Ultimate Iron Man #1: A Medical Review
Ultimate Iron Man #1
Orson Scott Card, writer
Andy Kubert, penciler
Goaded by Gordon’s post, I decided to take a stab at Ultimate Iron Man #1 earlier than I had originally planned. After reading through the issue (and enjoying the art), I found it an interesting premise. Premise, you’ll note, not story. Tony Stark, the main character of the series, doesn’t even show up, unless en utero counts, so I hesitate in calling it an actual “story”.
The two main medical/biological aspects of the plot I found far-fetched, but not impossible.
First, there is the bacterial armor that can block low speed impacts and oxidize metal. Unfortunately, it starts eating away at the wearer’s skin in an hour or two and would work only in very short wars. (So why doesn’t the person wear a wetsuit and spray the armor on top of that?)
In regards to this armor, a couple of related thoughts occurred to me:
1) The armor can’t affect gold, because the comic tells us that gold can’t be oxidized (although it can, just very inefficiently). So the armor is powerless against aome aspects of the color yellow… just like the Silver Age Green Lantern.
2) While the armor could block a blunt attack from a baseball bat, it wouldn’t block a quick stabbing attack from a stake. So the armor is susceptible to wood…just like the Golden Age Green Lantern (and probably susceptible to errant vampire slayers too).
Second, Dr. Maria Stark develops a regeneration virus that causes the growth of nerve tissue. In adults, this causes problems because there is nowhere for this tissue to grow. However, she states that the virus affects fetuses differently and that this neural tissue will grow throughout their body, not just the in the brain itself.
I can understand how this growth would lead to problems in adults, causing the brain to enlarge when there’s no room in the skull for it to expand. Pain and neurological problems would occur, and probably psychiatric ones too, just like the script shows.
However, in fetuses and infants, the skull has not sealed shut and the brain would have room to grow. I find it more likely that you’d have a kid with a giant brain and misshapen skull than a child with extra brain scattered throughout their body.
Running with that thought, having more brain doesn’t necessarily make you smarter. Humans are — arguably, to some — the smartest creatures on the planet, but we don’t have the largest brains. Additionally, the brains of certain geniuses have been weighed (after their death, of course) and found to be no larger than normal brains*. I don’t think the size of the brain would change the speed much either — a nerve impulse travels the same speed in any individual. People who are quicker on their feet are probably just wired more efficiently.
As a final point, I have some concerns about Maria choosing not to take pain medication because of the drug’s affects on her unborn child. This is certainly a valid concern, and pain medications administered to the mother definitely affect the fetus. Depending on how far along she is, and what drugs are used, the affects may be temporary or permanent. On the other hand, the severe pain she is experiencing is raising her blood pressure which can compromise the blood flow to the placenta and child. Which is the bigger risk? It depends on the situation, so I just throw this out there as food for thought.
*I know this is anecdotal evidence and not a well-designed prospective study, but it’s the best we’re going to get in this area.
March 5th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
“Running with that thought, a bigger brain doesn’t necessarily m”
…ake you smarter? …ean you’re better than anyone else? …orph into a bigger brain monster?
March 5th, 2005 at 10:14 pm
Official Comment
I was meaning to take that paragraph out because I wasn’t happy with how I was making my point (I thought the point itself was good, just not how I was going about it).
I finally decided to take out the entire paragraph and only bring it up if someone commented on the fact that Maria said that having more brains would make her kid smarter and faster.
However, it seems I accidentally left part of the first sentence in the post — so I decided to just add the paragraph back in since it does address some valid points.
March 6th, 2005 at 12:22 am
“I don’t think the size of the brain would change the speed much either — a nerve impulse travels the same speed in any individual.”
They’ve actually done some interesting studies on Harvard students showing that nerve conduction velocity is significantly associated with school performance. Size of brain does not appear to matter for humans, although on a species level, the amount of brain per weight (cephalization index, I believe it is called), is strongly correlated with what think of as more intelligent animals.
As for the remaining brain scattered around the body, I actually understood that to mean that he will have more peripheral nerve receptors, and likely be more sensitive to pain/have more neuropathic pain problems, as seen in X-Statix with the character The Orphan (or whatever his name was). Maybe I misread it.
March 6th, 2005 at 1:15 am
The golden age Green Lantern would be susceptible to a baseball bat too, wouldn’t he? I haven’t read the comic so I can’t say for sure, but the vulnerability to the stake over the bat reminds me of Kevlar, which will diffuse the force of a bullet, but will not stop a knife. Maybe the writer was working by the same principle?
March 6th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Official Comment
Rob,
Maria’s actual quote is “Undifferentiated neural tissue will grow all thorugh his body. As if his whole body is brain. Greater mental capacity. Quicker. Like no human in history.” I interpret that as saying that he is going to have a lot of extra brain tissue everywhere, and Maria thinks it will make him “smarter than your average bear.”
Later on she does state that he will suffer: “Constant pain. Like third degree burns. Everywhere. Always.
I feel obligated to point out that third degree burns, while very dangerous and disfiguring, are not particularly painful because all of the nerve endings have been burned away.
Davinder,
You’re right, the GA Green Lantern was susceptible to all forms of wood, just as the SA Green Lantern was susceptible to all forms of yellow. I know I was stretching to make a point, but it still seemed a bit curious to me
March 6th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
I haven’t actually read Ultimate Iron Man #1 so all I know about it comes from you blog but let me see if I got this right: Maria Stark, Iron Man’s mom, decides to create a child that will have undifferentiated neural tissue throughout his body. This will make him very smart. It will also cause him extreme (and constant) pain until he dies. Now, am I the only one who thinks that this makes Maria Stark an unfeeling, self-aggrandizing monster? Secondly, isn’t this really unethical? I was under the impression that this kind of genetic engineering on humans was very very illegal. Like I said, I haven’t read the issue so maybe it answers all these questions (except the monster one, becuase that would have to be a right doozy of an answer). I mean, for crying out loud, the woman just created a Morlock.
And to make a medical nit-pick: Fetus or no, Maria’s child will still have far more neural tissue than a human is supposed to have so technically, whilst her child may be intelligent (or not) it will also be quite deformed. In fact, won’t it have the same disease that some scientists think the Elephant Man had which cuased his nerves to either become enlarged or have growths on them?
March 6th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Official Comment
Not to give away too many plot points, so
SPOILER ALERT!!
Maria did not purposefully endanger her child. She didn’t know she was pregnant and then she got exposed to the regeneration virus by accident. Her ethics are (from what we know this far) good, but her OSHA compliance clearly is not.
I agree and think young Tony would end up quite deformed…
March 6th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
Um, ok.
So…
1) Card’s ‘Ultimate Ironman’ isn’t a brilliant innovative and driven _human_ engineer but an artificial meta-human with superhuman intellect.
2) Just like Card’s ‘Bean’, from the ‘Ender’s Game’ universe, isn’t according to the later ‘Shadow of…’ series, a brilliant innovative and driven military strategist but an artificial meta-human with superhuman intellect.
3) FYI Bean is extra smart because the switch that stops brain growth was disabled, so he has more brains and they keep growing, as does his head cranium not fused, which will eventually kill him.
4) Compare to UI smarter due to extra nerve tissue scattered through body with side effects of increased physical sensitivity and chronic pain. No doubt contributing to eventual development of alcholism.
to be continued…
March 6th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
continuing
on the more medical/science related front
5) Bigger brains don’t necessarily make you smarter. Though obviously an excess of processing power beyond what it takes for everyday functioning can’t hurt. In fact as any computer literate person will realize, smaller is often the key to faster. Of course that’s actually more like nearer leads to faster, because of the finite speed of signal transmission, fairly close to the speed of light in a vacuum for electrical conduction and more like the speed of sound in air for the transmission of nerve impulses by ionic pulsed and chemical signalling.
6) Parallelism. Human brains are ‘clocked’ very slow. One way they make up for it is by doing lots of things at once, typically in specialized / dedicated subregions, rather than working on one thing at a time like the traditional computer CPU(a). So if you want to suspend some disbelief, Tony could be quicker by offloading tasks to what would be essentially smart reflexes (b) and he could be smarter by offloading mental processing to little brains (c).
(a) Some other ways are by simplifying and chunking things, sacrificing accuracy or precision for speed, and of course ignoring as much irrelevant input as possible. Photoshop has to worry about every single pixel in a image, but the human visual system extracts the most salient features and concentrates on a small portion of what is seen and of course has this preprocessing done on-chip in the camera as it were instead funneling it all to and through the main processor/higher levels of consciousness.
(b) Akin to the Mars Rovers being sent tasks and programs for accomplishing them, instead of sending one command at a time. Move arm, report back, wait several minutes at least for next instruction… would be very slow.
(c) Akin to SETI@home and such. Or to a team or organisation with many different workers splitting work up between them. Unlike the way as Polite Scott points out the doctors on House spend their time doing the work of other trained specialists.
March 6th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Actually, though, wouldn’t there be room for a fair amount of new neural growth?
After all, we start out with lots of extra brain cells, many of which are pruned and die off, as we develop.
It’d be a matter of increasing the density, filling in spaces left by the dead cells, not so much of expanding the surface area or volume.
The main catch would be if white matter had filled up the interstices. If that could be pruned back by the same process, it might be possible to add a whole buncha neurons.
March 7th, 2005 at 3:39 am
Thanks for the info Scott. Ok, so maybe she isn’t a horrible person…. just not very good with lab safety. Hmmm…
If you take the premise that UI actually has multiple brains then he would end up (a) deformed (b) able to multitask (c) with very interesting dreams as his multiple subconciounce (what’s the plural of that?) process information. Since siamese twins don’t seem to have any problems synchronising their involuntary body functions then I take for granted that Starks “brains” won’t argue with each other about his digestive system but you would still end up with a multi-tasking morlock in pain.
If you take the premise that UI has more peripheral nerve receptors then you end up with Max Carrados (or Daredevil, depending on what kind of books you like to read).
OK. I need to stop thinking about this.
March 8th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
You don’t want to remove white matter — white matter turns out to be vitally important in brain function, something not known until remarkably recently. It seems to let distant brain regions communicate with each other.
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