Good Old Mountain Air

Wikipedia - Aleksandr Bogomolets:

Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Bogomolets (24 May 1881 – 19 July 1946) was a Soviet and Ukrainian pathophysiologist.

He was president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and director of the Institute of clinical Physiology in Kyiv. His laboratories were located in Georgia, where he had a permanent research unit attached to the Academy of Sciences (1937). According to Zhores Medvedev, this was made possible by Stalin, who wanted members of the Experimental Institute to study the extension of life expectancy. He developed antireticular cytotoxic serum. In 1938, in Kyiv, Oleksandr Bogomolets convened the world’s first scientific conference on aging and longevity.

Wikipedia - Gustavo Zubieta-Castillo:

Gustavo Zubieta-Castillo (May 20, 1926 – September 17, 2015) was a Bolivian physician, high altitude medicine expert, physiologist, army surgeon, writer, painter, who was named as the “Mountain Guru” at the St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore, India.

He worked on high altitude physiology. He was born at 3800 mts in Oruro, Bolivia, and then studied medicine at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in the city of La Paz, at 3513 mt above sea level, all his work was focused on initially high altitude physiology and later evolved to high altitude pathology. He proposed new concepts and understanding of what was known as Chronic mountain sickness. This pathology characterized by an increase of red blood cells, cyanosis, ventilatory and respiratory alterations with pulmonary hypertension and hypertrophy of the right ventricle seen at high altitude, above the normal values for such altitude, was originally affirmed to be due to “loss of adaptation”. He changed this interpretation, as he strongly stood for “The organic systems of human beings and all other species tend to adapt to any environmental change and circumstance within an optimal period of time, and never tend towards regression which would inevitably lead to death”. This concept has indeed changed the way high altitude diseases are interpreted.

On July 9, 1970, Zubieta-Castillo founded the first high altitude clinic in the world located in La Paz, Bolivia High Altitude Pathology Institute.

An excerpt from, “Why is La Paz, Bolivia the World’s “Capital of Hypoxia” with the High Altitude Pulmonary And Pathology Institute (HAAPI-IPPA)?” December 13, 2024:

This is the correspondence carried out between Prof. Dr. Gustavo zubieta-Calleja in La Paz, Bolivia and Dr. Olena Klyuchko in Kiev, Ukraine.

Dec 5, 2024

Dear Dr. Olena Klyuchko:

It is interesting to note that my father Prof. Dr. Gustavo Zubieta-Castillo (Sr. ) had named La Paz, the Capital of Hypoxia since many years ago. The reason was that it was the highest city and most populated city in the world where many hypoxia studies were carried out . And studies keep going on! High Altitude Adaptation Research Expedition 2024.

. . .

Dec 11, 2024

Dr. Olena Klyuchko responded:

Gustavo, my greetings to you! 

The story of why Kyiv was called the “Capital of Hypoxia” was told to me by doctors and scientists Pavel Beloshitsky (PB) and Oleg Bogomolets (OB), the son of the famous Alexander Bogomolets (AB). I can tell you about them in the future. They were fantastically interesting people, but before it was forbidden to talk about them – now it is possible.

It all started in the 1920s. Alexander Bogomolets was already a famous doctor and scientist. He had already created the Institute of Physiology in Kyiv and was its Director; currently, it is called the Alexander Bogomolets Institute of Physiology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IF NASU). There, we all met and worked for many years. In the summer of the 1920s, he went on vacation to the Caucasus Mountains, to the mineral water resort. It was a very difficult time after the First World War. Everything was destroyed, and people were starving as there was no food. He was informed about a very good doctor named Nikolai Syrotinin, who lived in the mountains. He lived in poor villages and treated people in the mountains who had no money at all. People fed him for this. Syrotinin also recorded observations of people, diseases, and nature in those places. Professor Bogomolets wanted to meet him, and they became good friends. He invited him to work in Kyiv, at his Institute of Physiology (IF) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). Syrotinin created a large group of people studying various aspects of hypoxia in Kyiv. For example, Bogomolets and Syrotinin invited many talented young people to work for them, and it was Syrotinin who got the little schoolboy Pavel Beloshitsky interested in his ideas. The Elbrus Medical and Biological Station (EMBS) in the Caucasus was a “laboratory” in which they actually conducted research in the mountains. However, it was created as a scientific “branch” of IF NASU. However, hypoxia is a multifaceted phenomenon, and much work could be carried out in Kyiv. For example, Alexander Bogomolets, himself, was most interested in how to help the wounded who were losing a lot of blood. We had 2 World Wars, (and now there is a war again) – there were millions of wounded, and they were taken to Kyiv to be treated. Many died from blood loss, and people wanted to help them. Our city is an important medical and scientific center that has been known for about 2000 years – at first, people were treated with herbs, honey, etc. 1500 years ago, Kyiv became the center of Christianity, and people were treated in churches and monasteries; in each century, treatment methods were improved. In the 20th century, Bogomolets and Syrotinin began to develop their new methods – and we continue now. Bogomolets and Syrotinin also invited people from other Kyiv institutes to participate in their projects – gerontology, psychiatry, hematology, oncology, pediatrics, etc. These were very large-scale projects, when many people worked on hypoxia research, solving related problems. So now it is very clear why Nikolai Syrotinin called Kyiv the “Capital of Hypoxia”. For example, Nikolai Syrotinin was very interested in the issues of treating schizophrenic patients in hypoxic conditions in the mountains; and Nikolai Syrotinin with Pavel Beloshitsky achieved success in this (see publications in the profiles of Pavel Beloshitsky and mine). These talented people were always interested in organizing healthy lifestyles and treatment in hypoxic mountain conditions – so they could live healthy and talented lives. In Ukraine, N. Syrotinin became a famous doctor and scientist, received his PhD, and then became an academician of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He became the Head of the Hypoxia Department in the Institute of Physiology and, simultaneously, the first Director of the EMBS in the Caucasus (he then handed it all to his student Pavel Beloshitsky). He became the founder and organizer of “Nikolai Syrotinin’s School of Science”.* However, all this became possible only because Alexander Bogomolets once invited him to Kyiv.

An excerpt from, “High Altitude Medicine : A Brief History” by George W. Rodway, The Himalayan Journal, 2016:

Early theories of what prompted mountain sickness was, perhaps not surprisingly, rife with wild speculation. From earthly phenomena, such as the wind or cold, to spiritual or otherworldly things such as gods and dragons, there were as many etiological hypotheses as there were sufferers.4 Astute observations and graphic descriptions were useful to early physical and life scientists wrestling with this confusing issue of altitude and its influence on the human body. It took many years, however, for the pieces to start to fall into place, such that it was possible to have some fledgling, evidence-based understanding of what made some humans (but not others) very sick when they travelled to the high mountains.

. . .

With World War II on the horizon in the late 1930s, increasing sophistication of combat aircraft posed problems for design engineers and pilots who were restricted by human physiological limitations encountered at high altitude. Simple gas laws hampered development of state-of-the-art aviation war machinery : supplementary oxygen delivered by mask had limited effectiveness in the very low barometric pressures above 10000 m (12000 m being the approximate upper limit of survival when breathing supplemental oxygen without a pressurized suit or cabin). Germany’s Air Ministry scientists, such as Hans Hartmann, sought to increase the physiologic ‘ceiling’ of pilots, and argued that high altitude acclimatization might effectively raise an aviator’s ceiling when he was utilizing supplementary oxygen from a mask. The German government, as a result, readily agreed to support Himalayan mountaineering expeditions in the late 1930s in order to provide a platform for physiological work that might potentially yield important insights into altitude tolerance and adaptation.

It was well known by the late 1930s that humans developed an increase in circulating red cells at altitude. Talbott had demonstrated the marked increase in reticulocytes during acclimatization of lowlanders to high altitude on the 1935 International High Altitude Expedition to Chile that took place under the scientific leadership of Professor D. Bruce Dill from the Harvard Fatigue Lab. The main purpose of this expedition was, in fact, to study the changes in blood chemistry that occur at high altitude.