Stratosphere Conditioning?

Soviet science may be laggard in prestige and solidity, * but it is certainly not so in imagination. A report from Moscow's Laboratory for Aviation Medicine last week reminded observers of the conditioning courses for newborn and unborn babies described in Brave New World, Novelist Aldous Huxley's sarcastic peek into a lurid future. The possibility raised in Moscow by the experiments of Professor V. V. Streltsov was that of training young Reds to become stratosphere pilots who would thrive in the tenuous upper air. have no need of oxygen from tanks.

Dr. Streltsov had built chambers in which he tested the ability of various animals to live at low pressures, translatable into equivalent heights above sea level. Best performers were guinea pigs and turtles, which got along at the equivalent of 13,000 metres (about 43,000 ft.). Dogs and cats could not hang on long above 12,000 metres, carrier pigeons collapsed at 7,000. Newborn rats and mice, however, which were given no chance to get used to air of normal pressure, survived amazingly in air of .002 of sea level pressure, which corresponds to an altitude of 30 miles. Conclusion was that air pressure requirements are not innate but a matter of conditioning.

* The U. S. S. R. has no living Nobel Prize-winner in the sciences.

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