Vsauce, I’m Jake and I’ve been thinking
a lot about mutation, not just because of X-Men Apocalypse coming out but because I
am a mutant...well at least part of me is. Cancer is a mutation of a cell, specifically
the DNA inside the cell is damaged. That cell doesn’t stop dividing and growing and growing,
faster and faster until we get a lump of cancer cells like this, a tumor, my tumor. Unfortunately
it didn’t lead to me having any enhanced special abilities like mutations do in the
world of X-Men. But that didn’t stop me from trying, I had to go to 8 weeks of radiation
therapy, and if I’ve learned anything from comics, that exposure to radiation should
have at least given me some sort of physically mutated power. It didn’t; but what I did
find interesting is that we use radiation to cure cancer, yet radiation can also cause
it. Non-Ionizing radiation like infrared, microwave
or radio waves don’t cause tissue damage but ionizing radiation: gamma rays, x-rays
and ultraviolet light can and when it does, it damages DNA. Sometimes the damage is repaired
and nothing changes. Other times the damage is not repaired and the damaged cell dies.
Occasionally, the damage is not repaired but the cell lives on with mutated DNA. The aim
of radiation therapy is to expose just the affected area to so much radiation, about
10,000 times the normal amount, that it kills every cell. Since you started watching this video you’ve
had at least 7 instances of DNA damage and by the end of the day you’ll have had over
10,000. The good news is that your cells usually fixes it, if the cell just doesn’t die first.
But mutations happen all the time. A human has an average of 60 at birth and a lot of
them developed over centuries: For example, originally we all had brown eyes. Six to ten
thousand years ago, a genetic mutation caused one person to have blue eyes. And they’re
the one common ancestor for everyone with blue eyes today. The truth is we are all mutants,
however some are more mutant than others. Timothy Dreyer has incredibly dense bones
due to a disease called Sclerosteosis. Because of a specific mutation in the sclerostin gene,
Timothy and around 100 other people have such thick bones that out of 60 patients surveyed,
none had ever broken one despite living normal active lives, and one had even been hit by
a car. Then you have someone like Michel Lotito,
who we’ve talked about before, that was able to eat things like 18 bikes, 15 shopping
carts, 7 televisions and 1 Cessna airplane. This was because of two things: one a disease
he had called Pica where you have the urge to eat inedible objects and because of a mutation
his stomach lining was twice as thick as an average person’s. But let’s talk about pain, eating something
like a bicycle would probably hurt going down even if broken into small pieces. And that’s
where the mutation CIP comes in: Congenital insensitivity to pain. As the name suggests, it is a condition where
the person can not feel physical pain. There is a fantastic New York Times article about
a girl named Ashlyn Blocker who has CIP and it chronicles how she and her family live
with it. They talk about how Ashlyn dropped a spoon into a pot of boiling water and then
she stuck her hand in to retrieve it. She didn’t feel anything but just because you
can’t feel it, doesn’t mean it won’t cause permanent damage. For example take Steven
Pete who discusses how his parents discovered he had it: Let’s imagine something, let’s
imagine we can’t feel pain. I’m sure it is a
fantasy that most of us have had before but
think about what it would actually be like. Steven Pete has done so much damage to his
left leg without knowing, that he can’t walk properly anymore. Or what if you had
an internal injury? How would you ever know? Timothy Dreyer might never break a bone because
of sclerosteosis, but the increased pressure on the skull could cause instantaneous death. And there are plenty of other mutations that
on the surface might seem like a superpower, like having incredible height similar to the
almost 9ft tall Robert Wadlow, or the mutation that causes Ehlers–Danlos syndrome which
gives your skin hyperelasticity. But all of these come with a trade off. In Robert Wadlow’s
case, his circulatory system couldn’t sustain his ever increasing height and he died when
he was 22. But there is some good that comes from these
mutations: by looking at the genetics of people with sclerosteosis, doctors are trying to
create a drug that increases bone growth to help patients that have osteoporosis - where
their bones become brittle and fragile. And with CIP, researchers are trying to figure
out a way to use this mutation as a painkiller. I think Steven Pete says it best And we tend to say that someone is a superhero
or that someone is special because they can run faster, jump higher or swim longer than
an average person. But then you have people like Steven Pete, or Timothy Dreyer, or the
people I saw every today at the cancer center, who have such incredible strength, the fact
that they continue to push and continue to live even with such immense odds, the fact
that they hope that what they face, what they live with, might help others, is incredible,
is super. To take the analogy one step further, these people with the help of doctors, are
using their super power to help defeat villains like osteoporosis or chronic pain. In pop culture we call mutants super heroes.
And I think in real life, these people are no different. And as always, thanks for watching.
Is Vsauce 3 made for teenagers? I feel like 2 and 3 are targeted towards a younger audience.