The Inventor of the Gamow Bag

Igor Gamow, with his favorite nordic sweater-cardigan

I got interested in Gamow bags the first time I saw a video of Dr. Luanne Freer using one at her Everest ER base camp clinic in Nepal.  I was sitting in my NOLS W-EMT class in Lander, WY, circa 2009, watching Freer deal with a broken Gamow bag that had exploded when pressurized (but she had two, so it was all right in the end).

Luanne Freer at Everest Base Camp

[By the way, this same video is apparently shown throughout the NOLS curriculum as an example to all the students on what to do in an emergent situation when things aren't going well:  Keep Calm, and get the other Gamow bag.  Actually it was just more like keep calm in general.]

This is a diagram of how the Gamow bag works:  it's essentially an air-tight pressurized chamber.  Chamber sounds so fancy--I'll just call it a bag.  Not much to it really.

I didn't think much about the inventor behind this life-saving device.  After it, it's a pretty simple idea behind this bag:  partial pressure of O2 decreases as people go up really high, and this makes it harder to saturate hemoglobin with O2 molecules.  Increase the air pressure surrounding your lungs, and the partial pressure of O2 increases, you bind O2 with your heme groups, and oxygen delivery to tissues markedly improves... and any pathology that gets better when you descend will get better in the bag.  That includes severe acute mountain sickness (AMS), high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) and high altitude cerebral edema (HACE).

... but I want to take just a minute to focus in on the inventor of the Gamow bag, Igor Gamow, progeny of famed defected Russian physicist George Gamow (who did a lot for the big bang theory). Let us consider the man who gamely stared the gamut of altitude-related medical problems in the face and simply-yet-brilliantly came up with a solution.

The first thing I thought when I saw a picture of old Igor was that he looked a lot like this man, who I'm sure you recognize:

This is actor Jonathan Goldsmith of Vermont, of Dos Equis beer fame, who 
actually might be a serious contender for most interesting man in the world. 

But that's just initial impressions; there's much, much more to Igor Gamow.

The dude had an interesting family.  His dad was a badass physicist, and his mom was a ballet dancer / Russian physicist nicknamed Rho.  The Gamows initially tried to defect from Russia in 1932 by kayaking 155 miles to Turkey across the gnar-gnar Black Sea, but bad weather foiled this plan.  Eventually they came to the U.S. in 1934, and George Gamow taught at George Washington University, UC Berkley, and finally at the University of Colorado starting in 1956.

[George Gamow wrote the popular series "Mr Thompkins" and "One, two, three... infinity" which my pre-physics-major dad read when he was in high school.  The books were really popular in the '60s with nerdy folks.  Just FYI.]

Gamow Physics Tower at CU, named after George

There's a lot more to Igor than just having a cool fam.  Igor was a really stoked kid, and he was stoked about a lot of different things:  at 17 he dropped out of high school and joined the National Ballet Company.  He became a motorcycle courier for CBS News covering the White House in DC.  He worked as a karate instructor, broke horses for money, and returned to academic pursuits at the age of 22, when he began studying biophysics at CU Boulder.  He loved the outdoors.  He did a post-doc at Caltech, and wound up back at CU, doing research on Phycomyces fungi.  In 1968, he became a CU professor in chemical engineering, microbiology, and "creative technology." 

Sometime in the late '80s / early '90s, he patented the Gamow bag after trials in Nepal.  Interestingly enough, the initial Gamow bag idea was first devised as a kind of reverse-altitude tent.  Of course, most people know about altitude tents such as the type that elite runners use to simulate 'sleeping high, training low' for the benefits of increased red blood cells / oxygen carriage.  The idea is to remove air pressure / oxygen content in order for athletes to sleep in a semi-hypoxic state, thus increasing the levels of erythropoietin acting on bone marrow to stimulate red blood cell synthesis.  Here's a photo of what I'm talking about, and a debate in a 2006 article from the NY Times.  

Gamow's idea was to give athletes living at high altitude a chance to train low.  He devised a pressured chamber in which athletes living on mountain tops could train. He called it 'The Bubble' but this bubble burst quickly:  the chamber was bulky, hard to set up, and people understandably got hot while working out inside.  Plus, most athletes living at altitude generally got down from where ever they found themselves in order to train low.  When I was living in Alamosa, Colorado, going to Adams State, most runners talked about how Alamosa wasn't the greatest location for training because of the altitude (7,500ft). [It might have been the spring wind and weather too.]

Anyway, Igor came up with more portable Gamow bag and marketed it to climbers in the 1980s, mostly in Nepal.  The American Alpine Club invited Gamow to give a talk on his product, and he sold it over the phone himself for a few years.  In 1989, he sold rights to Du Pont for manufacture and marketing.

Now you can buy one here from a company called Hyperbaric Technologies Inc. at a price starting at $2,110.00,  but you're going to need a physician prescription first.

Igor is described as a renaissance man in multiple flattering profiles written in the '90s, most of which can be found through his personal website.  In them, descriptions of his innovative BAT (Biological Altitude Testing) laboratory at CU, his inventions, and his trained white Arabian stallion Pegasus are prominently featured.

Pegasus

But unfortunately the most recent story is rather unflattering.  Old Igor's philandering ways with his female students finally got the best of him in 2002.  Unfortunately CU had turned a blind eye for far too long, and Igor finally paid $280,000 in a 2006 lawsuit to one of his former laboratory employees after the plaintiff testified that he raped her on Valentine's Day in 1995.  

Not to dig up old smut, or sully the story of the adventurous mountain-climbing, horseback-riding inventor but articles such as Fear and Groping in Boulder and The Smutty Professor [can we just take a minute to enjoy these creative titles] lay it all out there.  CU finally let Gamow go in 2004, but it wasn't until 2011 that he released this open letter in response to an article by the Daily Camera of Boulder.  In a very convoluted fashion, using a childhood fable, the letter attempts to justify his series of girlfriends who were "part of [his] family unit."

It beats me why things can be as good as they sound sometimes.  Can't a motorcyle-riding, ballet dancer cowboy-inventor be simply the altitude-loving creator of device that has saved many lives in the highest ranges on earth?  Does it have to involve inappropriate relationships with students and years of cover up at the University of Colorado?  I was reminded of reading Walter Issacson's Steve Jobs while I was researching Gamow.  Jobs was brilliant--his biography makes it clear--but he also justified some despicable business practices and destroyed personal relationships while building his iEmpire from scratch.  Maybe, in the same way, Igor Gamow is just another brilliant inventor that has too much of a dark side to let his story be remembered as purely rosy.