Polite Dissent

The Question #4 “Devils’s in the Details, part 4: Inside Out”
Rick Veitch, writer
Tommy Lee Edwards, penciler

The Question #4 brings up two interesting medical situations in just the first few pages. Organs are being sold on the Black Market in the first scene, and just a few pages later, Superman himself talks to the Question about heart beats.

Unethical Doctor: Caucasian. Twenty-two years old. Blood type AB. Deceased four hours and 16 minutes ago.

Organ transplantation requires more than just identical blood types. The donor and recipient need to match in several additional genetic markers. Having the same blood type is not nearly enough.

Once removed from the body, organs are very fragile. That’s one of the reasons they are not removed until the last minute and are transported very carefully. It’s also one of the reason transplant organizations are based regionally, not nationally: to cut back on transport time. It is doubtful that organs sitting in a morgue for 4 hours would be viable.

Superman: To me, every human pulse is as individual as a fingerprint.

I suspect that Superman means heartbeat, since the “lub dub” of the beating heart tells a great deal more information than the beat of the pulse (and the pulse varies depending on which artery you measure it in).

Even with that caveat, I doubt that heart beats are unique to each individual. There’s no science here, just gut instinct.

Still, let’s go with the story and say that heart beats are unique. Even with that, it is still doubtful that Superman would be able to pick a particular person out of a crowd by their heartbeat. Fingerprints don’t change over time, but heart beats certainly do. They not only change from year to year, but from minute to minute. The heart rate speeds up and slows down based on hundreds of factors including the time of day, how awake the person is, medications, hormones, fluid status (dehydration, for example) and variety of other stresses. Heart beats also change over the years – heart valves get tighter or get floppier and murmurs can come and go, improve or worsen. A heart attack can knock out part of the heart, changing the beat. As another example, it is my experience that nearly every pregnant woman at nine-months along has a heart murmur. (Pregnancy is a fluid-overload state, so it makes it easier to hear subtle murmurs that may have been hidden before.) It’s reasons like this that I doubt Superman could find a person based on their “unique” heart beat because it wouldn’t be consistent enough from moment to moment to find.