Well, this is everything but a long blog entry, I swear…

Basically all I want to make available on the net is something I read in the National GeographicMagazine (May 2005). In the article “The poison paradox” you can read what already many people know, namely:

Even oxygen has a sinister side.…

but what follows is more interesting, at least for me:

“Oxygen is the ultimate toxin,” says Michael Trush, a toxicologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Oxygen combines with food to produce energy, but our bodies also produce oxygen radicals – atoms with an extra electron that damage biomolecules, DNS, proteins, and lipids. “We are oxidizing all the time,” says Trush. “The biochemical price of breathing is aging.“. Which is to say, we rust.

The interesting part is the one in italics.