The Tropicana Hotel's New Non-Smoking Message

As part of its weird and grotesque and fascinating 'Bodies' exhibition (just opened at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas) is an appeal (strange for a casino) to stop smoking:

Also on the walls were anatomical facts such as: "On average, a pack of cigarettes takes 2 hours and 20 minutes off your life. We'd like you to be around longer. Leave your cigarettes here and stop smoking now!"

Next to the inevitable display of a healthy lung next to a smoker's lung is a large plastic container where people can make the decision to quit smoking right then and there. (This seems like such an odd message to be placed in a casino that employs hundreds of workers who must work in secondhand smoke....)

In 1988, at the University of Arizona, I got a chance to see tissue samples from smokers' and non-smokers' lungs, and I was startled to find out how similar they both were. There is a process called 'pleural drift,' where deposited particles are continually removed by macrophages (cells that swallow and digest foreign objects, including bacteria and dust) and transported to the pleural lining on the outer surface of the lung. So, the outside of smokers' lungs - pretty danged dirty, but the inside - ta da! - pristine! Dr. Sobonya said that if the particle clearance rate diminished below about 99%, lung disease and death would soon follow.

Let's hear it for the macrophages!

There was other weird lung stuff too - the body likes to store hemoglobin there, for some inscrutable lung reason.

Even doctors don't really understand the human body all that well......