Takanori Takebe is on a mission to find out if people can breathe through their butts.
As a medical doctor and stem cell biologist, Takebe spends most of his time trying to develop lab-made livers to treat organ failure. His side quest to explore backside breathing began several years ago, when his father caught pneumonia and had to be put on a ventilator.
“I was really shocked by how invasive it is,” says Takebe, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio and the University of Osaka in Japan. Takebe worried about how the procedure might affect his dad — who’d already had part of one lung removed due