Giving T cells extra batteries supercharges them against cancer

I think derefr might be talking about the cells that form the walls of the capillaries being bigger, so you can't really fit them in the places you need them, and if you tried they'd be too narrow.

Except replace "you" with evolution and delete "tried".

When I say "blood cells", I mean "all blood cells", not specifically "red blood cells." Anywhere your blood plasma flows, all types of blood cells are carried along with it.

As such, to prevent infarction, every capillary in your body must be at least wide enough, in its narrowest state, to still accommodate the passage of the largest blood cell type the body produces, in its largest state. (Which, for us humans, is probably something like "a neutrophil that is bloated from just having consumed a large bacterium.")

Interesting, but not surprising — DNA, and the cellular nucleus itself, aren't truly required to make our cells "go". (At least over the span of a few days.)

That is, after all, what radiation poisoning is: a complete destruction of your DNA in your cells, while the cells themselves (attempt to) continue to function. And they do! For some number of days. And that's without any of our evolutionary ancestors ever having been under evolutionary pressure to live without DNA (as far as we know.)

IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a bathtub curve.

• There's firstly a lot of immediate cell death from apoptosis — probably due damaged DNA starting to do something that looks like cancer, and autolyse safeguards activating in response. This is what a radiation "burn" is.

• But then, after that, everything's actually fine for a while. You're just sitting there for a few days, operating normally — despite the majority of your cells now having massive holes shot through their DNA, with any attempt to unzip that DNA to copy it failing.

After that few days, you get massive waves of cell death — the part of radiation poisoning that actually kills you. This likely arrives, due to cells experiencing various inputs that they see as triggers to attempt some kind of state-transition (whether a minor one, between e.g. glucose vs ketone metabolism; or a major one, e.g. into mitosis.) And doing that requires flipping some epigenetic methylation switches to start producing different proteins — which requires the DNA be un-rolled and re-rolled. The cell tries it; it fails; and there's no "error handling" for the case of "you started a state transition but can't connect to the blueprint database", so the cell just "deadlocks" in a volatile state — e.g. one where metabolism is shut down, so purine waste builds up until the cell lyses for chemical reasons.

So it's not too surprising that an organism could evolve to just intentionally not trigger such cellular state-transitions — likely no longer expressing any of the state-transition "machinery" at all. Such an organism would get quite far with their cells just "doing the thing they were programmed to do", without a nucleus. Even cellular metabolism would continue!

There'd just be nowhere to get "replacement parts" for proteins as the original proteins break down or get oxidized by some radical — thus the lifespan limit.

Also, something not mentioned in what you linked, but which seems like an obvious corollary: I would guess that such organisms would likely be "metabolically fragile." I.e., they likely have dropped anything like adrenaline signalling, as the whole point of that is to get cells to state-transition. So they'll be a bit like a person taking alpha-blockers, who gets winded extremely easily because the drugs are preventing their cells from "gearing up." For this organism, there are no other gears to switch to. The organism is a fixie.

That's probably what he would say. The actual minimum to be able to use the force is a 7000 midichlorian count.

Totally a tangent, but he's right about that. It was a flaw in Harry Potter as well. There was no logical system to how magic worked; spells did whatever plot requirements said they did. And it detracts from the sense of realism in a world when the magic just does whatever is needed at the moment.

They don't get cancer because they have a metric f ton of tumour suppressor genes copies, and we have relatively few and so it's easier for all of ours to get knocked off to form a cancer

I thought I remembered something about certain nutrients (magnesium?) being something you could intentionally reduce to slow down cancer growth -- kind of like a DIY chemotherapy; your cells need Mg to grow and multiply, but cancer cells need it more. Paired with other treatments, where applicable, the reduced nutrient diet had positive clinical outcomes.

Define "quality nutrition" and cite a source.

Really? Most clinical trials for nutritional therapy as a cancer treatment haven't produced significant results.

> Keep in mind that when dying cancer patients starve in the end, the tumors don't slow.

That's something I don't understand. If cancer cells grow faster then I suppose they should be more affected by the lack of nutrients. I know that this model is too simplistic to be true, but I don't know what exactly is missing from it.

i can't tell if you lost critical thinking entirely or trolling