We are all Frankensteinian, in that we all have the capacity to regrow dead or damaged tissue in our bodies. But even Frankenstein, once regrown from dead tissue, could control his circadian rhythms.
Everyone has little pockets of stem cells here and there capable of regenerating parts of their body. I follow cardiac regeneration research, and there are stem cells in the brain and organs as well as the bone marrow. My personal goal is to harness all my stem cells and totally have a new, regnerated, head-to-toe Swivelchair, and stick around for another generation. Of course, that probably poses health risks, because the longer you live, the more you’re likely to really irk someone who is violent and vindictive, and that could be a problem. But I digress.
Bone marrow stem cells are released into the circulation and home into sites of injury or else just decide to mature into blood cells, like white blood cells or red ones. This is important — white blood cells fight infection, and red blood cells carry oxygen, just for a start.
How often your body releases stem cells to get out of the bone marrow and go to work in the systemic circulation has now been keyed to a circadian clock. Méndez-Ferrer et al., in February’s Nature, (cite below) studied mice and found neural signals that would go to the bone marrow microenvironment, and signal stem cell mobilization. (Most mice live and work at night, which is one caveat, but I’m more or less nocturnal, so there you go).
Of course, with daylight savings time (at least in the US), we must now all readjust our stem cell clocks. If you are traveling during a time switch (springing forward or falling back), and going to a different time zone, good luck with that. Jet lag + daylight savings time = stem cell mobilization out of sync with your life.
Given that daylight savings time is of dubious value anyway, one could query whether the health effects are worth any economic benefits.
As you can see, my grammatical stem cells are obviously not homing into the grammar-portion of my brain, given the unwieldy title of this post.
I wonder if this stem cell release has something to do with who is a night-owl and who is an early bird?
Ménndez-Ferrer, S., Lucas, D., Battista, M., Frenette, P.S. (2008). Haematopoietic stem cell release is regulated by circadian oscillations. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature06685
This citation requires a subscription to see the whole paper. If the research was funded by taxpayer (and I don’t know if it was), imo, the research results should be free.
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