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  • 2 days ago
How many organs can you live without?

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Transcript
00:00How many organs can you live without? Let's start with the easy ones. Your appendix helps
00:05fight bad gut bacteria, so it's not useless, but let's chuck it. We can also take out your gallbladder
00:10as your liver still makes enough bile to digest your food and can even help cover for your spleen
00:15if we take that out too. What about the big players? We can't remove your liver completely
00:20as your body will stop breaking down toxins and put you in a coma. If you were healthy,
00:25we could cut out 70% of it and it'd soon regenerate, except yours is already covering
00:30for lost organs. But we can take one kidney, no problem. Around 40% of kidney transplants come
00:36from live donors who live long healthy lives after. And while blood is pretty vital, we can take up
00:42to 20% of it along with 10% of your bone marrow. It only takes around 3 weeks for marrow and around
00:476 for red blood cells to regenerate. We could take more, but it's probably a bad idea after
00:52everything we took and there are some organs you really can't do without. Stop your heart
00:57and your brain cells start dying within 5 minutes. But even this is possible if we get a machine
01:02to pump your blood. We can give you a new one we stored in this machine that keeps it beating
01:07outside the body for up to 12 hours. Sow the new one in, reset it with a jolt, and you're good to go.

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