system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The Thing] How long would it take for animal cells to reproduce to a pound?

I'm working on a The Thing game, and I was gonna have a biologist mention that a sample of Thing tissue has grown an abnormal amount since being brought back from Outpost 31. I was gonna say that it grew half a pound in four hours, but I didn't think that was actually abnormal. I then switched to a full pound, but still don't feel like it's good enough. The Thing has incredible cellular growth. What would be an abnormal(but small) amount of mass that could be gained in four hours?
gpt
Depends on how much mass you started with and how abnormally fast a growth rate you want. Under proper conditions, E. coli can make around a lb of biomass in half a day from a tiny bit of cells. And e. coli doubles every 20-30 minutes, while human cells take much much longer, doubling maybe a couple times a day. So a lb in 4 hours is within the bounds of biological limits depending on how much you start with, but wildly fast for human tissue. But that's assuming every cell has all the nutrients it wants in optimum conditions, while a chunk of tissue in a petri dish, even if it's sitting in a pool of prime nutrients, would grow much slower (e. coli growing of agar in a petri dish might grow only a couple grams). So a lb of growth would be a wild amount of growth, or maybe reasonable, depending on exact conditions and what you define as 'abnormal'.