Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: Today we are going to be talking about undead jeans. Yes,
Speaker 1: undead jeans, as they've been called in some of the
Speaker 1: headlines making the rounds. Some have even dared to call
Speaker 1: them zombie jeans. But I like to think even even
Speaker 1: those headline writers feel a little bit dirty actually calling
Speaker 1: them zombie jeans. I think zombies is a metaphor that
Speaker 1: has just invoked too often. Now. I used to love zombies.
Speaker 1: Uh ten years ago or so, or maybe even a
Speaker 1: little before that is when it was like peak zombie
Speaker 1: for me. In two thousand four, I saw a Knight
Speaker 1: of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead that year,
Speaker 1: and and that was enough. And then suddenly we're in
Speaker 1: this zombie world where everything is zombies all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been. I'm tired of it. It's been. It's been
Speaker 1: rolled out just far too often in science headlines. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we should do more. Just undead genes or
Speaker 1: undead could be a vampire, it could be a litch,
Speaker 1: yet litch genes would be good. I would like that,
Speaker 1: or even uh even something like um necro genes. I
Speaker 1: could be over that as well. But the cool thing
Speaker 1: is is what we're talking about here is not completely
Speaker 1: out of keeping with these concepts, you know. It's that
Speaker 1: there is there is a strong enough thread connecting even
Speaker 1: the more outlandish headlines to the really cool science that's
Speaker 1: going on here. Yeah, and so specifically, this is going
Speaker 1: to be referencing a paper that was pre published this
Speaker 1: summer in June. I think we're actually still waiting on
Speaker 1: it to come out in in a journal form, but
Speaker 1: it was pre published on a pre publication server bio archive,
Speaker 1: and and it's been covered in that form. So just
Speaker 1: be aware that that, you know, we don't have all
Speaker 1: the opinions in yet, right, But back back to undead
Speaker 1: gene So we of course probably don't have to say this,
Speaker 1: but just to be clear, this is a metaphor. We're
Speaker 1: not talking about any kind of magical or supernatural resuscitation. Instead,
Speaker 1: we're trying to communicate what's very unusual about the activity
Speaker 1: of genetic structures that have been discovered to continue after
Speaker 1: what's known as organismal death. The death of the overall
Speaker 1: body and uh. And it's not unusual, of course to
Speaker 1: use metaphors to think about what the body does, but
Speaker 1: it is helpful to find the right ones. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: depend on a number of metaphors to understand the human body.
Speaker 1: Machine is a big one, you know, the biomechanical man um.
Speaker 1: I I'm always partial to horse and rider versus centaur.
Speaker 1: Who's the rider? Well, horse and ride, horse and rider,
Speaker 1: the rider's the brain. Okay, the horses the body. And
Speaker 1: this is a faulty way of looking at the at
Speaker 1: the mind body connection. Centaur makes more sense where the
Speaker 1: tour are joined. Um. And in addition to that, you
Speaker 1: also see vessel every now. And I think we've talked
Speaker 1: about like spaceship, the spaceship human body before. UM. But
Speaker 1: if you think of it as a civilization, as I
Speaker 1: did in looking at this paper, you know what is
Speaker 1: death about the apocalypse civilizational extinction exactly because you have
Speaker 1: in the human body essentially have a vast kingdom of
Speaker 1: somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred trillion cells, thirty
Speaker 1: thousand genes, eleven distinct systems, and on top of all
Speaker 1: of this, just the the the manifestation of cognition, environmental sensitivity, navigation,
Speaker 1: and self awareness, all of these systems, this this wondrous
Speaker 1: manifestation of consciousness, all of it working together and ruled
Speaker 1: over by genetics and epigenetics. So the genes and then
Speaker 1: the way the genes are expressed, at least until what
Speaker 1: happens everything falls apart, right right, Okay, yeah, I'm kind
Speaker 1: of seeing this. So maybe in this metaphor, you can
Speaker 1: think about genes as what the constitution that governs the
Speaker 1: society or the council of elders in their roads and
Speaker 1: the servants that that rule over the fabulous city. Uh
Speaker 1: I guess you could probably say that no real civilization
Speaker 1: is as thoroughly prescribed by any kind of written document
Speaker 1: that says how everything's going to work as the body
Speaker 1: is by the genes. Yeah, and then of course that's
Speaker 1: not to say that everything works perfectly. Certainly the kingdom
Speaker 1: of the human body has its issues and has its problems.
Speaker 1: But sometimes you might get a cancerous rebellion. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: cancerus rebellion, or just things that don't particularly work right,
Speaker 1: But we kind of we evolved into it with the
Speaker 1: current system of government is based on old systems of
Speaker 1: government and and therefore the legacy is still there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in this sense, I guess you could look at
Speaker 1: death as if death in the body is energy bankruptcy.
Speaker 1: Suddenly cells can't get the energy they need in order
Speaker 1: to do what they need to do. That's sort of
Speaker 1: like in a civilizational sense, if there's a total collapse
Speaker 1: of resource distribution, Suddenly you can't get food and energy,
Speaker 1: you know, power, water to the people who need them exactly.
Speaker 1: And when that when that happens, say in a kingdom,
Speaker 1: in a in an empire, we it's not like everything
Speaker 1: just completely falls apart. I mean, the things may fall apart,
Speaker 1: the center may not hold, but everybody doesn't just vanish
Speaker 1: into nothing. Um. And and we see a similar right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we see a similar thing happened with the body, just
Speaker 1: as certain factions in a post apocalyptic scenario would would
Speaker 1: try and hold onto power or carry out their duties,
Speaker 1: you know, bravely delivering the mail no matter of what
Speaker 1: has happened, while other populations, such as microbiota and in
Speaker 1: our body riot and rampage. So just as warlords and
Speaker 1: bandit kings rise up in the wake of a kingdom's fall,
Speaker 1: so too, do certain genes come to life after death,
Speaker 1: some manifesting in ways that they haven't since the womb.
Speaker 1: And that's the crazy thing here we have to have.
Speaker 1: You know, what is happening here. We tend to view
Speaker 1: death is this great unraveling the system after sift system
Speaker 1: just going dark? So why would certain genes activate on
Speaker 1: the other side of death? I wanted to be an
Speaker 1: uptick and activity from certain genes after the organism has
Speaker 1: technically died. Well, that's a good question. Eventually, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at this paper, specifically that it's been pre published
Speaker 1: this summer and discuss its findings. But first I think
Speaker 1: we need to set a little bit of context about
Speaker 1: what exactly is happening in the body with with genes
Speaker 1: and how they're expressed. So a question you might have
Speaker 1: wondered before. Maybe you already know the answer to this,
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a little bit kind of vague. How do
Speaker 1: you get from genes to bodies? We all know this
Speaker 1: metaphor that genes are the blueprints, right, You know that
Speaker 1: genes have some sort of information encoded in them that
Speaker 1: will allow you to build a body that does what
Speaker 1: your body does. But really a gene is a molecule.
Speaker 1: A gene is a tiny molecular structure in DNA, and
Speaker 1: it's a chain of nucleotides, which are organic molecules made
Speaker 1: of a nitrogenous molecule based and usually got a phosphate
Speaker 1: group and a carbon sugar. But bodies are these big
Speaker 1: macro structures, relatively gigantic machines, and they're made primarily of
Speaker 1: cells full of proteins and protein structures that determine what
Speaker 1: the cells can do. And ultimately this collection of cells
Speaker 1: works as a sort of vehicle for gene replication, basically
Speaker 1: by being a gigantic energy trap. Now, how do you
Speaker 1: get from one to the other. This tiny molecule has
Speaker 1: to build your whole body well. In order to get
Speaker 1: from this tiny chain molecule to create an effect in
Speaker 1: the outside in in the the outer world the body
Speaker 1: at large, the gene has to be expressed. This is
Speaker 1: the term gene expression, and it's the name for the
Speaker 1: process that gets you from DNA to cell function. And
Speaker 1: then of course cell function at large determines what your
Speaker 1: body is and what it does. But at the ground level,
Speaker 1: this process is just biochemistry. You might remember these words
Speaker 1: from sometime learning them in school. Will transcription and translation
Speaker 1: do they ring a bell? Gene gene expression is what
Speaker 1: these words refer to. So you have a chain of
Speaker 1: nucleotides in your DNA and it's a gene for I
Speaker 1: was trying to think of what I could say a
Speaker 1: gene for maybe fingernails growing really fast. Could that be
Speaker 1: a thing that's gene regulated? Perhaps? Uh so. First, in
Speaker 1: order for that gene to be expressed, there's what's known
Speaker 1: as transcription, and this is going to be key to
Speaker 1: the paper that we're looking at in a bit. Transcription
Speaker 1: is where an enzyme called RNA polymerase latches onto a
Speaker 1: section of the DNA molecule and it starts pulling together
Speaker 1: all these other molecules to create a copy of that
Speaker 1: DNA section out of this substance RNA, which is similar
Speaker 1: to DNA. Now, sometimes that RNA copy alone does something
Speaker 1: useful in the cell. You've just made this RNA copy
Speaker 1: and it goes off and does its job. Other times,
Speaker 1: RNA is what's known as messenger RNA and essentially acts
Speaker 1: to take that that gene and carry it to a
Speaker 1: structure inside the cell like a ribosome, and there at
Speaker 1: the ribosome which arrives. Zome is a tiny molecular machine.
Speaker 1: It's a nanomachine that does work inside the cell. At
Speaker 1: the ribosome, we get to the process of translation, and
Speaker 1: that's where the rb zome essentially metaphorically, it reads the
Speaker 1: RNA photocopy of the gene and then translates into proteins
Speaker 1: that assume a function within the cell. These proteins determine
Speaker 1: what the cell can do, so that that's how you
Speaker 1: get from genes to a cell doing something to a body. Um. So,
Speaker 1: of course we speak metaphorically in terms like copies and reads,
Speaker 1: but keep in mind these are all chemical reactions, just
Speaker 1: like you know, Robert, did you ever make a science
Speaker 1: fair volcano? Oh? You bet I have, and I will
Speaker 1: make a few more before I'm done. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 1: are fun. I've never made one just for fun at home.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe when I have Well, there's a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of set up with the with the
Speaker 1: volcano itself. But yeah, what's the classic recipe for the
Speaker 1: science fair? So you need vinegary, you need a little
Speaker 1: food coloring, uh huh, and then you get volcano. Right.
Speaker 1: I never thought of food coloring that would make it
Speaker 1: more lava issue. If you make it orange, you've gotta
Speaker 1: make it orange or red otherwise, Um, otherwise you're just
Speaker 1: doing bacon, soda and vinegar. Right. Well, so that's a
Speaker 1: very simple chemical reaction. But this is a much more
Speaker 1: complex chemical reaction. And these chemical reactions are taking place
Speaker 1: between highly specialized molecules shaped by biochemical evolution. But back
Speaker 1: to those macro characteristics, the you know, the body as
Speaker 1: a whole, the big characteristics you see, all those observable
Speaker 1: characteristics of an organism, uh that emerge as a product
Speaker 1: of genes expressing themselves in an environment. All that together
Speaker 1: is known as the phenotype. You've got your genotype, that's
Speaker 1: your genes and they make your phenotype. So your hair
Speaker 1: is a part of your phenotype. Your toes are a
Speaker 1: part of your no type, and your ability to run,
Speaker 1: and your fear of clowns, and you're you know, delightful
Speaker 1: craving for deviled eggs. All of that is part of
Speaker 1: your phenotype. So one would typically assume that, well, the
Speaker 1: death is sort of the end of the phenotype being
Speaker 1: able to do its job right. The death of the
Speaker 1: organism means well, I can't get energy to my cells anymore.
Speaker 1: Everything's fallen apart, So the phenotype just ends. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like one like it's kind of like the the genotype.
Speaker 1: They are the hands creating the shadow puppet, right, and
Speaker 1: then the phenotype is the shadow on the wall that
Speaker 1: looks like a barking dog. Right. If the flashlight goes out,
Speaker 1: that you can't make the shadow on the wall anymore.
Speaker 1: But the hand, the hands are still there. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the hands are still there. And so the phenotype is
Speaker 1: not necessarily based on the brain being conscious, or the
Speaker 1: heart circulating blood, or the lungs pulling in oxygen and
Speaker 1: purging CEO two. Even though we think of these things
Speaker 1: as the primary signs of life from a purely chemical standpoint,
Speaker 1: if you're just some you know, cosmic chemistry professor looking
Speaker 1: at what we do and you're not very concerned about
Speaker 1: the experience of being alive, these are not the primary systems.
Speaker 1: These are support systems, and they're all in service of
Speaker 1: gene replications. So genes make these systems to do the
Speaker 1: things they do because they help trap, conserve, and judiciously
Speaker 1: spend energy that can be used to make gene replication happen.
Speaker 1: More often and more successfully. So, even though your brain
Speaker 1: goes inactive and your heart stops beating and your lung
Speaker 1: your lungs stop pumping, you know, the genes in your
Speaker 1: cell are still in some sense independent machines that can
Speaker 1: continue to do things as long as they have the
Speaker 1: energy to do them, and they would go on without
Speaker 1: you if they could. They don't care about you. Even
Speaker 1: though you, the organism are gone. The genes, as independent
Speaker 1: machines are, are still trying to do their thing. So
Speaker 1: does your core biological essence live beyond the death of
Speaker 1: your mind and body at large? Is their gene life
Speaker 1: after body death? The answer appears to be yes, and
Speaker 1: the details can get a little bit creepy. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: get into the undead genes that that here. So we
Speaker 1: knew from previous day Like this isn't just completely out
Speaker 1: of nowhere. So we knew from previous studies looking at
Speaker 1: blood and liver tissue that a few human genes remain
Speaker 1: active in the cadaver age. That's like after the Bronze Age,
Speaker 1: you're still continuing your civilization metaphor after the life age
Speaker 1: into the cadaver age. It continues. But recent work from
Speaker 1: microbiologists Peter Noble of the University of Washington, Seattle and
Speaker 1: his team have revealed a number of genes that that
Speaker 1: seemed to activate after death. So again, the kingdom fall
Speaker 1: on apart, the walls are crumbling, barbarians flowed the street.
Speaker 1: There's no going back to order life, bread and circuses.
Speaker 1: But there are certain certain groups in the city that
Speaker 1: are still going to do their job. They're still going
Speaker 1: to deliver the mail, They're still gonna enforce the law.
Speaker 1: You have maniac cops roaming the streets. Yes, the civilization
Speaker 1: has collapsed, but but some of the machines within it
Speaker 1: still continue to do their thing. Yeah, and so, but
Speaker 1: since there's no going back, since the organism is organism
Speaker 1: is dead, since the human body is dead. At this point,
Speaker 1: it's not an raw area that we really knew that
Speaker 1: much about. As the authors themselves point out, quote, it
Speaker 1: is not well known whether gene expression diminishes gradually or
Speaker 1: abruptly stops in death, nor whether specific genes are newly
Speaker 1: expressed or upregulated. Upregulated means, of course, uh an increase
Speaker 1: in their activity. So they decided to check it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the paper that they have in pre publication now
Speaker 1: is known as Thanato transcript home my new favorite word,
Speaker 1: the NATO transcript Dome genes actively expressed after organismal death,
Speaker 1: And that's pre published in bio Archive. Last I read,
Speaker 1: it's still under peer review at a journal somewhere. I think, um, though,
Speaker 1: if it's already come out and somebody knows about it,
Speaker 1: please contact us and let us know. But anyway, this
Speaker 1: refers to this collection of genes that continue to be
Speaker 1: expressed after organismal death, as as the Fanato transcript Dome
Speaker 1: from the Greek Thanatos for death and transcript dome for
Speaker 1: the genes that undergo transcription. But I guess the question is,
Speaker 1: how could you actually examine this, Like, what would you
Speaker 1: do to find out if there are genes that are
Speaker 1: certainly suddenly starting to be expressed or continuing to be
Speaker 1: expressed after death happens at the total body level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because experiments on humans that involve, you know, getting right
Speaker 1: in their close at the death point, generally those are
Speaker 1: those are the kind of experiments that either very hard
Speaker 1: to carry out or they're a little unscrupulous in nature.
Speaker 1: So we're not talking about humans. And uh, though it
Speaker 1: does bring me back to those old experiments about the
Speaker 1: weight of the soul and all the painful average you
Speaker 1: had to go who to get a willing dying individual
Speaker 1: to set on your set, to lay down on a
Speaker 1: bed on a set of scales for you. But no,
Speaker 1: they did not bother with humans in this. They examined
Speaker 1: post mortem gene expression into model organisms, the zebra fish
Speaker 1: and the common house mouse, with a focus on examining
Speaker 1: genes with expression increases after death. Again, we're not talking
Speaker 1: about um apoptosis or necrosis, but genes that suddenly light
Speaker 1: up with doomed life again like a band of waste
Speaker 1: wandering survivors. Uh So, So they expected the genes to
Speaker 1: shut down, but they didn't. But they did not in
Speaker 1: all cases. Although most of these upregulating genes up to
Speaker 1: their activity in the first twenty four hours after the
Speaker 1: animals expired and then tapered off. And in the fish,
Speaker 1: some genes remained active four days after death. So that
Speaker 1: that's crazy, Yeah, thinking about four days after the organism
Speaker 1: has died, there are still some genes in some cells
Speaker 1: or a body that are still doing things. They're they're
Speaker 1: undergoing transcription, they're having this chemical reaction. That's the beginning
Speaker 1: of the process to create proteins. The fingers are still
Speaker 1: working furiously to make that dog shadow puppet on the wall. Now,
Speaker 1: they had to kill a bunch of fish and mice
Speaker 1: for this. Uh that's how you get the specific time
Speaker 1: of death for the lab animals case. I think they
Speaker 1: killed the fish with ice water. Yeah, they Well, they
Speaker 1: have a pretty They have pretty exhaustive details about the
Speaker 1: methodology in the paper. Um, but suffice to say they
Speaker 1: gave them all an irrefutable death so as to study
Speaker 1: what came next. The mice, I know they killed by
Speaker 1: cervical dislocation, which is the humane way you're supposed to
Speaker 1: execute a mouse in the lab. You dislocate the skull
Speaker 1: from the spine. They're just like in an action movie
Speaker 1: with like Geene Claude van Dam with his hands, Like
Speaker 1: Steven Seagal does that right, Oh yeah, he grabs somebody's
Speaker 1: head and just breaks it off, just this casual little movement.
Speaker 1: It always does make me a little bit sad to
Speaker 1: read about mice like that, but I think we are
Speaker 1: actually learning things from this kind of research that could
Speaker 1: potentially lead to medical research two very useful applications in
Speaker 1: the real world. So after they euthanize these animals as
Speaker 1: as they said, Uh, they took samples and they leaned
Speaker 1: in for a closer look, observing the non random up
Speaker 1: regulation of certain genes. And that's important here because it's
Speaker 1: not just like, oh, the everything's out of order and
Speaker 1: things are clicking on and off randomly. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that is worth noting. So it wasn't just like all
Speaker 1: the genes started just kind of lighting up as they
Speaker 1: noticed specific genes are being up regulated at this time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's not like, oh, the chicken's head is cut
Speaker 1: off and it's just running. It's no, it's more like
Speaker 1: the chicken's head is cut off, but it's running specifically
Speaker 1: to a bar across town to get a drink or something. Um.
Speaker 1: And so so they sorted the genes into several different categories.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna and I and we're not gonna
Speaker 1: go through all of the genes in all of the categories,
Speaker 1: but just the categorization they rolled out, I think it's
Speaker 1: very illuminating stress, immunity, inflammation, apoptosis, solute ion, protein transport,
Speaker 1: embryonic development, epigenetic regulation, and cancer. Okay, so one part
Speaker 1: of their results that is not so surprising is that
Speaker 1: a lot of the gene expression that you see continuing
Speaker 1: after death is related to emergencies happening within the body. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: shock emergency. They're concerned with stimulating inflammation and the immune system.
Speaker 1: I think these are the police and firefighters that are
Speaker 1: swamping the post apocalyptic city, right. The genes performed tasks
Speaker 1: such as spurring inflammation, firing up the immune system, and
Speaker 1: counteracting stress in the organism, just doing their job in
Speaker 1: the face of cataclysm, even though there's actually no hope. UM. Specifically,
Speaker 1: just give you a taste of some of the specifics.
Speaker 1: You know, that kind of makes sense, even though there's
Speaker 1: no hope. The cell doesn't really know there's no hope.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not his job. This is doing his
Speaker 1: job that all the other stuffs above his pay grade. Uh. Specifically,
Speaker 1: the stress response genes were assigned to three groups. UH, heat, shock, protein,
Speaker 1: hypoxia related, and other responses such as oxidative stress. Hypoxia
Speaker 1: of course would be oxygen deprivation. Yeah, your cells know
Speaker 1: how to respond when they're not getting the oxygen they
Speaker 1: need exactly and also sorts not even in both organisms
Speaker 1: UM organismal death activated heat shock, hypoxia, and other stress
Speaker 1: genes which varied in the timing and duration of up
Speaker 1: regulation within and between organisms. But so they set off
Speaker 1: the stress responses death. Yeah, and all that that makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: totally totally on board. That makes total sense that these
Speaker 1: genes would be firing up in this time of chaos
Speaker 1: and unrest. But the really surprising thing was the embryonic
Speaker 1: gene activity. Developmental genes that normally helps scalp the embryo,
Speaker 1: but they aren't needed after birth, and that the possible
Speaker 1: reason here is because and this is according to the authors,
Speaker 1: is that cellular conditions and newly dead corpses resemble those
Speaker 1: in embryos. And there's something about that man that manages
Speaker 1: to be both comforting and grotesque at the same time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. So you might be wondering, like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: why how could this happen? That you have developmental genes
Speaker 1: that are, you know, not normally expressed in life. So
Speaker 1: these genes that help you develop as an embryo, they
Speaker 1: remain a part of your genome. They're still there, but
Speaker 1: they're known, they're they're quote silenced, which means they're regulated
Speaker 1: in such a way that they no longer undergo gene expression. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're still there. They're just turned off. But in organismal death,
Speaker 1: all those off switches just sort of get opened right
Speaker 1: back up. They switch back on. These silence genes are
Speaker 1: set free to be loud and proud. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: it's crazy to think about. But along with that, so
Speaker 1: we've got development genes, embryonic genes. You know, these are
Speaker 1: causing the development of body tissues, cell division. One thing
Speaker 1: you might not be surprised to see. Going along with
Speaker 1: that is genes that are related to cancer. Yes, several
Speaker 1: cancer causing genes also activated and at this result, according
Speaker 1: to the authors, could possibly explain why some individuals who
Speaker 1: received transplants from the recently deceased have higher have a
Speaker 1: higher risk of cancer. Now I didn't actually know this fact,
Speaker 1: I was. I was not really aware of that either,
Speaker 1: but yeah, according to the author is apparently people who
Speaker 1: receive like an organ transplant from a recently deceased person,
Speaker 1: you die in an accident, they take your organs, give
Speaker 1: them to someone who needs them. You're more likely to
Speaker 1: experience cancer like a tumor in those organs. So that
Speaker 1: that would seem to make sense if the death response
Speaker 1: in the overall body triggers some kind of genetic activity
Speaker 1: within these organs that sets off the cancer program. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of like communication transfer between the
Speaker 1: two worlds, between the living world and the post death world,
Speaker 1: the post apocalyptic. It's kind of like if your local
Speaker 1: neighborhood was going to hire a neighborhood watch and they
Speaker 1: hired the Brotherhood of Steel from the Games. You know
Speaker 1: they're They're from a totally different time with a totally
Speaker 1: different set of values. Okay, I wanted to read one
Speaker 1: quote from the paper that I thought was very illustrative
Speaker 1: of what we would have expected from this kind of
Speaker 1: study and what we found instead. So the author's right quote.
Speaker 1: We initially thought that sudden death of a vertebrate would
Speaker 1: be analogous to a car driving down the highway and
Speaker 1: running out of gas. For a short time, the engine
Speaker 1: pistons will move up and down, and spark plugs will spark,
Speaker 1: but eventually the car will grind to a halt end
Speaker 1: quote die. Yet in our study we find hundreds of
Speaker 1: genes are upregulated many hours post mortem, with some e g.
Speaker 1: And then they give the names of some genes that
Speaker 1: are especially interesting here upregulated days after organismal death. This
Speaker 1: finding is surprising because in our car analogy, one would
Speaker 1: not expect window wipers to suddenly turn on and the
Speaker 1: horn to honk several days after running out of gas.
Speaker 1: So that that communicates the you know, the the energy
Speaker 1: bankruptcy problem. You don't have energy to do anything with
Speaker 1: anymore at the at the total system level, so you
Speaker 1: would expect just nothing to happen anymore. But apparently if
Speaker 1: there's still energy within some cells in the body, you know,
Speaker 1: still some local energy that can be used to do something,
Speaker 1: the body is going to do something with it. And uh.
Speaker 1: This also they pointed out that since we saw this, uh,
Speaker 1: this post mortem up regulations, post mortem gene expression happening
Speaker 1: in both mice and zebra fish, that's interesting. It happened
Speaker 1: in both of these very different organisms. It's reasonable to
Speaker 1: assume that other multicellular eukaryotes, so you know, uh, organisms
Speaker 1: with a cell nucleus that have multiple cells like us,
Speaker 1: will show the same kind of phenomenon. It's not just
Speaker 1: an artifact of one branch of the tree of life.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of weird, like, so what if that
Speaker 1: includes humans? So this continued gene expression after death leads
Speaker 1: to some really bizarre questions. I want to quote one
Speaker 1: that they bring up in the paper. What would happen
Speaker 1: if we arrested the process of dying by providing nutrients
Speaker 1: and oxygen to these tissues they're talking about tissues that
Speaker 1: show continued gene expression after death. Quote, it might be
Speaker 1: possible for cells to revert back to life, or take
Speaker 1: some interesting path to differentiating into something new, or lose
Speaker 1: differentiation altogether, such as in cancer. I'm imagining, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: the post death expression of the genome reawakened into a
Speaker 1: living organism. This would make a great sci fi movie.
Speaker 1: That the Thanato transcriptome man, I like it. The the
Speaker 1: the idea I'm kind of envisioning here based on this
Speaker 1: is essentially you could take a newly deceased individual and
Speaker 1: if not keep their body alive, at least keep certain
Speaker 1: tissues alive, keep certain there are certain aspects of their
Speaker 1: body remain living even though the brain is dead, even
Speaker 1: though the body is essentially dead as well. I mean,
Speaker 1: right now, I think the the organ preservation regime is well,
Speaker 1: it's preservation. You know. They want to get the organ
Speaker 1: into very cold uh, too cold conditions so that it's
Speaker 1: uh sort of freezes up and doesn't undergo too much
Speaker 1: cell death. But yeah, what would it mean to to
Speaker 1: take tissues that are still showing gene expression and give
Speaker 1: them something to work with, put some energy back into
Speaker 1: the bank. I live, I die, I live again. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we we can actually get some interesting ideas out of
Speaker 1: this that might be useful in in medicine or in
Speaker 1: forensics even I mean, first of all, just a broadsense.
Speaker 1: It allows us to better understand life itself, because despite
Speaker 1: humanity's tendency to define death is this outside force is
Speaker 1: a thing that happens to our body, even as a
Speaker 1: personified force. Um. Despite all of this, death is something
Speaker 1: our bodies do, Okay, And to understand how life behaves
Speaker 1: at or even past the death point is to better
Speaker 1: understand how life works. I mean, I would say ultimately,
Speaker 1: understanding death is is one of the most important things
Speaker 1: in understanding what the boundaries of life are. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, our earliest understanding of what
Speaker 1: is necessary to sustain life must have come from observations
Speaker 1: about what specific deprivations lead to death. Yeah, like oops
Speaker 1: that I held that guy underwater for a little bit
Speaker 1: too long, apparently, and he's no longer alive. I guess
Speaker 1: we can't live underwater. Yeah, exactly so. Deprivation of air
Speaker 1: leads to death within minutes, deprivation of water within day.
Speaker 1: His deputation of food or sleep can mean death within weeks.
Speaker 1: If I take this this bone from a taper and
Speaker 1: beat this other humanoid with it, they cease to function.
Speaker 1: I guess we can't. We can't. That's actually a question
Speaker 1: you wouldn't normally think to ask. But why does that happen?
Speaker 1: Can you imagine at the troglodyte level, You know, we're
Speaker 1: very very early human trying to figure out what it
Speaker 1: is about massive blood loss and beating that causes a
Speaker 1: person to stop moving. It's it's one of This is
Speaker 1: the type of question I encounter a lot now with
Speaker 1: a four year old, not specifically about violent apes beating
Speaker 1: each other to death. I haven't let him watch the
Speaker 1: two thousand and one yet, but but I get a
Speaker 1: lot of questions where I'm forced to reevaluate just basic
Speaker 1: realities of life. Uh, such as you know, my son
Speaker 1: will asked, why do we lock the door at night? Well,
Speaker 1: we don't want people coming in the house while we're asleep.
Speaker 1: Why not? Why not? And that's a terrifying question to
Speaker 1: be asked because you can't really answer it for a
Speaker 1: four year old. But but questions like that about just
Speaker 1: every aspect of the natural world um as, as Louis c.
Speaker 1: K points out in his stand up, you you end
Speaker 1: up in a very existentially problematic place eventually, where you're
Speaker 1: making arguments like, well, some things are and some things
Speaker 1: are not, and then you just have to cut off
Speaker 1: the questioning and to change the subject ontological crisis brought
Speaker 1: on by the questioning of children. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: other interesting areas here is of course, in the area forensics.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I didn't even think of when I first
Speaker 1: started reading this. Yeah. So one thing you'll notice if
Speaker 1: you look at this paper is that there are expression.
Speaker 1: There's gene expression charted onto time. So you can chart
Speaker 1: the transcription of certain genes after death by looking at
Speaker 1: the amount of m R and A or something like
Speaker 1: that after certain periods of time after the organism dies. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing you could do with this is take those
Speaker 1: time charts and you know, do them enough that you
Speaker 1: have a pretty rigorous idea of exactly what the numbers
Speaker 1: should be at what points after death, how long it
Speaker 1: takes and you can figure out based on the amount
Speaker 1: of m R and A or something like that in
Speaker 1: the tissue sample, how long it has been since the
Speaker 1: organismal death occurred, since this organism died. Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: you have kind of a timeline of genetic up regulation
Speaker 1: that you can look to and you say, all right,
Speaker 1: when did the when did John Doe here expire? Well,
Speaker 1: let's see what Let's see what his genes are doing,
Speaker 1: and and then we'll compare to the chart, and then
Speaker 1: we'll have a very definite idea potentially when he died.
Speaker 1: And of course that's something that now we don't always
Speaker 1: have a great way of doing that. When one of
Speaker 1: the articles we read, I know pointed out that, you know,
Speaker 1: forensic investigators are often trying to like look at last
Speaker 1: made phone calls or texts or something like that in
Speaker 1: order to establish time of death. I think would be
Speaker 1: great to have a much more solid or the I
Speaker 1: think they might look at body temperature, but but it's
Speaker 1: not always solid. You would be great to have a
Speaker 1: really really reliable way to know exactly when somebody died.
Speaker 1: So that's another big possibility here for this paper. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's an entire separate paper that that looks extensively at
Speaker 1: the forensic applications. Yeah, and so I imagine at some
Speaker 1: point there is going to be a whole blooming science
Speaker 1: of the Thanato transcript home. I have to imagine this
Speaker 1: is going to inspire a lot more research and hopefully
Speaker 1: a few horror movies as well. Yes, all right, so
Speaker 1: there you have it. Um, this is definitely a topic
Speaker 1: where we wanted to make sure we didn't go to
Speaker 1: in depth. That the paper itself is is ultimately very readable,
Speaker 1: uh and fascinating, but it and it's and it's open.
Speaker 1: It's open so you can look it up by the side,
Speaker 1: readily available. But but it does go into into into depth.
Speaker 1: It does list out a lot of genes and to
Speaker 1: and specify exactly what they're doing, more so than it
Speaker 1: made sense to include here. But we wanted to give
Speaker 1: you a nice overview of these findings and uh can
Speaker 1: give you an appreciation for where it might be heading.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out more
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you I don't
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Speaker 1: we're doing. And if you want to get in touch
Speaker 1: with this directly, as always, you can email us at
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Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Maybe later they think they
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