Ultimate Spider-Man #98: A Medical Review
September 7th, 2006
Ultimate Spider-Man #98 “Clone Sage, Part 2”
Brian Bendis, writer
Mark Bagley, artist
 |
This is a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). It is a member of the family Hominidae and lives in the wild in Africa. According to a recent study, chimpanzee DNA is 95% identical to human DNA. |
 |
This is a clone of Peter Parker. According to Reed Richards, the clone’s DNA is 94.2% identical to that of the original Peter Parker. |
So in terms of DNA, the chimpanzee is closer to human than the clone.
The fact is that any two random people in the world have DNA that is 99.9% identical. One would expect the DNA correlation between a clone and its source — even for an imperfect clone — to be much greater than average, along the order of 99.999% or higher.
As I see there are several ways to explain this discrepancy.
- Reed Richards instruments and fancy computers are wrong. (Never trust the low bidder.)
- Science is wrong. (Damn! Four years of college and four years of med school down the drain.)
- Writer error. (Has been known to happen on occasion.)
- The clone’s DNA is not entirely human. This one seems the most likely to me and some of Reed’s dialogue supports it (“This scorpion clone of yours — his blood has some oddities”). Of course, if this were the case, one would have expected Reed to notice the non-human DNA (but then again, I would also expect him to notice the 94.2% vs. 99.9% discrepancy).
September 7th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Does the chimpanzee statistic refer to coding or noncoding DNA–I’ve never been sure, but always assumed it was limited to coding DNA (since there are large chunks of noncoding DNA more-or-less free to mutate at will). If so, he could be comparing to Peter’s whole genome–and it does seem that having all of the base pairs be laid out the same to 94% similarity would be rather impressive, although I’m not a geneticist.
Of course, if Reed were to use a different base reference than everyone else, one would think he’d be smart enough to specify such.
And hey: isn’t Sue supposed to be the bio-geek on the Ultimate FF? Why isn’t she the one doing this analysis?
September 7th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Comment #2:
Looking over the inital publication of the chimp genome and this random article that cites it, it seems that the total difference between the two genomes is ~4% (~1.23% from single nucleotide substitutions and ~3% from indels), but that there’s still a
September 7th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Official Comment
Jonathan,
The Chimp DNA study uses both coding DNA and “junk” DNA. So do the human genome studies, so the 99.9% is still accurate even if every base pair were considered.
Various studies I’ve seen cite anywhere from 98.5% to just under 95% for Human/Chimpanzee DNA correlation. I used the most conservative study, which was still higher than Reed’s 94.2%. Note that if just the sense (non-”junk”) DNA is used, the percentage correlation rises even higher.
September 7th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
It could be that 94% _of_ that variable .1% is identical, in addition to the baseline-human genes all being identical. That’d be weirdly low for a clone but too high for a relative.
September 7th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Ditto what Anonymous said. For the no-prize, 94.2 % identity in the 0.1% that isn’t automatically identical among humans.
September 8th, 2006 at 9:05 am
My further thoughts - what if the clone is a perfect clone, and the 94% comparison is Peter Parker (now) to Peter Parker when the DNA sample was taken (i.e. prior to being bitten)?
September 8th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Official Comment
Oliver,
That’s certainly a possibility. I was thinking Peter had some DNA taken during the Venom or Carnage storyline, but I don’t remember precisely.
Anonymous and M,
I stick with my original interpretation. Here’s the dialogue:
September 8th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
5. The writer is Brian Michael Bendis. (See [3] above.)
September 9th, 2006 at 1:11 am
I think the quote supports Anon & I.*
As you said, an actual DNA homology test would’ve been expected to show less than 1% difference between any two humans alive today, not ‘all or nothing’ but all or 99.9%.
He’s just factored out that 99.9%.
*Although I also favor Chance’s option 5. I would’ve offered it myself, but decided it’d be uncharitable given that I haven’t read any of Bendis’s writing and don’t intend to.
Also for readers who may not know, in the real world those DNA comparisons between species to see how similar aren’t normally done by sequence the whole genome and comparing them**. Takes too long. What you do is have the two samples anneal into, for lack of a less misleading term, a ‘hybrid’ double-helix and measure the degree of mismatch between them. **Or you can sequence a portion, like a specific gene, and compare how much that part has diverged between the two.
The DNA ‘fingerprint’ used in to establish identity or parentage, doesn’t involve sequencing either, in that case you look at patterns in a type of ‘junk’ DNA consisting of huge stretches of the same bit repeated over and over again, to see how many millions of times it repeats. So person 1 with repeats of lengthes A,C,G & K is not the same as person 2 with repeats of B, D, F & K. Twins or other clones should have the same DNA fingerprint (though their actual fingerprint fingerprints would be different), two people who’re parent and child or full siblings should have about half the lines in common and barring a drastic mutation no child should have a line that isn’t present in at least one parent.
Talking about a 94% DNA match suggests a homology comparison not a DNA fingerprint, where you’d have a probability like say 94% certainty that the two samples were from the same person. Though in the real world you wouldn’t compare individual humans who should be 99.9+% identical using homology tests, you’d use DNA fingerprints.
So, it’s Reed Richards. He did sequence two human genomes completely because he’s Reed Richards, and compare them and find them to be 99.9942% identical then lopped of the irrelevant 99.9% and renormalized. That or the comic book people couldn’t be bothered to fact check against the most commonly known discovery of molecular biology.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:30 am
I believe the blood samples would have come from either Dr Connors, or from Nick Fury. When Spider Man was patched up by the Wasp, and Fury told Spider Man he essentially owned him, I think he also mentioned saving some of his blood. I may be remembering it wrong.
On a side note, just found out about your blog today, and I’m loving it. I’m an ex-Navy cryptologist, and a huge comic fan. Plus, I watch House. Your site rules.
September 9th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Official Comment
But M, you’re forgetting an important factor in your argument: the writer.
No writer, particularly a wordy one like Bendis, is going to deny Reed the chance to prove to reading audience how smart he is (and by extension how clever the writer is). They would have him say all those extra 9s, or at the very least have him go into a lengthy explanation about why he didn’t.
(Good science explanations though)
September 9th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
I believe Bendis has specifically linked the clone to the blood sample taken by somebody named Ben Reilly. I don’t read the book, so I don’t know when this was, but that seems to be it.
November 25th, 2006 at 1:50 am
And not quite three months later, new studies indicate (to everyone’s surprise) that “It would seem the assumption that the DNA of any two humans is 99.9% similar in content and identity no longer holds.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6174510.stm
Just happened to stumble across this article on the same day that I was catching up on the Polite Archives!
December 26th, 2006 at 9:57 am
interracial…
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