doctor who - How to identify a Time Lord?

ROSE: Well, he's got two hearts.
JACKIE: Oh, don't be stupid.
ROSE: He has.
JACKIE: Anything else he's got two of?
_{(The Christmas Invasion, 2005 Christmas special)}

So is there anything else he's got two of? Or to put it more generally, what are the physiological differences between a human and a Time Lord, other than the number of hearts? How can you tell, just from examining a Time Lord's body, that he - or she - is a Time Lord?

Let's say you can't kill the person to see whether they regenerate, nor can you wait hundreds of years to see whether they die of old age. All you can do is a one-off examination of their body. You have all the equipment you need: stethoscopes and so forth. So that you can see the whole of their body (as well as to exclude the possibility of identifying a Time Lord by their dress sense), let's assume they're naked:

naked Doctor

Answer

This is from Wikipedia so take it for what it is, but the main differences are:

Physiological differences from humans include two hearts which normally beat at 170 beats per minute, an internal body temperature of 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) and a "respiratory bypass system" that allows them to survive strangulation. Time Lords can also survive full exposure to the vacuum of space with no ill effects, though when in a vacuum for an extended period, a Time Lord must take a supply of air along or suffocate. Time Lords also seem to have an increased resilience to higher frequencies of sound, as seen in "The Christmas Invasion" and "Partners in Crime". If severely injured, Time Lords can go into a healing coma which lowers their body temperature to below freezing.

So according to this, a simple temperature test will do. If you're still not sure, throw him to outer space and see how long it takes him to suffocate.

Some of these facts are marked as "citation needed". Others are referenced to different episodes of classic Who and new Who.

Comments

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