Dangerous Blood
I donated blood today, and as usual in this situation, my thoughts turned to blood and comic books.
Radiation, in the Marvel Universe, is a blood-borne disease. Peter Parker donated blood to an anemic Aunt May and gave her radiation poisoning. Jennifer Walters received a blood transfusion from her gamma-irradiated cousin, Bruce Banner, and became the She-Hulk.
So my question is: how much blood does it take? Does it have to be a full transfusion for these effects to occur, or will it take less? A cupful? A mere ounce? Just a thimbleful? What if just a few drops of blood were enough?
Let’s face it: fighting crime as a super-hero is a brutal occupation. Blood is spilled, literally and routinely, on both sides. What if this blood was lethal? Would villains facing irradiated heroes (or vice versa) stop fighting if they noticed their opponent was bleeding? Especially if they had open wounds too?
Just food for thought.
2 Responses to “ Dangerous Blood ”
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December 5th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
You could connect this back to your review of the most recent House episode, where one of the duclings got exposed to blood from an HIV positive patient.
How much virus is in a thimbleful of blood? Vs how much potential bad blood radiation?
And yay for giving blood! You get some virtual karma points :) (That sounds sort of dismissive, but I don’t mean it to. Giving blood is GREAT!)
December 6th, 2005 at 1:35 pm
I was going to write something about Spider-Man’s radioactive blood perhaps not being infective as having a really long half-life, but then it occurred to me that even if it was based on isotopes with long radioactive half-lives, such as Carbon-14, almost any isotope is going to have a much shorter *biologic* half-life in the human body, there bieng no mechanism for selective retention of the isotope over the regular form of the atom. Hm.
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