BSG 4.5: "A Disquiet Follows My Soul" Talkback (SPOILERS)

[His Divine Shadow]

At this point we basically have to assume they have nanotech in their bodies that's programmed to seek out cells with mutant genes that commonly lead to them becoming cancerous and destroy them.

I suppose magic nanotech (or maybe we can solve this with micro-tech, not nano-tech?) is about the only solution that'll work, small little things hiding cylon cells. The colonials medical tech isn't that impressive compared to the cylons and with the equipment on the fleet they might not be able to detect those tiny things even in a microscope, or they might see them but not actually tell they are non-biological.

[Sarevok]

Actually the fleet being able to detect skinjobs easily would be more irritating in the same vein as magic viper factories. Galactica is a warship and there is like one single real doctor in the entire surviving fleet. So if one thinks a tecnobabble Cylon detector that works perfectly is a good idea ask oneself the following. Does a modern carrier vessel have massive onboard biological laboratories filled with scientisits ? BSG is not intended to be Voyager where a warship has same R & D and production facilities as a small alpha quadran empire !

[Junghalli]

I suppose magic nanotech (or maybe we can solve this with micro-tech, not nano-tech?) is about the only solution that'll work, small little things hiding cylon cells. The colonials medical tech isn't that impressive compared to the cylons and with the equipment on the fleet they might not be able to detect those tiny things even in a microscope, or they might see them but not actually tell they are non-biological.

Nanotech like this need not be of the really obvious "little robots swimming around in the bloodstream chomping cancerous cells" type. There are subtler ways to kill cancer cells, using agents that would probably show up in a blood test as "odd plasmid-like compound" not "obviously artificial nanotech" (if it showed up at all) and wouldn't really be readily identifiable if you didn't know what to look for.

It doesn't really surprise me that Cylons would have anti-cancer nanos. If I was building a fake human from scratch I'd probably try to correct as many of the design flaws as I could while leaving it as something that could still convincingly pass for baseline. If anything what surprises me is that the nanos will work for some random schmuck you shoot up with Cylon blood.