CU PROFESSOR LEAVES FEW PATHS
UNEXPLORED IN LIFE'S ODYSSEY
The Rocky Mountain News -- June 24, 1990
Story: Kevin McCullen Photos: Jay Koelzer
"My life runs on then
as the gods have spun it." -- Odysseus, from Homer's The Odyssey
BOULDER -- Pegasus snorted and shook
his snow-white mane defiantly as he clomped into Igor Gamow's barn.
"How's the light of my life?
Are you hungry?" Gamow asks his Russian-accented voice echoing off
the walls. "Open the gate.
Momentarily, the Arabian stallion
-- his feistiness befitting his mythological name -- hesitates.
Inventor-scientist-classicist Igor
Gamow stares at the horse and inches his 6-foot-4 frame forward. Much like
his mythological hero, Odysseus, Gamow refuses to retreat from this challenge.
"Open the gate," Gamow
repeats firmly, his braided, gray ponytail bobbing in reply to his horse's
protests.
Abruptly, Pegasus drops his neck
over the corral gate and flings it open. He bolts into the stall and turns
toward his gray-bearded master.
"Close the gate," commands
Gamow, who once rode horses for a living.
With another furious snort, the
horse leans his neck over the gate and firmly pulls backward until it latches.
"I trained and broke him.
Isn't he marvelous?" Gamow says, his infectious laugh eliciting smiles
from bystanders.
Outside, Gamow's great Dane, the
aptly named Titan, guards the porch above a garage that holds a 1950s Harley
Davidson motorcycle and a 1960, fuel-injected white Mercedes 220 SE convertible
that belonged to Gamow's late father and mentor, internationally acclaimed
physicist George Gamow.
This is a noon-hour break for Gamow
before a biochemistry class at the University of Colorado, where the chemical
engineering professor will guide undergraduate students through afternoon
presentations with the admonishment to make their lives "fun."
Barely 10 minutes from his laboratory
and office, Gamow's rustic canyon home offers clues to the character of
the Renaissance man who lives here with Elfriede, his wife of 29 years.
There are photographs from his
days as a dancer with the National Ballet Company, snapshots from the time
he served as a motorcycle courier driver for CBS News at the White House
and more photos of
his days as a karate instructor.
There are reminders everywhere
of his brilliant and adventurous father, who helped develop the Big Bang
theory of the creation of the universe. George Gamow, the story goes, poured
brandy into baby bottles and served them to such heavyweight scientific
colleagues as Niels Bohr at Igor's 100-day birthday party.
Other clues to the wanderings and
work of Igor Gamow are in his laboratory of 22 years at CU.
Inside are replicas of the life-saving
hyperbaric Gamow bag he created, along with designs to adapt the bag's altitude-lowering
principles for use aboard space shuttle flights.
On a wall is a model of an underwater
breathing device he developed called Suba. On a lab table sits a windmill
he's experimenting with to generate high-altitude electricity.
In his office are brochures for
a class he'll help teach this fall in Nepal on altitude physiology, a letter
from Sir Edmund Hillary extolling the Gamow bag, and a stuffed cobra.
"Igor lives his life according
to his standards and dreams, and he loves life as much as his father did,"
says Elfriede, who owns a fabric shop in Boulder. "With Igor, you can
never relax or prepare for what he'll do next."
"Oh father, surely
one of the gods who are young forever has made you magnificent before my
eyes." --The Odyssey
Much like the voyages of Odysseus,
Gamow has charted a meandering course in his 54 years. His genes provided
the navigation.
From the time of his 100-day birthday
party, when George Gamow mischievously poured pablum into non-drinker Edward
Teller's bottle, Igor inherited his father's sense of frivolity and wonderment.
Rho, Igor's mother, danced ballet.
Her influence steered Igor, then 17, out of high school and into acceptance
by the National Ballet Company in Washington, where he danced for four years-
and worked as a news courier for CBS-before his father's interests eventually
drew him to CU.
From both parents came a love for
the classics. Young Igor embraced the mythological hero Odysseus, fascinated
by his trips and encounters with Cyclops and Calypso, and gods and goddesses.
"Odysseus was modest and boastful,
sensuous, aristocratic and public-spirited, a soldier and a philosopher,"
Gamow says.
Russian-born George Gamow's interests
spanned from radioactivity to the genetic code and the internal structure
of stars, to writing and teaching. He also relished earthly pleasures, such
as carrying a 
thermos of martinis while horseback
I riding.
"When I was 16-17, I couldn't
understand anything father was doing," Gamow recalled. "There
are mountains to climb, horses and bikes to ride, I thought. I couldn't
understand why he was going out and looking at stars.'
George admired his son. Once, he
showed up at a 7:30 a.m. ballet practice. Igor, pleased, wandered over.
"He wondered if I could use
an auxiliary oxygen bottle, because he said that would have enhanced my
performance," Igor said, laughing.
Gradually, the father's myriad
interests became those of his son. By 1968, the year George died, Igor had
joined him on CU's faculty.
George wrote a fantasy called Mr.
Tonkins Inside of Himself to explain to children how their blood
cells worked. Igor later developed the work into a film.
In later years, much like his father,
Igor's interests have varied from studying the cell structures of plants
to infrared receptors in snakes and human athletic performance at altitude.
"Igor has this childlike curiosity
that his father had," says Elfriede, who knew the elder Gamow. "He
is not afraid to fall on his face and get up again. His father was like
that."
Even now, 22 years after his father's
death, Igor's face brightens when he considers what his father's reaction
would be to his son's inventions.
"Would he be proud? I think
so. I never thought of myself as an inventor," Igor said. "The
Gamow bag would have been a kick to my father."
"No other Odysseus
will ever come, for he and I are one and the same, his fortune, his wanderings
are mine." --The Odyssey
In principle and design, the
high-altitude Gamow bag is simple. Yet, says Jim Kasic, a graduate student
of Gamow's, it took someone special to see the concept.
Gamow offers another explanation:
"It's like Dagwood Bumstead says, 'That makes a lot of sense if you
think about it.' "
Intrigued by athletic performance
at high altitude, Gamow in the mid-1980s built a pressurized chamber and
experimented with lowering the elevation inside.
Several years later, at the urging
of a former student, Gamow adapted the principle to help climbers suffering
from acute mountain sickness, an often fatal illness.
He attached a foot pump to what
looks like a large sleeping bag to create a compression chamber. When filled
with air by the pump, the bag simulates the greater air pressure of a lower
altitude.
Gamow took his invention to Nepal
two years ago to test it. To his delight, he saw a French climber ill with
acute mountain sickness crawl into the bag and revive.
Since then, the bag has gained
acceptance among climbers and doctors and has become standard equipment
on some Mt. Everest expeditions. No less an authority than Hillary, the
first man to scale the world's highest mountain, requested a bag for a volunteer-staffed
hospital in the Everest region to treat climbers and locals.
Last month, Gamow received a letter
from a Canadian doctor at Kunde hospital in Nepal raving about the bag.
The Himalayan Rescue Association, the doctor wrote, used the Gamow bag at
least 50 times during the climbing season and saved "countless"
lives.
He estimates sales of his bag could
one day reach up to 4,000 per year, at a price of about $2,000 per bag.
But anxious to see the bag gain
wider distribution, and not wanting to do the marketing and production himself,
Gamow last year sold his exclusive rights to Du Pont Co.
"I'd rather do the research,"
Gamow says.
In Colorado, doctors with the Colorado
Altitude Research Institute in Keystone used a new prototype of the Gamow
bag- which Gamow enlarged - during a study of altitude sickness among visiting
skiers.
Patricia Pearce, project coordinator,
said 32 skiers were treated in the bag. Although medical results of the
study are being analyzed, those who were treated "thought it was wonderful.
They were sick one day and able to ski the next."
Kasic and Gamow are experimenting
with a "Gamow tent." They want to put the foot pump inside and
devise an internal frame "so people can climb in and out without the
tent collapsing on them," Kasic said.
More adaptations are in the works.
Aldona Siczek, president of Altaire X manufacturing, is collaborating with
Gamow to make the bag portable and practical enough to put aboard space
shuttle flights or planes flying at high altitudes.
Perhaps, Siczek said, the bag could
even be adjusted for use as a smoke inhalation treatment.
"Beauty, to me, is in the
simplicity of a design," she said. "Igor's designs are simple
and functional."
Indeed, Gamow's ability to see
new applications amazes his colleagues.
Last year, for example, he developed
the Shallow Underwater Breathing Apparatus - or Suba - that blends snorkeling
and scuba.
"He's always making connections
between one project and another," Kasic said.
Using the principles of the Gamow
bag, and modifying a firefighter's mask with surgical tubing attached to
a foot pump Gamow found he could comfortably work down to 10 feet underwater.
"It really has been a wonderful
year," Gamow admits. "Everything we've tried has worked out."
"Odysseus,
master mariner and soldier, what next? What greater feat remains for you
to put your mind on after this?" --The Odyssey
Elfriede Gamow never knows.
Recently, Igor returned from a
weekend trip to California lugging a new toy. At a friend's pool, he tested
this automatic paddling device.
This fall, he'll be in the Himalayas
for at least six weeks teaching a "Semester in Nepal" course he
helped organize last year.
"I let Igor go on his odysseys,"
Elfriede said. "There is absolutely no way to confine him. He is definitely
his own person, and he might or might not come back. His loyalties run deep,
but he's not someone you could ask to go to Safeway for you."
Yet, Gamow always returns from
his adventure of the day or week to his Boulder home. There, Pegasus awaits
for rides up the canyon.
"I see Igor and the horse
riding, and I think it's wonderful, because it's right for him. And it's
right for us," Elfriede says.
His life, Gamow says, has "been
wonderfully fun" and offers an analogy.
A biology professor interested
in ants is asked what he planned to do on summer vacation.
"He says, 'Why, study ants,
of course. It's what I do,'" Gamow laughs. "If you get to the
point in life where you say, 'I have to work,' why do it?"