Bad Movie Beatdown/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* Minor quibble, but since he normally [[Shown Their Work|show his work]] and I'm a biochem major, it bugged me: in his review of ''[[Mission: Impossible]] 2'', he snarks at the movie for saying the supervirus destroys red blood cells, saying that makes no sense since viruses use red blood cells to replicate. Thing is, a lot of viruses ''do just that'' to the cells they infect. While there are some that sort of "bud off," leaving the membrane of the cell intact, most viruses basically just hijack the cell's protein-synthesis machinery and produce more and more viruses until the whole thing falls apart and they're all released.<ref>And then there's the herpesviruses like chicken pox that splice themselves into the host's genome, but we won't go into that.</ref> For instance, this is why the HIV virus damages the host's immune system so badly; it reproduces in white blood cells (responsible for fighting infection), and kills them in the process. While it's true the movie probably needed a biology lesson, viruses destroying their host cells is not one of the reasons why.

** I haven't seen either [[MI 2]] or the review in question, but is he criticising the destruction of the cell or that it's red blood cells? Because if it's ''red'' blood cells, I guess the criticism would be that red blood cells lack a nucleus and most organelles, including, I presume, those that would allow a virus to be replicated.