Blood test on the highest peak

A team of researchers and climbers, curious about how the body responds to low-oxygen conditions, have reached the summit of Mount Everest to take blood sample.

The group didn’t quite manage its goal of taking blood samples on the peak. “We decided that taking an arterial blood sample on the summit itself was too dangerous,” team member Dan Martin wrote in his online diary for Nature on 30 May. Instead, members of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest expedition descended a few hundred metres to a spot where gloves could be removed more safely. (NATURE|Vol 447|7 June 2007)

What ? Gloves ? People are trying to climb it naked and and these scientists thought taking out the gloves was dangerous! May be they should ask the naked climber to donate some blood at the top of the peak.

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This is still, they say, the highest altitude at which blood gas content has ever been examined. The team also collected data on oxygen use from subjects on an exercise bike at 8,000 metres.

They hope the data will help inform the treatment of patients back at sea level who have difficulty shunting oxygen around the body.