Common sense suggests it would stop contributing to your sensation of taste, no?

It gets someone else – helpful jellies, for instance, rather than sardonic ones – to work for it.

Sorry, but I don’t have any citations. You asked: “What happens if a cell fails to work?” I suspect that if a single cell in the body, of any sort, suddenly “fails to work,” that it wouldn’t really have much of an effect on anything at all. Maybe, perhaps, there is someone here who knows more about these things than I do and they and can and will correct me here, but that’s my thinking on this.

Cleaner cells remove it from the organism, or it becomes a free radical and causes disease.