I just knew I should have been following this thread...
I actually was involved in clinical trials some years ago with the
old-style perflurocarbons some years ago as blood-replacement therapy.
I've seen the longer tests of mouse submersion, including one critter
that was eventually trained to perform immersed. For long periods. He
appeared as comfortable perfusing with gas infused into the solution as
he was scurrying around on the table, although getting out of the stuff
meant a lot of coughing to clear his lungs. Still, no ill effects.
Its us in humans, however, was more problemmatical. We tended to see,
when a sufficient quantity was infused to support life, problems in two
areas: 1. the molecules tended to aggregate in the liver and plug up
the system, and 2. we tended to have to maintain higher oxygen
concentrations for long periods of time causing lung toxicity issues,
which were only slightly mitigated by high positive airway pressure
maintenance.
We discontinued trials because of the rather daunting challenges of the
patient population we had to work with, and the rather grim outcome
statistics.
gerry
David Mathog wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote
After a minute the
mouse was running around again and seemed no worse off.
"Seemed" being the key word here. If memory serves the biggest
problem with being immersed in these types of oxygen carrying inert
fluids is that they leak into the body, presumably through the lungs.
Eventually that gunk ends up in the liver which becomes cirrhotic.
Since the time scale was so short that really wasn't much of a safety
demonstration. There are lots of things that could be injected into a
mouse and it would run around happily for a couple of hours and then be
dead in a few days. At the more extreme toxic end of the spectrum,
here are a couple most people have heard of: ricin and alpha-amanitin.
Regards,
David Mathog
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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