Can a Doctor Who Doctor ACTUALLY EXIST? (pt. 1, Biology)

"Hello, Internet. Welcome to FILM THEORY, where we just took a vote and decided that "FILM & TV Theory" was just too long of a name. So, just go with it."

- MatPat

'Can a Doctor Who Doctor ACTUALLY EXIST? (pt. 1, Biology) (subtitled Can he Exist? pt. 1') is the 1st episode of Film Theory and its 1st episode on Doctor Who on The Film Theorists.

Description
''Grab your Sonic Screwdriver and be on the lookout for Daleks because we're out to see whether a time-hopping Doctor a la Doctor Who would be a physical possibility...or at the very least, whether a human could fit the bill and become a Timelord. There's A LOT to cover, from biology to technology to, you know, TIME HOPPING, so it'll have to be done in chunks. This time, we're taking a crack at Doctor Who's BIOLOGY. The Doctor has an interesting set of characteristics, but could a human match those? The answers will surprise you!''

Transcript
So, for those of you who haven't drank the who-laid yet, the show two depicts the adventures of a mysterious and eccentric Time Lord, known as the Doctor, who travels through time and space in his time machine, the TARDIS. Other things to know, the Doctor regenerates with a new face every now and then when his two-hearted body is about to die. They're currently on the 12th Doctor, or 13th, depends on how you look at it. The Doctor often travels with his companions, facing alien foes and bizarre scenarios, and generally just helping people out and righting wrong-doings, and there you go. I just caught you up on 813 episodes spanning 52 years in the space of one opening paragraph, but one question all the whovians on tumblr want to know is whether a real-life Time Lord can exist. In other words, we're gonna look at what makes a Doctor a Doctor, and from there discern whether or not those things are possible in the realm of human experience. ‘But MatPat’, I hear you're angry blog rant now. ‘The Doctor is an alien’, and yes, I know that, but since the Doctor looks like a human man in every single regeneration, despite having any alien race ever conceived as a potential model, and yet still ends up being a human, we're sticking with that. So perhaps the better question for today's episode is can a human fit the bill and become a Time Lord? So, let's look at some of the things that make this guy, and this guy, and these guys, and maybe this guy, tick. One: the Doctor has two working hearts that beat at 170 beats per minute. Two: he has an internal body temperature of 15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Three: obvi he travels through time and space in a time machine. Four: he has a sonic screwdriver which functions as a do-it-all tool, and five: he regenerates into a new body when he's dying and then lives for hundreds of years. That is a lot, and even for a show whose average episode is five times that of most other YouTube videos, we can't cover all that in one episode, so let's been some time today focusing on one element: the Doctor’s biology. Let’s begin with the two heart thing, otherwise known as a binary vascular system. Believe it or not, there are actually numerous documented incidences of actual humans being born with two hearts. This baby born in Zimbabwe in 2013 for instance, has two hearts, but also three legs, four feet, and two heads, and some other things that we don't need to go into here, but that's not really what we're looking for. More commonly, humans who have a faulty heart get a second heart implanted on top of the first one. This is called a heterotopic heart transplant, and is done so that the weak heart can rest and heal. Take for instance Hannah Clark, now sixteen, who had a second heart grafted onto her own heart to save her life when she was only two years old. Her original heart had time to reset, rebuild, and is now working just fine on its own, or how about the case of the 71 year-old man in Italy, who lived through dueling heart attacks in his two hearts? The trouble in this case was that the man developed two independent heart rhythms when the old heart repaired itself. To cure this apparent dysrhythmia doctors gave him medication, which caused both hearts to shut down. Don't worry, they figured it all out and revived him with a defibrillator to both hearts. He's alive and well, and drinking plenty of Italian red wine, which is actually supposed to be really good for your hearts. So humans can live with two hearts if they're specially implanted by non who doctors, but we're talking about being born naturally with two hearts. Is that possible? Well get this, it's not only possible, we've all lived with two hearts at some point in our lives. When we humans are in the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts. This stage is called the heart primordial. The two hearts do eventually fuse together into one heart with four chambers, but yes, at some point we've all had a binary vascular system. So knowing all this, some curious scientists in the 20s and 30s were able to keep the heart from fusing in some lab frogs, and those little green guys did grow up with two hearts and no issues, which I'm assuming just made them more loving toward their frog parents. In humans though no similar experiments have been done, for obvious reasons, and in the case of heart defects non who doctors are able to find them and fix them in utero, so there aren't any documented cases. Still, we have been shown to be able to live with two hearts. Mark one for yes to Timelords existing. So how about 170 beats per minute thing? Seems kind of fast, doesn't it? Well again, that's a big point in the yes column. The heart is a muscle, and it's contractions are known as heartbeats, right? Nothing earth shattering there. Well the refractory period of cardiac muscle, or the time it takes between pulses is between 250 and 300 milliseconds. This means that the heart can be at its fastest at 200 to 240 beats per minute. If your heartbeat lingers at those high of rates, then you've probably got some issues to attend to, because it means the heart isn't pumping blood efficiently, or it just means that you're a small child as small children's hearts beat faster, but regardless, that was pretty easy to prove. Another point in the Time Lord category. You can have a heartbeat at over 170 beats per minute. So now let's move away from the heart. There's one more biologic component to our Time Lord: his incredibly low body temperature. I mean as winter fresh commercials have always reminded me “it's scorching 98.6 degrees, inside your mouth”, though, can you drop that by nearly 40 degrees and still live to match the doctors 59 degree internal temperature? Well let's see. Us humans aren't like Gallifreians, we're incredibly sensitive creatures. Mild hypothermia sets in at 95 degrees Fahrenheit, amnesia at 91, and loss of consciousness at 82. Any body temp below 70 and you're pretty much screwed. However, there is one recorded instance of an adult surviving a body temperature of 56.7 degrees: Anna Elizabeth Johansson Bagenholm, a Swedish radiologist- or Time Lord in disguise maybe- who survived 80 minutes in freezing water after a skiing accident left her trapped under a layer of ice. During that time she had extreme hypothermia, and her body temperature dropped to 13.7 degrees Celsius, 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit. After being rescued and transported by helicopter to a hospital, more than a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours to save Anna's life. She woke up 10 days later after the accident, paralyzed from the neck down and then spent two months recovering in an intensive care unit. The miraculous thing though is, she's now almost a hundred percent recovered, and that was the lowest body temperature in history until another Swede, a seven-year-old named Stella, survived nearly drowning and getting down to 13 degrees Celsius. That's 55.4 degrees Fahrenheit. So what have we learned here today? That there is something super weird about people almost freezing to death in Sweden. You be careful out there PewDiePie. Oh, and we also learned that body temperature is very very important, and we can't really function with just a few degrees of drop, but for the sake of the Doctor Who argument, we have two survivors with Time Lordian temperatures, so put a point in the Time Lord column, but just barely. Maybe like .6 of a point or something, and there you have it, we've just covered the easy stuff. We haven't even tackled the complexities of time and space.

Trivia

 * The music in this episode was provided by several people.
 * The opening teaser was a reference to this.