Breathing Underwater?

Factual Questions
1

In the movie The Abyss they use that fluid (which they demonstrate on the mouse first) that allows breathing underwater?

Someone showed me this photo
http://www.gbphoto.com/items/024.html

Is this fluid real then?

2

Yes. It’s called Flourovent, and it is a liquid polymer that is ultra-saturated with oxygen. It is used to help premature babies with damaged lungs breathe without the damaging pressures involved in standard respirators. The scene you saw on The Abyss with the rat was real: The rat did breathe the liquid.

3

There is a good site here about liquid ventilation. It gives an accounting of the treatment and the chemical. By the way, the first experiments with liquid ventilation was with ultraoxygenated saline (saline is salt water in an exact ratio of salt to water used in medical fields).

4

The initial research was done in the 60’s, and I remember references to this guy’s liquid-breathing mice from decades before the movie was made. Here’s a link with the background:

http://www.scienceweb.org/movies/abyss.html

See “Early Experiments” part way down the page.

It was kind of hard on the mice in those days:

5

Yeah, I saw the press kit from The Abyss, they had lengthy technical details on Fluorovent. All the scenes in the movie are real. The actors really did breathe the stuff. The scenes where the guy coughs up the liquid from his lungs and starts breathing air again, that’s real too. They had all sorts of liquid breathing experts working on the movies, but since the film was not shot at great depths or pressures, it wasn’t very risky for the actors.

6

Never believe ** anything ** in a movie press pack. The rats were fed the pink stuff, but the actor just had a suit filled with pink water and had to hold his breath. If he had used fluorovent, then the lining of his lungs would have been stripped and he would have had to been put on high dodes of antibiotics for several days, if not weeks. Practical for premature babies, but not deep sea divers (or actors).

if I can just find that link … http://us.imdb.com/Trivia?0096754 isn’t quite there

And an underwater drilling rig? Pleeeeease.

7

Colin is right. The scene with the rat was real, but the actors were, eh, acting. If you get the DVD version of the movie, there’s a lot of documentary info on how they pulled it off.

8

I remember reading about this as a kid in the 1960s.
Hal Clement wrote a science fiction vovel about an entire community living in fluorocarbon fluid. It’s called “Ocean on Top” and it came out about twenty yars before “The Abyss”.

9

Yeah, but babies in the womb can breathe womb liquid. One would think that if they could make a similar liquid, we should be able to breathe in it?

10

Cheers for all the links. Excellent stuff

The blurb under that photo mentions a blood substitute and the name Leland Carter. Neither of which I can find any mention of though

11

Except the babies aren’t really getting any oxygen out of the liquid in their lungs- that comes via the placenta.

Arjuna34

12

Arjuna is right. Fetuses don’t breathe anything. They get all they need through the placenta. That was one of the big annoyances I had with the film.