A new company is changing how people summit Everest — by making climbers inhale xenon
May 18, 20258:20 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
By
Ayesha Rascoe , Martha Ann Overland
4-Minute Listen Transcript
Rather than taking weeks or months, climbers are trying to summit Everest in just 7 days by inhaling xenon gas. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Dr. Peter Hackett, a pioneer in altitude research.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Four men flew out of London on Friday planning to climb Mount Everest and return home in just seven days. Normally, the human body needs time to acclimatize to the highest altitudes on Earth, but these men will use a shortcut. They'll breathe in a rare gas known as xenon. We asked Dr. Peter Hackett about this. He's a mountain climber, an authority on altitude sickness and a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
PETER HACKETT: Xenon is gas that was discovered in the late 1800s. It was used as an anesthetic gas initially. It has two interesting properties that might make it useful at high altitude. One is that it triggers the body to produce chemicals in response to low oxygen levels, specifically things like EPO. That is the hormone that the kidneys make to tell the bone marrow to make more red cells. So with xenon, you get an increase in this EPO, and maybe you'll get an increase in red cells. That hasn't been well-established.
And secondly, it seems to have protective effects on the brain and the lung and the heart when those organs are exposed to low oxygen levels. This has been shown in animals but not really yet in humans. So the bottom line is we don't really know exactly how. There's a couple of theories, but we need a lot more research to really understand if it's useful and how it would be useful.
RASCOE: Now, Lukas Furtenbach, the owner of the company organizing this climb - he says he's done this himself and is perfectly safe. So do you agree?
HACKETT: Yes, I think it's safe, in terms of it being used for that one thing. Here's the danger. The danger is that word gets out that xenon is helpful, and then next thing you know, people can buy it on TikTok, you know, or somewhere and use it unsupervised, a wrong concentration, wrong amount of time, and they could easily kill themselves. So it has to be done in a safe environment, and then it's perfectly safe.
RASCOE: You have actually climbed Mount Everest. You're one of the few who have reached the summit solo. Do you think it would work? Would you use this?
HACKETT: Well, I think there are other things that are being used by this group that are probably more important. For example, they did hypoxic pre-acclimatization. That means that they slept in tents over their beds at night that contained air that had less oxygen in it, in order to simulate high altitude. And they did that for 6 to 8 weeks, is my understanding. So that pre-acclimatizes the body, gets the body ready to go to high altitude. Secondly, and most importantly, they're using oxygen on the climb. And that's the most helpful thing that any Everest climber can have, is to use oxygen. So it's so hard to tell if there's any additional benefit from xenon.
The guide, Furtenbach, you mentioned, has - he's very experienced. He has an extremely good safety record. He experimented with xenon himself. He thought it was fantastic that it seemed to help, and he climbed Everest with only xenon before he went and no oxygen. And he climbed some other mountains, and he's had 15 other people try xenon, and he says it works. So I don't think you can ignore those observations. I think more than anything, it needs to be studied, which is a difficult thing to do.
RASCOE: What's the purpose of, like, trying to get this down to a week? I mean, especially if you've got to spend 6 to 8 weeks sleeping in a tent with a little oxygen. You got to do the xenon. You got to do all this stuff. Does it make a huge difference to cut it down to a week versus, you know, two to three?
HACKETT: Yeah, what's all the - why this motivation to do everything faster? I don't quite understand it myself, but everybody has their own reasons. I hate to sound like an old man, but I am an old man. And to go back and say, in days past, we would take much longer time and enjoy the walk in so much and get to know the Sherpa people and enjoy the mountains and climb smaller mountains and work our way up eventually to something like Everest.
But, you know, we spent a lot of time in the mountains, and people don't have time these days. And it's created this whole new class of what we call high-altitude tourists, that is people without much climbing experience. But now that it's so safer and faster and there's so many Sherpas and so much oxygen, it's much different than it used to be. And it's a different kind of person, a different perspective. And more power to them for doing it in their own style, but personally, I don't understand the big rush.
RASCOE: That's Dr. Peter Hackett, professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Thank you so much for joining us.
HACKETT: Well, thanks for having me.
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