Poor Steve Austin. Six million dollars for a super-cyborg seems ridiculously low nowadays. Putting exactly how much it cost to rebuild him in the title of his show was a big mistake. They should have handled it the classic way:
“I’m going to write down how much it cost to rebuild him on this piece of paper.”
Then just show the reaction show of Oscar Goldman’s eyebrows raising in suprise.
To be fair, $6 million in 1972 adjusted for inflation is about $30 million today.
Hmm, I got another thought about the fact that DNA never changes within one’s life. We know that diabetes is inheritable so if a person who didn’t have blood history of diabetes, gets diabetes during his life, his later offspring will then have the potential to inherit diabetes. Didn’t some DNA change there along the way or have I missed some facts?
No, his DNA did not change. Diabetes is not inheritable. A predisposition to diabetes can be. If your parents had a predisposition to diabetes, and develop diabetes later in life, you might have inherited that predisposition. But your parent’s DNA didn’t change.
For a long time it was thought that acquired characteristics could be passed on to your offspring. A blacksmith who develops strong arm muscles would have children born with stronger arm muscles. A giraffe that stretched its neck to reach higher leaves would have offspring with longer necks. And so on.
But this theory has been disproven, try reading this article: Lamarckism - Wikipedia
You’re consistently misunderstanding the role of DNA in the body. There’s no feedback mechanism where changes in phenotype result in changes to the genotype, either in somatic cells or germ line cells. There are changes in gene expression, meaning which genes are active and which genes are inactive. But the genes themselves aren’t rewritten.
For instance, consider how puberty works. Around your teenage years, suddenly your body gets flooded with hormones and physical changes start to happen. Males grow facial and body hair, they start putting on muscles, their voices deepen, and so on. Female grow body hair, their hips widen, their breasts accumulate fat, and so on.
But none of these body changes involve a change in the DNA of the organism. All that happens is changes in the regulation of the DNA. Hair follicle cells get a message to grow thicker hair, but the hair follicle cells have exactly the same DNA as before, only now genes that were inactive during childhood are active.
The same thing occurs with inherited predispositions to certain diseases. Suppose you have a family history of a certain type of cancer. That doesn’t mean that if you finally get that particular type of cancer your cellular DNA changes. What it really means is that you’ve inherited since conception a particular weak form of some enyzme that regulates cellular repair. People with normal versions of the enzyme can repair a particular type of damage, but you’ve inherited a broken or weaker form of the enzyme, and eventually your body is no longer able to keep that damage under control and you start expressing the disease. Your DNA hasn’t changed, you’ve still got the same DNA you always had.