The Biology of Carbon Dioxide

00:00 So it’s such a treat for me to introduce you all to one of the great mentors of my life, Dr. Ringby. I thought maybe a place to start would be with the question that I asked you, because we do want to get into St. George and Otto Farberk and Respirations and so on, but would be to start with the question I asked you before about how many languages do you speak? Well, people at the talk in Mexico, a professor introduced me and said that he was fluent in Spanish, and that surprised me because I never thought of myself as being fluent in English even. But at the high altitude, that was eighty-five hundred feet altitude, I think I was more fluent. And you were speaking about your trip and how you got involved with the Russians and CO2. Yeah, in 1968 I took a trip to Russia to meet some of the professors I’d been reading the work of, 01:10 and it happened that most of them were on vacation all summer. So mostly I depended on publications. Before 1950, there was quite a bit of Russian literature available in the United States. My parents and grandparents had some old books that I got my introduction to science from these books all the way from 1860 up to fairly recent stuff in homeopathy and natural medicine. And one of the people I ran across who was pretty famous back in 1945 or so was J.C. Bowes, who was a Hindu physicist who studied in England. And he invented the radio in the 1890s and was thinking about the connections 02:15 between the device that he used for receiving radio signals. He demonstrated in the 1890s setting off a bell across the auditorium. And his receiver was powdered metal with an electrical connection. And the radio waves from, for example, just a spark, but he had microwave, millimeter wave transmitters and such. So they were really very sophisticated even for present technology. And he would expose these metal powders to radio waves, and they would cohere and conduct electricity. And he naturally was thinking about the sensitivity of organisms in comparison with this powdered physical state of matter. 03:19 And to resensitize it, he would thump it, had a little thing called a decoherer. So as soon as it rang the bell, it would thump itself and become sensitive again. And that kind of thinking, he started arguing that he tried to distinguish the properties of sensitivity that plants and animals have from the various properties of crystals, rocks, everything he could think of. And he showed that all of the defining features of life could be found in lumps of metal or rock. And he devised a thing that would give a million times amplification, not resolution, but it would show motion amplified by a million times. And he could show that very easily you stimulate a nerve and it twitches. 04:24 Most people don’t think of nerves as being analogous to muscles, but they do contract when they’re stimulated. And if you stimulate them too much, it can even break the nerve fiber by contracting it until it can’t maintain fine structure. But he showed that rocks, pieces of metal, would twitch when they were stimulated by any means that mechanical and electrical properties went back and forth both directions. And the English physiologists and physicists of the time didn’t like that at all. They were already getting committed to a mechanistic view of biology and neurology. And so he went back to India and set up his own research institute there, which is still operating with his name. And I think it was Marconi who went to try to get him to develop the radio technology. 05:34 Many years later, but he was really about 120 years ahead of his time in everything. I know you wanted to speak in particular, start off in terms of respiration, about St. Georgie and auto-paragraph work, so maybe you might start with that. When I ran into academic biology, I realized that there just wasn’t anything happening that seemed intelligent in American biology all through the 50s. So that was when I was going to college and I decided that I would just read in the library all the science I wanted and major in literature and philosophy and linguistics and such. And when I was 18, I ran into William Blake in a literature course and realized that from the way he used language, 06:38 he knew stuff about the physiology of the brain, among other things, that started me thinking in that direction and so I read Swedenborg’s work on brain physiology. Again, in the 18th century, he knew stuff that was rediscovered only in the 20th century, but Blake was writing about this stuff 200 years too soon. And that helped guide me through the science literature. And finally, in 1968, I had decided I could tolerate getting a degree in biology, that I had learned you have to be quiet, not say what you think. One of my professors explained nerve cells and pH meters as both working on the basis of a membrane. 07:42 All through the 20th century, they talked about the pH glass membrane, but I mentioned that you could get exactly the same pH measurements if you filled your glass membrane with mercury instead of acid. And I said, does that mean that the mercury diffuses freely through the glass membrane? Or that when you put two chambers separated by an airspace, I measure the pH on the outside of one and the solution inside another. Does that mean that the protons are diffusing through that airspace? And I learned you shouldn’t do that. Well, I don’t want to digress too much, but that sort of leads into a little bit about your discovery of Gilbert Ling. And this also made a huge difference in my life. 08:43 My first term in nerve biology that were leading into a major body of work by Gilbert Ling, who came from China in the 40s, worked with Ralph Gerard at the University of Chicago. He linked with one that invented the class microelectrode. And he was the one who knew how it worked. And in studying cells, he couldn’t accept the idea that it was penetrating a membrane to have its effect. And he said it was simply a phase contact like the pH meter. It was a surface effect of the glass, the same as the lightning chart, exactly the same surface electrical effect on a cell or pH meter or anything that has an electrical surface. 09:50 And I saw that Gilbert Ling had answered all of the problems that my professor was talking about, and he had done it in a meaningful, coherent way that harmonized with J.C. Bowes and others. And I saw that Albert van Georgie was doing the same kind of coherent biology, had nothing to do with membranes. Sensitivity was an intrinsic property of the complex of proteins and other molecules and how they interacted electronically. And I wrote Gilbert Ling and said, am I understanding this right? It looks like you’ve already solved these problems that people are confused about. He said, well, the problem is you just don’t understand what science is. That it’s about money and prestige. No. 10:51 Well, it’s never been about that for you, which is unfortunate because Dr. Pete has always been so generous as he is today of being here. So maybe you want to go further a little bit more with the St. Georgie and Otto Farber. Yeah, I wrote to these people because they were doing the stuff that I thought my professor should be doing. And St. Georgie, I saw, was related to another respiration physiologist, W.F. Koch. You’ve heard of the Koch reagent, probably the cancer treatment he devised in 1915, 1920, that was based on the quinone system. And the FDA chased him out of the country because they said that’s a toxic molecule and there couldn’t be any such thing as a free electron system in a cell. 11:54 And after he was working in Brazil for years, the uberquinone coenzyme Q was discovered doing exactly what Koch said quinones do in cells. And I saw that St. Georgie had based his whole career on W.F. Koch’s work. And Koch had even been a little bit ahead of Otto Farber in understanding how respiration works in cells. Koch didn’t concentrate just on mitochondria. He saw the whole system as an electronic unit that could be tuned up by such things as the quinones. St. Georgie applying W.F. Koch’s respiration oriented work showed that if you put an electron donor of a certain variety into a cell, nothing happened. 12:55 Or an electron acceptor, like a quinone, nothing would necessarily happen. But if you put a paired donor and acceptor into the cell, the cell would contract, showing that contraction was an electronic, a matter of donating and accepting electrons within a certain voltage range. And Koch had said that this is what controls respiration and all cell functions. Gilbert Ling’s backup to that view of how cells work, Gilbert Ling called them the cardinal adsorbents, not just the quinone system, but anything that affects the system in a way that adsorbs the protein 13:58 and modifies the way the protein adsorbs other things. And carbon dioxide, calcium, and progesterone were things that Gilbert Ling had worked on. And that started me thinking about what is carbon dioxide, and that led into a whole rethinking of, I guess everyone knows the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation and how bicarbonate is the thing that you focus on to regulate pH and so on. That was all the way from about 1910 up to the present. I think probably AC Guyton’s textbook of medical physiology, I think probably is still teaching that. 15:04 But essentially it was shown to be wrong the whole system of the whole context around the focus on bicarbonate as the regulator of pH and so on. The Brunsted-Lowry acid is the one based on the definition of an acid as a proton donor, the base as a proton acceptor, but there is a whole class of acids and bases which contain no protons. So the theory can’t be right. And Jean Lewis at the same time that Brunsted-Lowry got their idea accepted, partly because they fit it into a simple reductionist view of chemistry, 16:10 Lewis, the Lewis acid looks at electrons and an electron acceptor is a Lewis acid and electron donor is a Lewis base. And looking at St. George’s and WF Koch from the context of how acids and bases really work, you see that carbon dioxide is, well, if you visualize the Koch reagent, his most powerful reagent, instead of being a quinone with the double bonded oxygens joined onto a carbon ring, his reagent that he made by spraying alcohol or methane onto a hot plant and electrode and collecting it in water, which brings to purple dye at a very tiny concentration 17:13 showing free electrons in the system. His reagent was just a carbon chain with all of the carbons having a double bonded oxygen. And so if you look at carbon dioxide as the shortest Koch reagent, it not only fits into WF Koch’s view of how respiration works, but it explains that the Lewis acid is the carbon atom with its electrons so pulled away under the oxygens that the carbon atom is a strong electron acceptor. And so it’s instantaneously acidic. It doesn’t have to form a carbonic acid to be acidic. If CO2 goes in the solution, it doesn’t go through that sequence. 18:16 Well, it does eventually, but that doesn’t have to do with its acidity. If it happens to hit a protein, it works like WF Koch’s reagent or ubiquinone. If it absorbs to the protein, cardinal adsorbent means that it’s the one with power over other things, but still it’s the whole system. So progesterone, carbon dioxide, potassium, magnesium, other things stabilize the system in a cooperative way. And if you disrupt one of them, it can trigger a release of all of them. And the ones that can put it back together are the powerful cardinal adsorbents. And cardinal dioxide and progesterone are in this group of the powerful adsorbents that can restore proteins after they’ve been excited and disrupted. 19:23 If you look at the Lewis acid effect pulling electrons out of the protein system, it’s like what St. George did with his electron acceptor and donor. You pull electrons out, and if there is a source, the electrons will travel through the protein and change its confirmation. And in the process of causing the protein to retract its electrons, every ionized group is tending to associate with other oppositely ionized things, which in the physiological solution, it’s likely to be sodium or potassium. Those are the main things that are attracted. It’s the same thing that works in a water softener, an ion exchange resin. 20:27 You put the charged resin in your stream of water, and it binds to magnesium or calcium. And if you flush it with a big dose of sodium, you can wash off the more strongly adsorbed calcium or magnesium or iron or whatever. And in the cell, people have taken pieces of hair which are obviously dead and have no membrane pumps. They’ve washed the hair free of all counter ions, and what’s left is a protein with some ionized groups, so it’s a weak acid. They dip it in the serum or any mixed solution, and instead of picking up the sodium that’s abundant in the serum, the hair will reestablish the high potassium low sodium arrangement. 21:36 It’s a bulk ion exchange effect, and when you excite the cell, temporarily it loses that property and will pick up sodium momentarily and lose potassium. And they talk about that in terms of membrane pumps restoring the balance, but it’s the protein. Gilbert Blaine, at great redundancy, has explained that over and over for about 50 years, and very few physiologists want to get involved in it because his math seems complicated for most physiologists who are already committed to the kind of math that AC Guyton uses, a simple reductionist sort of thing. Now, in the way in which we kind of look at things from Bottego’s standpoint, we’re looking at the Bohr relationship. 22:38 And so maybe I’m not understanding this clearly, but our notion was that in the Bohr relationship, that CO2 coming in allows for oxygen to dissociate from the hemoglobin, but it was through the Henderson-Hasselbach equation that we understand why the body continues to operate poorly, in a sense, by over-breathing and getting rid of more CO2. So I think you’re saying that that really doesn’t quite work that way. Well, there are places where it doesn’t work. For example, the textbooks say, well, you must have to lose bicarbonate in your urine if you’re going to acidify it. But actually, good experiments show that you don’t, in fact, have to lose bicarbonate to acidify it. And it’s just bad bookkeeping in most cases. They don’t look at the total amount of carbon dioxide in the system. For example, if you heat the bones of an average animal or person at sea level, 23:46 you can drive out maybe 100 liters of CO2 that was bound in the bones. But in experiments where they have kept, for example, for submarine studies, they’ll keep people five weeks or three months or so in a chamber with 1%!C(MISSING)O2 in the atmosphere, roughly 30 times the normal amount. And they see ups and downs of the bicarbonate doing something. But while there are these up and down adaptive reactions happening, they find that there’s very little calcium, they’re eating calcium rich food, but their urine has very little calcium, very little bicarbonate in it when they’re being really well supplied with carbon dioxide. And after they’ve been out of the chamber, they keep pouring out bicarbonate and calcium. 24:53 And if you look at people who live at 0.03 carbon dioxide in the environment, through their whole lifespan, they’re doing what these subjects were doing when they came out of the chamber, they’re losing calcium in their urine constantly and their bones and other tissues are chronically getting smaller over the decades. But just after six weeks in one of these chambers, someone calculated that at that, under those conditions, it looks as though the bones must be binding a thousand liters per person, which would mean that you would gain or lose about eight pounds in or out of the carbon dioxide environment. 25:57 I know that you had mentioned, for example, that’s a great story, so maybe you could tell, I think it relates to this very directly. And I thought, you ought to write a little book which would be called The Naked Mole Rat and the Bats. So maybe you could sort of go with that and give your idea of how come that makes such a difference and maybe the peace about Mexico and the difference between Mexico and New York City. Yeah, I went to study in Mexico when I was 18 and I had a couple of times in high school I had gone maybe 9,000 feet and I found that I was exhilarated the closer to the top I got, the more energy I had. And my whole summer in Mexico City, I had that same sensation that my brain was purer and I had more energy. There were many things besides that that got me personally involved in thinking about respiration. 27:08 One was that when I would swim, my friends who wanted to go down to see how deep they could go would take a rock so they would sink quickly. I would just let out a little my breath and I would sink like a rock and I was always aware that I apparently, even though I seemed to have a normal amount of fat I had to sort of struggle to stay afloat so I figured that I had very dense bones and I read about a family of mutants who had osteopetrosis which if it’s an extreme form it can kill you because the bones close in on the marrow but this family just had a moderate form and they lived in chronic respiratory acidosis because they couldn’t efficiently expel the CO2 that they made and so it made their bones become extremely dense. 28:13 They call it the marble bone disease. I’m very interested in these experiments of this research that you did with living in environments or being exposed to extra rich carbon dioxide air. I study a therapy that exists in Europe. It used to exist in North America called the Nahuing Bath. Are you familiar with the Nahuing Bath? I’d write articles on it. I’d love to give this to you later. But in this space they’re being conducted in Europe for people with heart disease and so they’re immersed in carbon dioxide gas either in water or in drug. And it’s the most exhilarating experience. I would be elated for five days. 29:17 If you have a tank of gas in a big plastic bag we sometimes sit around watching TV sitting. So you knew this! That’s what I wanted to tell the story of the naked mole rat and the bats because it’s very poignant in terms of exactly what you’re talking about. Tell me, because I will ask you another question after that. In another 1941 publication in the Journal of Growth, three different authors, two of them were talking about bacteria, anaerobic, anaerobic, another one about protozoa. And they found that none of the single-celled organisms, even the anaerobes, which can live totally without oxygen, none of them could live without carbon dioxide. If they’re making carbon dioxide and you remove it as fast as they make it and don’t let them build it up, they can’t survive. So that gives you a picture of all of us. 30:25 One of us raises the question, what’s the ideal amount of carbon dioxide in the environment? The carboniferous period where life and evolution were so abundant I think it was 20 times as much carbon dioxide as we have now. And the temperature was pretty stable all through those changes of carbon dioxide. The expansion of vegetation, for example, will reflect infrared light back into space. So it’s sort of like Earth has a thermostat that will regulate for huge changes in CO2. 30 years ago they discovered undersea vents that miles down in the dark the density of organisms from bacteria through worms and crustaceans, even eels. 31:32 The life density is 10,000 to 100,000 times too dense to account for by solar energy. They’re all getting their energy out of this volcanic stuff. There’s one called the champagne vent, which is exuding streams of liquid, pure carbon dioxide. Where these very odd organisms are thriving at a very low oxygen environment. But it says that these primitive organisms love the most carbon dioxide possible. When you look at the lifespan, not only are lost in bone and tissue with aging, but all animals and even plants suffer from a lack of carbon dioxide. 32:40 If you lower it, even plants won’t do well, single-celled animals and so on. Quite a few animals have learned how to optimize CO2 in their environment. Salamanders and frogs, for example, will burrow in the mud. Frogs will leave their nostrils out and breathe as their skin is not losing carbon dioxide anymore when they’re buried in the mud. They gradually blowed up on carbon dioxide and they found frogs in cement castings that broke open. Decades later the frogs hopped out. Also in the 1940s, people experimented with, for example, poisoning to death rats or mice with 50%!c(MISSING)arbon dioxide. 33:47 And keeping them dead for an hour and then reviving them and they had no brain damage. And giving zero oxygen supply to rats, if they gave them extra CO2, they weren’t damaged by the absence of oxygen. So for us, like the primitive organisms, it’s more essential than oxygen. The naked-roam all around? Yeah, I’m getting there. I’m going to hear this story. There’s a whole, there are all over, all the continents, I think, have variations on these. But they’re about the size of a big mouse and mice usually live two and a half years maximum, something like that. 34:51 The naked mole rats that they’ve had in labs, even though they weren’t in their natural habitat, lived 30 years. And they not only live in burrows, but they close off the entrances to their burrow and keep the oxygen way down less than half of atmospheric and the CO2 up around 5%!o(MISSING)r 6%!.(MISSING) And so that’s more than the submarine experimenters got, but it increased their longevity tremendously. Queen bees lived, one calculation was they lived 47 times longer than the worker bees. And the worker bees every day go out into the atmosphere and they build up many times more free radicals, 35:52 lipid peroxides in their tissues than the queens because they’re out breathing fresh air. The queen is breathing 5%!o(MISSING)r 6%!C(MISSING)O2 in the hive. And also the workers eat pollen and get a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids that in the absence of carbon dioxide these things produce the lipid peroxides. And in one experiment people increased the CO2 in the tissues three times normal and saw that the normal amount of lipid peroxides went down to zero. Dr. Lee, I have a question for you. Recently I’ve read a medical paper about near death experience. And they had several patients who went into cardiac arrest when they were dying in a hospital and then they returned to life. 36:58 And the only common denominator that they could find between these people was that they had very elevated levels of carbon dioxide. And I’m wondering if you could respond to that. A few people in the last 10 years are starting to, I guess they’re discovering it themselves and then looking back at the literature and seeing that carbon dioxide protects not only against free radicals, lipid peroxidation. One group, Kogan is the Russians name who has done a lot of work on the antioxidant effect of CO2. But quite a few people are now just the last few years starting to talk about permissive hypercapnia where instead of ventilating someone to death, that’s two or three of the most popular ways hospitals kill people. 38:00 It’s giving them pure oxygen. When people, for example, aren’t getting enough oxygen to the brain, they’ll give them pure oxygen and then hyperventilate them. The idea is to shrink their brain by hyperventilating because it shuts down the blood circulation of the brain. But if they’re dying of lack of oxygen to the brain, it’s not what you want to do. And one of the first experiences I had with carbon dioxide therapy was a person who several times had rushed to the emergency room with stroke symptoms, paralysis and I think it was called a transient ischemic attack. I told him about the Russian research with carbon dioxide and suggested he drink a Coke when he had those attacks and that worked for him. And I mentioned that in a nutrition class and I had said soda water meaning like carbonated water. 39:10 But the next week one of the students said that she had interpreted as baking soda in water, which basically the same idea, but she said she gave a spoonful of baking soda to her mother who had been half paralyzed for six months and 15 minutes after drinking just a glass of baking soda water, the paralysis lifted and stayed away. And they’re doing that sort of thing now just by not ventilating people to death as is the typical hospital practice. Wasn’t there a time when Fireman had the CO2 added? Yeah, Yendil Henderson, who he’s one of the quoted Friedrich Mischer, the guy who discovered nucleic acids in or was one of the early researchers in 1865. 40:12 Mischer, besides working on nucleic acids, was a person who realized that you could cure shock with carbon dioxide. And Yendil Henderson had a septic shock, for example, anything that causes the loss of circulation. Instead of giving them oxygen, he would give them carbon dioxide and Yendil Henderson knew about this work 50 years before his time. And in the 20s and 30s, Henderson devised systems with 5%!,(MISSING) sometimes 7%!o(MISSING)r even 10%!c(MISSING)arbon dioxide. The 5%!m(MISSING)ixture in oxygen is now called carbogen, but he had fire departments all over the United States and a lot of hospitals using 5%!c(MISSING)arbon dioxide 41:18 for starting babies breathing and treating shock cases. And right after the Second World War, when several factors came in, that went out. Medicine became purely reductionist and mechanical and mistaken after about 1945. Was he used post-operatively too? Didn’t the Germans do some cases? Yeah, now a few people are using it. A friend’s grandfather, 94 years old, had become sick. He wanted to travel around the continent. He went to Munich, I think, and spent four days getting what they called carbon dioxide therapy in the hospital and went back to resumed his trip around the world. Now that reminds me also, I’m sorry, we have a lot of people want to ask some questions. 42:20 Yes, Amy? Can you talk a little bit about carbon dioxide and hyperbaric oxygen therapy? Yeah, I have a friend who had been using hyperbaric oxygen therapy and I was talking about carbon dioxide and the essentiality of that. So he added some, he didn’t have good regulators, but he had a cancer patient who was the first one he tried to deal with. He had been unable to talk for several weeks because the cancer was very far advanced. And he added a few percent of carbon dioxide to the hyperbaric chamber and he said the window steamed up so he couldn’t see what was happening. And I lost contact with the guy and he was afraid he wasn’t communicating so he had anesthetized him. 43:23 And when he opened the chamber, the sheet around him was saturated with water. It is not only a diuretic but it caused him to vaporize huge amounts of water and he could talk as soon as he came out of the chamber. It had taken the edema out of his tumors. Do you have any idea about the mechanism of that, of how carbon dioxide under pressure would work? The same as just increasing the concentration I think. It just makes it into your tissues faster. But it’s, whatever the conditions, it’s still going to equilibrate into your bones and other tissues. And all of your tissues go through that adapting process. You’ll change the proteins, loading them up with carbon dioxide and that makes them have a higher affinity for potassium and progesterone and so on. 44:29 Then you’ll induce new protein synthesis to suit the situation. And so it’s a fairly prolonged thing to adapt and no one really knows how long the ideal adaptation is. But I’ve seen people just by breathing in a paper bag a few times a day bring their blood pressure down 30 points and keep it there just in two or three days. Yeah, there’s a group in the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. Glenn Dohmann masks these kids who are brain damaged and it creates a tremendous change in the glial cell activity and they’re really recovering much more rapidly. He’s just masking because he masks himself too so he keeps his memory. There was another animal, I didn’t mention the bat. Bats like to live in caves and have a fairly high carbon dioxide environment and they physiologically have a very intense metabolic rate. 45:32 So they’re producing it even when they’re hanging in their cave, they’re still adjusted to this high tissue and serum level of carbon dioxide. And people have banded them over the years and someone found a banded dead bat that had been, they didn’t know how old it was when they put the band on, but it was banded 42 years previously. And as a physiologist you basically will wrap a mouse that lives about two to three years at once. Bats don’t have arthritis. Bats don’t have arthritis. I didn’t know that, but once I was carrying a big tank of carbon dioxide and I was aware that the valve apparatus, if it happened to break, it would be like I was holding a rocket. So I tripped on steps and as I fell, I knew I didn’t want to drop that thing and then knock off the valve. 46:42 So I went down with it and landed on top of my hands with my body and the tank. My hand immediately started swelling and turning blue and I immediately got a plastic bag and put my hand in a bag of pure CO2. And in 15 or 20 minutes it looked like a fresh hand except for some scrap of pieces of skin. And I told that experience to some friends who had arthritis of the knees. And they put their legs in a bag of pure CO2 and they relieved the arthritis just in an hour or two. I have a question as regards the administration of CO2 and infants who you mentioned earlier. I’m sure they were breathing in some shape or form. 47:44 And my question is, if you administer a higher level of CO2, then the organism is able to tolerate. Will it not induce breathlessness and re-breathe out the CO2 again? It stimulates its own production. When I was talking about the effects of polyunsaturated fats and thyroid and estrogen on respiration, I would concentrate on the electron transport chain and the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, which is under the influence of thyroid or altitude. You increase the amount of, not only of total mitochondrines, but of the, especially the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, which is what uses oxygen and governs your rate of oxygen consumption, how much of that enzyme you have and how active it is. 48:49 And when you saturate a cell with a very large amount of CO2, you activate, chronically you increase the number of mitochondria, but fairly quickly you increase the amount of the cytochrome oxidase enzyme and increase its activity almost instantly. The first thing you see is that the whole oxidative balance of the cell is increased towards the oxidized state, pulling electrons out of the system. Diabetics in cytoplasm of a normal person, you’ll have a ratio of 5 or 600 NADs to each NADH. When you’re, if you plug up the cytochrome oxidase as in Barbara’s idea of what happens in cancer, 49:54 and start running on increased leptic acid formation, the NAD is being consumed in making leptic acid. And although this pours leptic acid out into the system as a hormone of stress and toxic inflammatory effects, it leaves the NADH in excess, so that where normal you have a ratio of NAD to NADH of several hundred to one, a diabetic would support a person with cancer has a reduced amount of NAD, because the NADH is being increased in forming leptic acid, and the pH inside the cell increases during leptic acid formation. 50:59 If you look at the equation of pouring leptic acid and using up your niacin cofactor, you see why it increases the pH of the cell for the leptic acid to be produced and leaving. And so the several effects of the carbon dioxide shut off glycolysis, and it also shuts off lipolysis. A diabetic is forced to use increased amounts of fat, and free fatty acids poison the mitochondrion so they can’t respire as in the barbaric effect of what constitutes cancer, the defective mitochondrion, especially the cytochromoxidase. So you’re turning off the crucial thing in barbaric cancer explanation, 52:06 turning off the leptic acid excess production. At the same time, you’re increasing the cytochromoxidase and shifting the balance of the cell, so that the diabetics or cancer patients will have much lower ratios of available NAD. And just by looking at the ratio of NAD to NADH, you can see that diabetes and degenerative diseases generally have an over-reduced cytoplasm, and the stressed system, besides being reduced, that means it’s got more electrons than it should have. This makes the whole system have in the sense of alkaline things as being electron donors. It shifts the whole system’s pH towards the alkaline direction, 53:09 and that is involved in loading up the system with water. If you put acid in a gelatin solution, it excretes water. If you alkalinize it, you pop it up. So it’s just a physical effect that water is attracted towards the electron-rich polymer. So carbon dioxide is changing the water economy of the cell. It’s a physical arrangement which affects the enzyme glycolysis and respiration, and you’re actually increasing all of the aspects of the oxidized condition of the cell, pulling the electrons out of the system, in effect, at the same time that you’re activating the oxygen as the ultimate electron, etc. 54:13 So if you want to damage the respiratory apparatus, you can cut off the oxygen without supplying the CO2 or with, if you make too much light against it, it’s available. The same thing happens, but lactic acid displaces CO2, so you hyperventilate when you make too much lactic acid, and if you hyperventilate, you make too much lactic acid. So, like just driving on the freeway, you probably are shifting your balance by hyperventilating in the mechanical sense, and that pulls the cells in the direction of making lactic acid, which keeps the stress system going. Now, at higher altitudes, like, for example, in Mexico City versus like New York City, 55:14 you have much more pollution in Mexico City, and yet the rate of asthma there is lower than it is in New York City. I think Mexico City is much more polluted than most of the US cities, and the kids who grow up there very seldom have asthma, but if they go down to Acapulco where the air is very clean, coming in fresh off the ocean, a lot of them get asthma attacks going down where there’s more oxygen, and oxygen access seems to be the big thing. So, is the oxygen access not the difference in terms of the tension at the higher levels? Well, yeah, the oxygen is pushing the CO2 out of your system. Other questions? Yes, thank you. Many years ago, people studying hot spring baths, 56:24 you know, people have known about carbonated baths of the natural sort for thousands of years. Already in Europe, in the 1700s, there were several big companies. Schweppes and a Hungarian company, a Swedish company, German and English companies, were already bottling carbonated water from their springs, and that was Joseph Priestley, the guy famous for oxygen. He was one of the first people to devise a way to artificially carbonate water, making a tonic, a drug product, essentially. But the Japanese, I think, were the pioneers in doing the physiology of how bathing in carbonated water works, 57:26 and the reasoning is you can only get a certain amount of carbon dioxide into warm water, and the body already has more carbon dioxide than that, so what the mechanistic idea is, if you have a membrane and things always go down in gradients, you must be losing carbon dioxide into the water even when it’s carbonated. But the Japanese found that it actually goes into your body up the so-called chemical gradient, as if it’s being pumped in, but it’s because, like the bones can store 1,000 liters per person, all of your tissues, other people have experimented with storing meat in carbon dioxide, and just a chunk of muscle, dead muscle, can store a huge amount of carbon dioxide, 58:30 and it’s the same thing that happens in the bore effect. On hemoglobin, the carbon dioxide makes the hemoglobin as a unit a little more acidic by retracting the electrons, and that’s just enough to make the oxygen a little less sticky to the protein. But the whole body has this affinity for carbon dioxide that binds strongly enough to pull it right out of the water, and it can be in the form of bicarbonate or carbon dioxide gas. It still flows up the gradient into your body, and the main thing seems to be the carbamino formation on lysine and other amino groups in proteins that works in the bore effect, 59:37 but we’re made of proteins that are rich in lysine and other amino groups, and even the nucleic acids contain some amino groups that physically just are going to have to associate with carbon dioxide. When you look at protein hormones, for example, pituitary hormones, if you really pay attention to a given hormone, like you call it growth hormone or prolactin or whatever, it’s really a family of substances, and their composition will change, and their function will change according to how much carbon dioxide that they’re exposed to, because all of them have some lysine or other amino-containing proteins or amino acids, 01:00:46 and when the carbamino group is formed, instead of being an amino in contact with water, it’s this more acidic carbonyl, carbon dioxide bound under the amine, and the so-called receptors in the cells that respond to each of these hormones. The hormones change according to the CO2 they’ve been exposed to, and the receptors also get carbamino groups formed on them, and just a few people have been studying that, but it means that insulin, for example, there’s a difference between carbamino, insulin, and plain insulin. They’re the same hormone, and the so-called insulin receptors are carbonated or not, 01:01:54 and they behave very differently. So just looking at the concentration of a simple hormone, you can’t interpret it until you know how carbonated the cell is, and then the carbonated hormone is going to be different in relation to the carbonated cell. How do we get ourselves into a plastic bag with carbon dioxide? You can buy just a big leaf bag and just fill it up. Fill it up with the gas? Yeah, you just have a welding shop, you can squeeze all the air out and then fill the bag up, and it’s heavy, you can feel the weight of it, and if you hold it up once it’s full and climb over the edge so you don’t spill it, then close it up. As soon as it touches your skin, you can feel it’s hot because it’s causing vasodilation. 01:02:57 This is the gas itself that’s in the bag? Yeah. It’s heavy, so it stays down. Anna, you wanted to, you had a question? Yes, I did. So when you first were talking, Dr. Pete, gosh, I’m trying so hard to stay with you here, and you mentioned that Henderson has a lot, probably is not a valid theory anymore, and I have used that in my talks about the botego and CO2 and acid. Is it true what you’re saying that it’s, am I getting it right? What you’re saying is that it’s more related to these proteins than carbaminos? Would you just clarify that for me, please? Yes, the carbon dioxide directly acidifies not only the hemoglobin in the red cell, but it acidifies your whole system and makes the cell have a greater affinity for oxygen. 01:04:00 So it’s causing the cells to pull oxygen in as well as driving it off the red cell. And where the Henderson-Hasselbauch goes wrong in the worst way is how kidneys behave. If you look up Peter A. Stewart’s, the strong iron difference is what is the first substitute for the Henderson equation. Thirty years ago, he said, what is the role of bicarbonate in acid-base regulation? Simply none. But he was only talking about the blood, really, and not about the cells, so he’s only sort of halfway there. 01:05:06 You have to think about how the cell is being made more eager for oxidative processes when it’s well carbonated. And you can approach the carbonation, for example, with pregnant one or progesterone. You’re contributing to pushing the balance in that way so that that hormone will make the cell have a greater affinity for carbon dioxide. And estrogen does the opposite. Instantly, estrogen, within two or three minutes, you can see the cell begin to take up water and begin to make lactic acid, poisoning the respiratory system. So there’s a balance between estrogen and progesterone and how that pulls water out and puts CO2 in. 01:06:12 Here, one of the most popular books that was built on a lot of Dr. Pete’s work, but sort of really not only popularized it, but I think kind of, you know, brought it down a bit. It’s by John Lee, you know, the book called What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause. But it was much more well-explicated by Dr. Pete’s book itself, which is from Menopause. Yeah, which is also from PMS to menopause, female hormones in context. I just, I’m sorry, I want to make sure we cover two other things and if we have some time we’ll be glad to. But because most people are not aware of the relationship between thyroid hormone and CO2. So would you just speak a little bit about that? Besides the thing I mentioned about the rabbit bones being overdeveloped in the presence of either carbon dioxide or thyroid, 01:07:19 there have been many experiments using just T3, the active thyroid hormone, in mouse skull bones, which you can grow in a culture dish. And they showed that T3 very quickly stimulates respiration and the deposit of calcium carbonate as the newborn is calcium carbonate rather than calcium phosphate. And the, as I said, the cytochrome oxidase is what thyroid acts on primarily. So it’s, I think it’s main thing is to increase the production of CO2 and the affinity for oxygen. 01:08:23 And that ends up suppressing lactic acid formation and doing the opposite of what estrogen and polyunsaturated fats do to your respiratory system. One other whole system that I didn’t mention that causes biochemical hyperventilation. In other words, the production of lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide is the endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide from bacterial activity in the intestine. Under stress, the circulation to the intestine is reduced and it becomes more permeable, more endotoxin gets into the bloodstream. And it, once it gets past the liver, it releases the inflammatory cytokines, nitric oxide and tumor necrosis factor and such that work with estrogen as an anti respiratory adaptation. 01:09:36 And anything that slows your liver function, such as low thyroid, will let more endotoxin get in your bloodstream and let more estrogen remain there. And both of these, in turn, lower your CO2 production and thyroid function. And so it can be a vicious circle that starts just with stress or eating something wrong. And how do you explain the protective mechanism for, they’ve done studies on rats and they show that estrogen has a great protective mechanism for the brain to maintain a healthy, healthy brain of rats. Estrogen? Uh-huh. Well, the- How’s it received estrogen, how much healthier it remains than what’s it done? In the 50s and 60s, there were studies in which estrogen or insulin would be given to one group and while they measured brain metabolism and growth, 01:10:46 they saw that either estrogen or insulin would stop brain growth completely, where by lowering blood sugar was what they were studying at the time, but estrogen lowers oxygen availability and insulin lowers glucose availability and so those are essential for brain growth. But it makes the rats smarter? No. Does the old rats smarter than the estrogen? Well, no, what it does, the omethylation of brain transmitter substances is, this process is blocked by estrogen so that you accumulate, it acts like an adrenaline or brain transmitter. A accumulator, the estrogen has a toxic effect on the detox enzyme system that should lower your brain transmitters and cocaine and estrogen have almost identical effects on this enzyme system acting like an antidepressant or the cocaine effect, which is an excitement. 01:12:05 So cocaine is really a safer solution to increasing brain activity than estrogen because estrogen has these liver and thyroid suppressive effects and increases vascular permeability and tendency to blood clot and so on. So it’s a very risky way to increase your brain function. Somebody just ran out and they’re going to have a bunch of cocaine available for us. The final thing I wanted to, you know, just have one mention because this is someone again that hardly any of you, certainly not myself, will have heard of and that’s just a moment about May 1 whole. Oh, she has a website, ISIS, but if you look up her name, M-A-E-W-A-N-H-O, she, for example, has put worms under a geological polarizing microscope and demonstrated that you can see coherent polarization streams 01:13:19 through the worm. Her book is, I think, called The Worm and The Rainbow. And I got interested in her work when I was in Mexico in Michoacan. They used to catch their fish and lay them out in the market on a newspaper or magazine or something. You could read the fine print through a fish the size of a trout, just like a lens. When you cook them and ate them, they had bones and blood vessels and organs and so on, but in the living state you could see right through it like glass. The only way to explain that is that photons are behaving in a way that is very hard to explain, but May 1 whole is working. She sees the body as a liquid crystal. It is a liquid crystal-y fluid system. 01:14:20 It’s a crystal. It’s an ever-changing crystal. I wrote a book called Psychical Physics. I think about 1940, but in the 30s, the idea of life as a liquid crystal was already catching on. And that was just one of the things that in the late 40s got knocked out by a standard reductionist medicine. In the work of Gerald Pollack, who really believes that the water of the body, as opposed to Bruce Lipton, is thinking membranes, Pollack is talking about the liquid crystal as the controlling factor in the movement of metabolic metabolites to the system. I think that’s going in the right direction. Gilbert Ling has the fine details on how it works. GilbertLing.org is his website. Dr. Pete, is there any final comments that you would like to… We could go on for hours and hours and years, actually, but is there anything that you felt like you would like to say to this group in terms of your life experience 01:15:30 and sharing your own sense of wisdom about what you might say to us? Well, for people in alternative holistic health interests, carbon dioxide is really a good thing to focus on, because if you think of context as being what’s missing from a reductionist medicine, every life process at carbon dioxide is a context that you have to take into account. And if you look at any tissue or organ or system in any kind of organism, the way carbon dioxide behaves in that organ or system is going to be a model for the way carbon dioxide works in other systems. Your heart and brain, same thing if you are hyperventilating, your heart blood vessels close off, metabolism goes bad, 01:16:37 you get heart pains, your heart attack, clotting, and so on. Same thing, clotting or transient ischemia spasms in brain. Just simple carbon dioxide will cure or prevent the most drastic biological events. And thinking of it as the context for interpreting physiology across organ systems, you have a good fence against the basically silly arguments that the standard medical people make against thinking physiologically, because their physiology is always applicable only up to a certain limit and a very narrow range. So I think we’re about, yeah, we’re going to have to finish. 01:17:39 So thank you very much, Dr. Pete, it’s just an absolute pleasure.