IMPORTANCE FOR HUMANITY The effect of air filtered through cotton was studied by us and by our supporters who continued the experiments in considerable detail. Not withstanding the excellent air exchange in the chamber, the filtered, totally deionized air proved injurious. Sooner or later all experimental animals perished, showing signs of sudden suppression of the oxidative processes, as established by thorough analyses of their tissues and organs. It was proved that filtered air had the same effect on the organism as lack of oxygen, i. e., oxygen starvation. Most remarkably, this "oxygen starva tion" was recorded in conditions of normal oxygen concentration in the inhaled air, and at the usual partial pressure.
Kiyanitsyn's hypothesis of "oxidizing microorganisms" has long since been discarded. It had to be recognized that the experimental animals ultimately died for want of oxygen ions, which were absorbed by the cotton filter and converted into electrically neutral oxygen molecules. This transformation was also proved experimentally.
In a second series of experiments, the filtered, and hence deionized air was artificially ionized; the animals inhaling this air showed no signs of illness and did not die. The close relationship between oxygen and negative
electricity was thus established experimentally for the first time. Our experiments were conducted at the Third Medical Institute (in the depart ment headed by Prof. V. K. Varishchev) between 1937 and 1942. We obtained results of outstanding importance for the entire human population which spends 0.9 of its life indoors.
Every inhabited room should be regarded as a chamber with filtered air lacking the required amount of negative oxygen ions. The significance of this fact imposes on us tremendous responsibility toward the present-day human population and its descendants. It compels us to improve the air within inhabited premises; air purified by ventilation should be artificially ionized with negative charges to concentrations equal to those found in pure country air, on a fine summer day. This measure was designated by the author as air ionization of inhabited premises (1931). All attempts at disproving the biological fact established by us have failed.