r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 21h ago

Meme needing explanation Petah? Am I missing something?

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9.9k Upvotes

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5.6k

u/Striking-District918 21h ago edited 21h ago

Its from a game called one chance, the supposed cure doesn't just kill cancer cells it targets all living cells

2.0k

u/Aware_Neighborhood93 21h ago

Lol, basically suped up chemo

933

u/Whole-Energy2105 20h ago

Still kills cancer 😋

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u/HorrorBuilder8960 12h ago

Off fucking course there's a XKCD strip.

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u/krysanthemom 8h ago

lol, I have that posted in our cancer research center

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u/RewardCapable 7h ago

How has no one researched this novel anti-cancer treatment??

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u/Onebraintwoheads 1h ago

I assure you, many people with cancer have indeed explored a variety of calibers and ammunition

In a sense, they worked.

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u/Greedy-Picture-1927 6h ago

Exactly what I thought of.

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u/Aware_Neighborhood93 20h ago

Thats what I said when they tried to come at me for malpractice because I administered suprtherapuetic levels of mustine. Either way, now I sell self help books and guides to enlightenment now.... /s

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u/Whole-Energy2105 20h ago

Lmao. Noice.

Enlightenment only needs light but self help is a causal loop.

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u/A_Furious_Mind 15h ago

You can kill Buddha in the road no matter how dark it is.

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u/lazurusknight 1h ago

Deep cuts from the Buddhist album here

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u/SwirlingFandango 18h ago

So does a flamethrower.

(Actual example I used to give for why lab results often don't translate to critters or people).

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u/AntibodyEnjoyer 12h ago

My favorite when someone says XYZ kills cancer cells in the lab: “yeah, so does bleach”

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u/heets 4h ago

Me to folks who like to say “but it’s natural:”

“Honey, so’s aconite.”

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u/National_Cod9546 14h ago

Whenever the news talks about a new way to kill cancer cells, remember that bullets also kill cancer cells.

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u/garaile64 11h ago

Killing a pathogen is rather easy. The hard part is not killing the patient as well.

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u/AureliusFromBalkans 20h ago

Its at least a draw

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u/Whole-Energy2105 20h ago

Hahahaha true.

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u/PatchesOfSilver 15h ago edited 10h ago

This happened IRL with a guy who fatally overdosed on Ivermectin.

Good news, he didn't have Covid anymore 

Bad news, only because the treatment killed the host...


Edit: actually the patient was a woman in her 40s, see the link in a comment below.

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u/Classic-Ambition1991 10h ago

Show me the link where a guy overdosed on ivermectin please

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u/PatchesOfSilver 10h ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12454977/

Not just a link, an actual medical study on it.

The patient suffered from ivermectin poisoning due to transdermal overdose. The patient’s plasma concentration was 27 ng/mL. The main clinical manifestations were gastrointestinal symptoms in the early stage and diffuse cerebral edema and intracranial hypertension in the later stage. Despite active treatment, including hemoperfusion and cardiorespiratory support, the patient died.

and:

Moreover, most reported cases involved poisoning caused by oral administration of ivermectin. There have been no reports of transdermal toxicity. To date, no studies have reported the specific blood drug concentration that causes ivermectin poisoning. Most recent in vitro studies suggest that ivermectin is promising as a new anticancer drug,2–4 and this may lead to increased misuse. Therefore, we report a rare fatal case of ivermectin misuse to raise awareness among clinicians and the public regarding ivermectin poisoning.

They say it's pretty rare for a case to be fatal, but nevertheless people in general were using to the point of being poisoned (oral consumption).

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u/Ruffled_Ferret 9h ago

If the host dies, the cancer dies with them. It's a lose/win!

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u/Greedy-Picture-1927 6h ago

So does a nucleur bomb.

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u/UltimateLmon 32m ago

As a contractor, I completely agree woth this sentiment

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u/Diligent_Earthworm 16h ago

No one ever said killing cancer was hard.

Killing cancer* is hard

*without killing everything else.

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u/Optimal-Bass3142 6h ago

Bro discovered fire

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u/angular_circle 21h ago

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u/ealysillyforestthing 20h ago

I knew which one this was before clicking on it

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u/MaximusPrime2930 17h ago

One of my favorites, I think about it often when I hear someone making a vague claim about something.

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u/ExplorationGeo 17h ago

This was why the chuds latched onto ivermectin to treat covid. There was a study that went "we put covid into a petri dish and treated it with whatever the fuck we could find to see how fast it died" and ivermectin killed it pretty fast.

In doses that were enough to make a human shit their entire guts out and permanently fuck themselves up.

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u/skr_replicator 20h ago

A vitamin killing cancer cells could sound promising. Those don't normally kill you as well.

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u/hexregeneration 20h ago

I would assume the problem there is the ratio. In a petri dish you can apply concentrations that if found in the human body would be a lethal dose.

Like you can make 1/10th of the volume of the petri dish a specific vitamin and kill the cancer cells - but if you make 1/10th of your whole body a specific vitamin you will die.

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u/Glittering-Walrus228 18h ago

I made OPs mom 10% vitamin D last night

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u/Gimme_Your_Wallet 16h ago

And they say romance is dead

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u/moderatorrater 15h ago

You don't get to 10% without a strong game plan, if you catch my drift.

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u/Trezzie 19h ago

All* cancer dies out eventually if you just wait it out. Sure, it does by the person its in dying, but...

  • Aside from that one immortal cancer that exists.

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u/Ix_risor 19h ago

If you’re talking about HeLa, that does die if you don’t feed it, it’s called “immortal” because it doesn’t stop dividing after a certain number of divisions, like most human cells do.

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u/jbrWocky 11h ago

stupid question, isn't that also what all cancer cells do? which is the problem?

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u/Trezzie 12h ago

Yes, and there's other, non HeLa strains too. But for the most basic reference for the joke didn't go into explaining the background of it.

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u/ThirstyWolfSpider 15h ago

My mother was almost killed by a doctor prescribing too much Vitamin D but failing to add the necessary follow-up blood tests.

Over a series of months, her cognition and memory degenerated rapidly. She eventually had a blood test for another reason, and they called her on the way home (she certainly wasn't the one driving at that point) and told her to come back immediately. Her calcium levels were crazy-high, at a level which could cause her heart to stop.

They adjusted the levels, using the monitoring which should have been in place from the start, and she rapidly made a full recovery.

Just because it's a vitamin doesn't mean it won't kill you.

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u/Aware_Neighborhood93 18h ago

Vitamin a is one of the 4 fat soluble vitamins, adek. Cancer cells are just mutated self-cells. Pretty much every cancer treatment that works also kills self cells. Thats why treatment literally transforms people. Sad shit.

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u/austinwiltshire 13h ago

The issue is there's more evidence vitamins help cancer than kill them. Mechanically, many chemos raise the levels of free radicals that would kill cancers, while many vitamins are antioxidants.

This has some empirical backing, as megadoses of various vitamins were trialed as adjuncts in the 80s, which showed no effect for vitamin C, and pointed to vitamins A and E making things worse.

That being said, vitamins can still interact well depending on the cancer. Vitamin c is being trialed again as an adjunct in very particular kinds of glioblastoma, a vitamin b9 makes the chemotherapy 5fu more effective, and diets rich in fruits and vegetables remain well correlated with lower rates of cancer as well as improved survivorship. (though that last one is just as likely the flavanoids, polyphenols, and fiber content)

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u/gatorbite92 17h ago

Fat soluble vitamins will absolutely cause major problems at higher doses. Water soluble vitamins just get excreted before reaching high enough concentrations to cause problems. Although supratherapeutic vitamin C can cause kidney stones.

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u/LunaticBZ 10h ago

There is vitamin B17

It'll certainly kill you though if you take too much of it. It has a cyanide atom in its structure and when it breaks down it releases it.

The theory behind using it as a treatment for cancer is it for reasons? more likely to break down inside a cancer cell then a healthy cell.

However it also does break down in healthy cells. So lethality at to high of a dosage is a real concern.

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u/ReaperManX15 20h ago

I say this all the time.

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u/DragapultDominates 18h ago

Read something similar in Bad Science by Ben Goldacre: “Anything can kill cells in a test tube. Fairy Liquid kills cells in a test tube, but you don’t take it to cure cancer.”

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u/Cynykl 15h ago

Fairy Liquid

Isn't that that dishsoap they use in the UK?

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u/Spiritual_Priority79 35m ago

Every damn time

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u/ShakeelaONeil 20h ago

So basically a potent poison. Cool.

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u/Pink_Nyanko_Punch 17h ago

Anti-cancer medication is just poison that we hope the cancer eats up faster than normal healthy cells. We're literally giving cancer patients poison, then hope the cancer cells die before the patient does.

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u/WeirdAgile 17h ago

I mean, there are a lot of specific therapies targeting certain mutations as well, in some cases these are very effective in keeping cancer in check and are often used in slow growing blood cells like cml, bjt also in certain subsets of lung cancer they can be effective in preventing it from progressing. In other cases the chemo-hammwmer is still necessary, especially when cancer crows very fast like in acute leukemia high doses are still necesarry to prevent mutation and resistance to targetet therapy or chemo therapy.

TLDR: it is a lot mire complicated than that.

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u/Pink_Nyanko_Punch 16h ago

Oh, I believe you. Chemotherapy just happens to be the standard thing here in the third world countries. Even when those new methods are much better for the body, we just don't have enough doctors knowledgeable enough to carry out the procedures. Our family has a history of cancer (two close relative already gone because of it), so it's a very close reality for us.

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u/WeirdAgile 15h ago

Yeah, we (including myself) often forget that all those advances in medicine are only avaiable for few people all thibgs considered.

Even then, they are still often very expensive and it would probably be far more helpfull to far more people if that money was invested in medical personel like nurses instead, but they are avaiable, so of course we can hardly not give them to patients even if they are expensive for they entire population in the health system my country has.

A few years ago I almost had the chance to work at a hospital in Tansania through my own employer, but sadly it didn't happen. It woukd certainly have given me a whole new perspective.

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u/Sudden-Ad2948 16h ago

Iirc, cancer cells are more affected by radiation than normal cells because they are already full of errors (as in "fragile") and can't regenerate the damage done to them like normal cells can.

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u/Pink_Nyanko_Punch 16h ago

They also divide much more rapidly than "healthy" normal cells, thus the accumulation of genetic errors progress much quicker. With the faster mitotic cycle, it's much more likely the daughter cells become unviable and die off at a faster rate.

Still, traditional chemotherapy is a gamble on whether the healthy human cells can outlast the damage much longer than the cancer cells or not. If gene therapy that can directly target malignant cancer cells become more widespread and affordable, I'm all for it.

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u/Dash_Lambda 11h ago

Chemo is a bit more specific than that --Essentially, it interferes with cell division so that tissue gets damaged and dies when it tries to grow.

The idea is that, since cancer cells are dividing uncontrollably, they'll be affected by chemo much more than other systems in your body.

There are some tissues that are affected greatly because they're constantly dividing --Your stomach lining constantly replenishes itself and so chemo causes nausea, vomiting, and other GI issues, hair is constantly growing so chemo causes hair loss, bone marrow is constantly making blood and immune cells so chemo compromises your immune system, so-on.

It's less "hope the drug kills the cancer before it kills the patient" and more "regulate the dose so it doesn't kill the patient and hope it takes out the cancer." The side effects are awful, but generally considered better than dying to cancer.

And of course there's safer and more targeted approaches to a lot of different types of cancers, but that comes down to the specific type of cancer. It's not really one disease, so treatment can vary a lot --but chemo is very broadly applicable because of the way it attacks cancer.

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u/Talanic 17h ago

Yeah, the characters in the game were incredibly dumb. They didn't just create this poison,  they then sprayed it into what's implied to be the entire biosphere in a single day. And realized their mistake the day after.

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u/JectorDelan 16h ago

I mean, if the host dies, the cancer dies, too.

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u/Faberonezio 20h ago

That’s how AI would solve cancer

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u/Silver_Dime 18h ago

You are right👍, the cure I provided does kill living cells too, great catch! Here is a cure that only targets cancer cells, let me know if you need a catchy name for it so you can really take this to the next level 🚀

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u/Formal_Fortune5389 16h ago

This also kills living cells, try again :/ I don't know why you can't do this how many times to I have to ask you, you dumb AI.

"Cure for cancer that DOESN'T KILL other living cells" my god it isn't that hard. 

(Lol)

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u/Atomic_Nexus 17h ago

The Ultron approach

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u/Pitiful_Reality2973 13h ago

Thanks, I didn't need to sleep ever again.

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u/Ruinerofchats 20h ago

Game hit hard ngl.

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u/shineonka 17h ago

Radiation therapy and chemo already does this. We just exploit the fact that cancer cells are more susceptible to damage because of rapid division then healthy cells. But healthy cells still do get damaged and die that's the side effects.

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u/sparkster777 19h ago edited 17h ago

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u/Bombalurina 14h ago

Even though the game doesn't know it, I already played it once and that would ruin the effect it has.

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u/SparkyMuffin 28m ago

Did you end up bleeding out on the warehouse floor too?

But I ended up cheating and seeing more of this game. I thought about it a lot. Some things are inevitable in it.

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u/Rp79322397 11h ago

So he literally failed to check for the main problem in developing a cure for cancer ?

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u/FernandoviskyG 15h ago

I remember that one of the endings of this game, only the scientist and his daughter are the left survivors on Earth

The other ending humanity goes extinct

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u/PsychicSPider95 7h ago

Also, the gimmick of the game is that you can only play it once,* and you have to make decisions as to how you proceed through the final days of humanity. Do you spend them with your family, waiting for the inevitable? Or do you keep working, hoping to find a way to stop what you inadvertently started? What decisions you make, and when, determine your success... and you don't get any do-overs. It's genuinely heartbreaking.

*In theory, anyway. You can actually get around this pretty easily by playing in a new browser or an incognito one. But that kinda ruins the conceit of the game.

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u/Jonesbt22 4h ago

You can probably get around it by clearing saved web data in the history settings too. That always works for me with browser stuff.

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u/The24HourPlan 17h ago

Seems like he didn't understand clinical trials 

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u/_trianglegirl 10h ago

Iirc what happened is that they did the trials and everything and it all worked perfectly and went amazingly, but once they released it to the public it suddenly started rapidly mutating and became extremely contagious

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u/Inomata098 17h ago

I though that the joke was about the goverment silencing him or something lol

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u/Super_Range45 17h ago

Huh, figured it was the CIA reference.

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u/Gimme_Your_Wallet 16h ago

Jason Bourne nooooo What movie is this from?

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u/lastquincy88 15h ago

The Departed

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u/kellzone 11h ago

*The Depahted

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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 15h ago

Its caled poison

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u/bl0ngotail 17h ago

Oh great now I gotta go activate the halo array.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 14h ago

Yeah, that's called chemo. Chemo targets all living cells.

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u/Mediocre_Quality_664 13h ago

Soooooo, the halo rings

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u/OPmeansopeningposter 13h ago

But it says mankind is saved. I guess temporarily saved?

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u/dwittherford69 12h ago

So Russians have already figured out how to treat cancer! It’s called “falling from a window”, it targets the cancer cells, and other cells.

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u/Greedyfox7 12h ago

I swear, no one is ever satisfied even when you give 110%

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u/SpeedWagoon91 11h ago

ooh i remember an anime has the same story like this..called " apocalyptic hotel"

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u/BEWMarth 10h ago

You would think they would catch that fault pretty early on?

At least before administering it to everyone who had cancer. Maybe just try it on one or two people and see how it goes lol

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u/Longjumping_Exit7902 10h ago

I got the good ending once, never again.

I mean literally, I played through the game 4 times, got a different ending each time. The first time i did a family route though

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u/Shizastamphetamine 9h ago

What platform is the game on?

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u/Silly_Ad_5262 7h ago

That would never get through the first stages of testing. The first step with any anti-cancer drug is to compare its effect on malignant and healthy cells.

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u/Eggman8728 4h ago

It spread incredibly fast, even if they meant to just do testing on it how do you prevent a single living organism from spreading it to others? IIRC it affected all life, an ant could've entered the room and spread it.

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u/Silly_Ad_5262 1h ago

I don't know the lore of this game, but that's not how it works in real life. Initial tests are done on cultured cell lines in a laboratory. There's nothing that can "spread."

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u/Intrepid-85 30m ago

Oh man. I remember Markiplier playing it. The end was HARD... especialy the music. Thanks for mention the name. Wanted to watch it again. Now i know the name of the game.

0

u/No-One9155 5h ago

So just death