials. Eventually, though, they start to grow their own capillaries and vessels, like oil companies eager to guarantee a steady flow of crude...