Zombie allusions: They just keep on coming-“animatedly challenged” and like cancer, having "a degree of biological instability"

UAF Hosts Lecture on new Zombie and Cancer Research

Ivan Kvapil/Sun Star Reporter
Nov. 5, 2013

"Harris, a UAF professor of Physiology and Neuroscience, started his discussion about zombies by insisting that they are not in fact undead but merely, “animatedly challenged.” His reasoning was that if we want to understand zombies properly, we cannot be doing it with anything supernatural in mind and have to do it from a purely scientific standpoint.

Harris mentioned some interesting things about zombies, such as the fact that they only require 5 percent  of the metabolic requirements of regular humans.This makes them more akin to reptiles than humans, but also helps understand why they can take a bullet to the chest and still function even though they may not have the same metabolic requirements as humans. In short, about 95 percent of a zombie would have to be destroyed before it is permanently killed.

Podlutsky, a professor of Molecular Biology spoke next on cancer, and how it is surprisingly related to zombies, such as how cancer is both zombies and cancer have a degree of biological instability, cancer cells being unstable by themselves and the organs of zombies being unstable due to a lack of tissue regeneration. The most surprising one is that both are incapable of killing themselves. Zombies won’t because they don’t have the mental capacity to, but with cancer, even if the body has sent an order to other parts of the body to start killing the cancer, cancer will not listen."