Man Takes Up Internal Farming

RockDoctor writes "'A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.' Just that summary should tell you enough to work out most of the rest of the details, but it does raise a number of questions unaddressed by the article: How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system? What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated? I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company."

Comments

crap...

[bsDaemon]

I knew I shouldn't have eaten the seeds to give myself an edge in all those watermelon eating contests :(

Re:crap...

[FatdogHaiku]

.... oh god, I just realized I had peanut butter last night!

Quick! Have someone lick your nuts and see if they taste salty!

good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed

[snookerhog]

Seriously though, INABotanist so could someone elaborate on how long a sprout like this could survive devoid of light for photosynthesis?

I assume that if it went untreated it would have just died and either been absorbed or caused a nasty infection.

Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed

[TheJokeExplainer]

Seeds don't need light when they're just sprouting. That's why you can plant them buried under soil, then they start to sprout.

Think of it as them subsisting on their "egg yolk" (the twin "bean" parts) while they're still in the process of sprouting. As the plant use them up in sprouting and forming leaves, the "bean" parts shrivel up and then the plant starts to rely on its roots and leaves for food and water.

What the article describes most likely looks more like a bean sprout than a full-blown pea plant.

Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed

[sonnejw0]

A seedling is capable of germinating without sunlight, because the fruit (the pea) has within it all the necessary nutrients to sprout.

Photosynthesis serves the function of producing sugar from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide by transfering an electron through several enzymatic structures. It is conceivable that (in order of likelihood), a) the half-inch long seedling was still being fully fed from the fruit, b) simple diffusion of sugar from the blood stream was able to supply the plant with enough sugar to sustain itself, c) free radicals were able to diffuse into the seedling's tissue, donating an electron to the photosynthetic chain.

"Scientists Grow Plants without Sunlight or Water": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-grow-plants-wi

Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed

[Flea of Pain]

Well it works like this. First if uses its existing nutrients to grow high enough to reach sunlight. Then it starts photosynthesis. If they'd left it in him, he'd have ended up like this

Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed

[Reziac]

"Scientists Grow Plants without Sunlight or Water" -- I'm wondering how this might be applied to limited-resource gardening, such as aboard spacecraft (wouldn't be energy-efficient, but might be nutrient-efficient). No doubt some are already wondering how to apply it to the pot plants in mom's basement, too. ;)

Not to mention... "If I grow pot in my lung, I won't have to smoke it!"

Pine tree lung

[Jodka]

There is a similar case of a pine tree in a lung.

Re:Pine tree lung

[sonnejw0]

Actually, the pine tree in a lung ... that was (obviously) a fake: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/04/russian-man-did-not-aspirate-fir-tree.html But if this pea actually did grow insidiously inside a man's lung, this is actually remarkable in any number of ways. The immune system surely could not handle a pea, it's simply too large. Plants of been around for a lot longer than mammals, and this just goes to show their evolutionary dominance. If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans. Twilight zone stuff.

A plant growing inside a human, able to cause pain and possibly death, much like a virus, brings to mind lots of philosophical questions.

Re:Pine tree lung

[bill_mcgonigle]

If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans.

Except that plants don't have intentions (doesn't take away from a silly horror flick, of course).

Re:Pine tree lung

[bill_mcgonigle]

How did this toxic pollen evolve?

Of course humans have intentions - brains operate differently than bark. It's of course true that the basis for our brains is simple electro-chemical/quantum interactions, but from that base are built ever more complex structures, some of which generate intentions.

To say a brain has no intentions is to say that a city has no neighborhoods because houses are made of wood, stone and metal, which have no neighborhoods. This is a division error.

Re:Pine tree lung

[bill_mcgonigle]

How does anything evolve? What's your point?

Traits occurring through random mutation that are useful for a species to reproduce tend to be picked up, and traits that expend resources that offer no benefit tend to be lost.

The idea that thousands of plant species could have convergently picked up a complex set of traits (poison pollen, communications systems) that were never useful before but required resources to maintain - asymptotically approaches zero.

Synergism of neurons can create inordinately complex results, but that does not create a qualitative upheaval in which "intention" is born. Free will cannot exist without cause-and-effect. If we truly had free will, our actions would have no correlation to our environment at all ... but they do.

Yes, I'm familiar with the Free Will arguments. That Will is predictable, given perfect knowledge of all the inputs and states (including quantum uncertainty) is true, but that knowledge is unattainable, so 'free will' is used to describe an abstraction of the human experience. The same could be said of any of the other human mental states - anger, love, happiness, sadness, calmness, inspiration, depression. That one can explain the hormones or neurotransmitters involved in creating those states does not make the words less useful for describing the human condition.

This isn't superstition, though, it's pragmatism. Sitting around in a nihilistic funk winds up not being a useful exercise. Using these abstractions lets us talk about humanity. Describing the mechanics lets us talk about a human being. Simply describing the anatomy and physiology is insufficient to describe the emergent behavioral features.

My mom used to tell me...

[ITBurnout]

...not to inhale my food. Guess she was right.

Farmville

[kriston]

This Farmville player is asking you for a PEA IN HIS LUNG for his farm!

Re:Farmville

[need4mospd]

Am I the only one that thought of R. Kelly when you said pea in his lung?

Re:This is why you shouldn't eat vegetables

[WrongSizeGlass]

The only reason it grew inside of him is because he's as old as dirt ... as a child you were too young to sprout your own garden.

This really is

[ciderbrew]

a 'Lung'gume.

Hmmm Hmmm. see what I did there.

Re:This is why you shouldn't eat vegetables

[commodore64_love]

The last time I read a story like this, the human was taking immuno-suppressant drugs which allowed the plant to grow without being attacked & killed by white blood cells.

So, we could say...

[garg0yle]

...he's achieved inner peas?

How about internal hookworm farming? Serious!

[droopus]

I was watching one of the weird science documentaries my wife loves and saw one that beats this story by a bit. Jasper Lawrence had severe asthma and allergies and heard an old wives tale that hookworms could force the body's immune system to "cure" the allergies...so he went to Africa, stamped around in feces and got a nice case of hookworm. It worked.

Now, he has set up a business selling hookworms he harvests from his own feces.

So this is what happens...

[ilsaloving]

So this is what happens when you give peas a chance?

A4Q

[blair1q]

How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system?

They didn't have to. The immune system is largely inactive in and oblivious to the airspace of the lung. It would only be when the roots breached the walls and entered the blood that the immune system would get wise.

What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated?

If it had continued to grow and tore a hole in the lung he could have got infection-like symptoms (fevers and aches as the body ramped up production of leukocytes).

If it had died it would become food for bacteria in the air, and it would have decayed in situ. That would have made a gooey mess.

It gave him what TFA called emphysema, or maybe they meant he really has a prior diagnosis for emphysema so he thought this was more of that and didn't do anything with it until it became acute.

He probably would also have contracted (or had and they weren't reporting) a bad case of pneumonia. The more stuff in your lungs that isn't lung, the easier that is.

BTW, BT, DT, and there's not much better in life than to get a result of "it's not cancer it's something weird" when your lungs hurt.

bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company.

Or a lawsuit waiting for him from the trademark-trolling division of Archer-Daniels Midland, for using their logo in his x-rays without paying a royalty.

Lung....

Lunnnnnnggggg....

Lovely, woody word....lunnnnnggg...

Re:A4Q

[naoursla]

I was thinking that Monsanto was going to sue him for using their patented lung-resistant pea seeds.

Re:Plants vs. Zombies 2

[naz404]

Clearly, this was a pre-emptive strike against his impending zombification.

Monsanto is suing him

[goombah99]

Turns out it's a GMO round-up ready pea mutant. Monsanto is suing him for using their genetic material without paying for it.

Re:This is why you shouldn't eat vegetables

[rhyder128k]

There was a young woman from Leeds, who swallowed a packet of seeds. Within the hour, her tits were in flower, and her bottom was covered in weeds. See, I knew I learnt something instructive while at school.