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Oh for god's sake! Can't I get away from people discussing how cells get replaced for five bloody seconds?

That actually does come up in my conversations ... at least once a month. Either in regard to brain cells dying, or smokers' lung cells being entirely replaced five years after they quit, or ...

Mind you, half of my friends have science degrees of some sort, but it is the kind of thing that comes up.

More often than, say, the calibre of specialized sniper rifles, which I'd put at once a quarter.

Re: Eric's comments

Ditto!

I heard someone refer to it two days ago.

Brian,

Did you see how they retrofitted your favorite villain ever back into a wacky shadow team up with Kraven over in X-Men/Spider-Man?

And on the other side of the spectrum, they actually felt compelled to explain what the Butterfly Effect was on Heroes earlier this season. Hah?

I was having a conversation with the GZA the other day (don't ask), and I swear to God, he dropped numerous scientific facts exactly like that one into the discussion. So it does come up occasionally.

I'm afraid you're not going to sell the sarcasm to this crowd, Brian. We're too nerdy. I mentioned it to someone about three weeks ago.

How about some context? Just who are those characters and why was the cell thing brought up?

Hey, rememebr when Wolvine was destroyed except for a single cell and then he entirely regrew from that?

Is that the sort of cell replacement they're talking of.

So when he gets stabbed and some blood comes out (a not-unlikely circumstance for Wolverine), that blood should regenerate into another Wolverine. Maybe that explains how he's in so many books every month.

it's Iceman explaining what happened to him in Manifest Destiny #2 to some truck driver.

This comes up in conversations I've had before and I've seen it mentioned in numerous other non-textbook media...

Hell, I've brought it up specifically with regards to conversation about changes in body chemistry.

I actually have never heard this before. Obviously, I haven't been hanging out with all the right people who go on and on about this.

Also, why is Ultimate Peter Parker hitch hiking in Manifest Destiny?!

"Also, why is Ultimate Peter Parker hitch hiking in Manifest Destiny?!"

Because many comic book artists can only draw 3 different male hair styles: short, 90's shag, and ponytail.

Did you know that the cells of a person with a ponytail have trouble finding other cells that are willing to replace them when they die?

I've heard it plenty of times before. And when I mention it to people, they seem to know what I'm talking about. It's definitely well-known enough.

Sijo: Iceman's explaining what happened to during his last battle with Mystique, to a truck driver who's picked him up -he's telling him because he wants to gauge the truck driver's response to see if he is in fact Mystique himself.

I didn't know that until I saw The Man from Earth (great sci-fi movie, by the way) so I don't think it comes up as convetsation all that often, as Iceman seems to suggest.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OBH-f0rPrlo&

At least it adds a new power to his ill defined power limit.

wil:

That song had some of the most ridiculous lyrics I've ever had the pleasure of reading/hearing.

Awesome. Just awesome. Thanks.

It doesn't come up in conversation all that much, but it comes up in exposition rather frequently.

I totally talked to my Buddhist grandmother about how that effects our continuity of being on repeated occasions.

It's also not true - the central nervous system sticks around your whole life.

SO TAKE THAT.

Apodaca...
What you said is very true.
However, do not underestimate the attractive power of the cells of someone with a mullet.

Actually, Ben Folds mentioned it on his most recent album, in the song 'Free Coffee'. So, I mean, that was the first thing I thought of.

also he doesn't say that it comes up in conversation all the time, he just says "they say" which could be referring to scientists who say it, and it's also said to sort of explain that point to the truck driver, he doesn't assume that someone would just know it, it's just something he's heard before.

Oh man, thank god someone took the time to write a totally serious defense of the word balloon in that X-Men comic.

As choirsoftheeye says, its my understanding that several kinds of cells exist for much longer (often for your entire life) such as neural cells, certain immune cells, bones (which i guess aren't necessarily cells) and egg cells for the female memebrs of the species.

Greg Hatcher:
Yes, I'm sure that many of us are way too nerdy for the sarcasm to be relevant to us. Me and my friends regularly talk about a bunch of stuff that wouldn't "normally" be brought up in conversation.

maybe its weird, but like some of the over people posting.... I've had this come up in conversation frequently enough... I'd say more often than it probably should. I actually had it come up during small talk at work once....

Its something Ive definitely talked about. Maybe in a more philososphocal conversation then the what appears to be happerning here - Bobbys casual conversation with a truck driver - but as a previous poster explains there may be an actual plot explanation as to why Bobby brings it up.

What Im interested in is is it actually true? if it is then its pretty profound. It has to make you wonder what we really are - could we be simply a moment tom moment electrical pulse passing through some organs that contain "memories" making us believe we exist more then a transitional state?

Perhaps be a bit too profound a topic for this thread, though Im confident that we could figure the whole thing out if we concentrate our geeky/snarky expertise.

Well, to be fair about it, back in the 1980s when I was a kid reading all the SF and Fantasy I could get my hands on at the local library, I saw that thing about "cellular replacement on a seven-year cycle" come up occasionally. Philip Jose Farmer used the concept as the basis of a surprise gimmick at the end of his SF novel "Time's Last Gift." And I do believe that A.E. Van Vogt used it in a description of the theory behind a "suspended animation" technique used by interstellar travelers in a ship going noticeably slower than the speed of light. And I may be forgetting other cases when I was slapped in the face with that "seven-year cycle" concept. But I sure don't remember stumbling across it recently!

(I do seem to recall once reading, somewhere, sometime, a pointed debunking of the whole idea which explained that some types of cells are lucky if they last a few weeks, whereas others stick with us until we die. Maybe SF authors such as Farmer and Van Vogt finally got the word about that little detail?)

So apparently the idea was a piece of pseudoscience that was in vogue for awhile, once upon a time. Maybe this story is set back around the continuity of the 1970s, when it might have been more probable for a superhero to keep stumbling across people who had that bit of misinformation on the tips of their tongues?

This idea has been around for a long time, with some reference to it in writing from the 19th century. Given that modern cell theory was in its infancy at the time, and that there was no way of knowing how and when cells would be replaced, it's fairly likely the idea was fanciful. Even if you ignore such an early reference, it seems people have been talking about this since the early '20s, and again, that's way too early for it to have developed as the result of any kind of meaningful scientific data.

There was a study a few years ago that looked at the ages of tissues in the body by studying levels of carbon-14 in the DNA of various cells. They found that the average age of intestinal and skeletal muscle cells was about 15-16 years. They also found that people's gray matter was about 3 years younger in the cerebellum, 10 years younger in the occipital cortex, and that the occipital neurons were about the same age as the person. Another author suggested that the average age of cells could be as low as 7-10 years.

So the truth appears to be that cells turnover ranges from 5 days or so (for epithelial cells, like skin) to almost never (for central nervous system neurons). Our tissues/organs are constantly in flux, because individual cells are dying and being "born" all the time.

Even our cells themselves are not permanent, unchanged entities. The material that makes up cell structures is continually being replaced, new proteins and RNA are created, the walls of cells and organelles (the machinery within the cell) are built and rebuilt (which is why we need molecules like fats, proteins and cholesterol). So, if we look at the body at a very basic level, it's the atoms making up all of these cells and tissues that are being replaced, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that the age of these atoms in the body could be limited to around 7-10 years. So, in a very fundamental way, your body now is not the body you had as a kid kid (and, believe me, I feel it. I had to climb a tree today and it turns out my kid body was a monkey's, and my present one is a sloth's).

So you'd probably be on more solid footing if you said that all the atoms - not the cells - in your body are replaced every seven years. It's still a stretch and an oversimplification (and perhaps a bit of a cheat), but there it is.

I have this conversation at least once a month, and that's not a joke.