The startling truth behind hair cells

Age-related baldness may have more in common with “The Great Escape” than “The Bucket List.”

Researchers at Northwestern University recently discovered that stem cells in the hair follicles of aging animals don’t die. Instead, they squeeze out — or are squeezed out — and disappear, perhaps gobbled up by the immune system, according to a New York Times article.

The discovery could revolutionize the study of aging. Or at least start a healthy debate among Hair Club for Men members.

If you look at the picture that accompanies this article, you can see why hair loss is such an important issue for me. Decades ago, the stem cells in my hair follicles peaced out, escaped, went on strike or headed for Bermuda, where they never call or write. Ungrateful little buggers.

I don’t know if male-pattern-baldness is caused by the same slacker stem cell issues as age-related baldness. At my age, I’m likely suffering from both. It’d be just my luck if science could find a way to corral only some of these AWOL cells, leaving old guys like me with half a head of full, luscious hair and half a head of Sahara desolation, dermatologically speaking.

And isn’t it just like the kill-or-be-killed, nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw world we live in that a stem cell finally breaks away from a humdrum existence at the bottom of a hair follicle — which, let’s be honest, is not party central — only to get eaten by the immune system?

What kind of shoot-Bambi’s-mother’s world is that?

I prefer to imagine a scenario where all these escaping stem cells get together annually and hold a big bash. Or where they combine to create a big, hairy simulacrum to wander the earth, doing all the fun stuff they were denied before.

Maybe the hirsute guy in line in front of you at Chipotle or sitting across the waiting room at the doctor’s office is just a conglomeration of escaped stem cells that formed down in the bayou and gained sentience. Now, he does things the rest of us only dream of. Like eating two big bean burritos and a side of chips and guac at one sitting, washing it all down with a margarita and then cruising around town with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” blaring from open windows.

It certainly would explain a lot of boorish human behavior to find out that most boors weren’t human, but just a bunch of expat hair cells asserting themselves outside the follicle.

So all those people raging on Twitter about ’Merica and the right to go vaxless and spread germs in a pandemic? Hair cells.

The drivers that zoom past 50 cars when a lane on the highway is closed, only to cut in front of the driver who’s been waiting patiently for 20 minutes? Hair cells again.

The shoppers that bang into you with their carts, check out with thirty-four items in the “ten items or fewer” lane? You guessed it.

I once read a novel about a race of Neanderthals that lived a secret existence alongside human beings — looking like us, acting like us, but not us. They were actually bent on the destruction of humanity.

If all this were true, but with escaped stem cells from bald people in place of some fantastic extinct branch of the human tree … Well, then truth is stranger than fiction.

But it’s probably not the case. These cells likely just get vacuumed up by our super-efficient bodies.

So it ends up that this news is more “Maid in Manhattan” or Mini-Me than Steve McQueen.

Call it the bald, unvarnished truth.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com, or @cschillig on Twitter.