"I'm a scientist! That's what we do!"

I just decided that I should elaborate upon the topic of my previous post.

The theme of science and technology versus natural forces is very old hat in terms of film and literature. We all know the plot progression by rote:

[1] Dastardly scientist creates something (creature, substance, virus, et cetera);
[2] Regardless as to whether the intentions of said scientist are good or evil, the potential consequences are ignored. It doesn't matter whether or not he should be doing what he is doing -- what matters is that he CAN do it, and by gourd he will!
[3] Everything backfires and spirals out of control;
[4] Many people die;
[5] Dastardly scientist's creation is thwarted, and the audience is force-fed the Hollywood moral that SCIENCE IS BAD.

These portrayals of course, leave us as an audience with a bitter taste against humans and their need to strive for technological and scientific advances. I know that when I was watching Cameron's Avatar, I sided with the nature-loving Na'vi and despised the humans for everything that they were doing. I hated the scientists in Jurassic Park (Crichton seems to explore this theme in many of his works, actually), in the Alien series, in Dark Angel and I could continue the list ad nauseum...

...But, I'm a scientist myself. Shouldn't I be biased in favour of my peers? The issue with Hollywood science is that it is demonized in its portrayal. The scientist is usually either a figure corrupt with greed or a bumbling, useless blob. Oh, and the scientist often has a toddler mentality of "Look what I can do with my SCIENCE! It has no purpose other than to prove that I can do it if I want to!" Take away the unlikely and unlikeable scientist, and the science itself cannot really be hated. There are more people in this world in favour of research to better our defenses against diseases and other biological threats than not -- only in the movies does this sort of work suddenly seem suspect and loaded with ulterior motives.

Though there are always some exceptions, my point is really just to say this:

Don't hate the science, folks. Hate those people [characters] who choose to abuse it.

This post was inspired by this blog entry and by this trope.

Oh, and the title of this post is from the film Bats and, though it is a perfect example to illustrate my point, it is a horrible movie. I do not recommend it in the least.

The Pursuit of Spidey-ness

In a minor digression from lecture, my professor claimed that in no way could Spiderman ever exist.

His rationale:

If you took the actual volume--assuming one cm diameter--of the webs he shoots out, and you calculate the amount of water mass in one cm over 100 m, it’s over half of his body weight. He’s a little weenie guy – one shot and he’s gone.

Okay… Let’s have a look at this.

Let’s assume that Spiderman’s webs are pretty saturated with water, say, 50% of their composition. For a web that is 100 metres long (10 000 centimetres) and one centimetre in diameter, we have a total volume of approximately 7,850 cm3 -- 3,925 cm3 of which would hypothetically be water.

The adult male body (age range 20 – 29) is on average about 60.5 % water (±7.1 %), and so if Peter Parker is something like 65 kg, that would give about 39.325 L of water. One web shot would take up over one tenth of his body’s water. More than that would leave him drier than a raisin unless he were constantly guzzling water.

It would seem then that my professor is on the right track, and that there is little hope out there for Spidey-hopefuls, but he missed one crucial fact: unlike in the 2002 film in which our hero somehow develops some nifty wrist glands to squirt out webs, the original comics had science geek Peter Parker develop a synthetic web and mechanical wrist shooters. Extra web is stored in a cartridge belt for easy and convenient reloading. So, apparently this weebly little guy can work his way around fluid shortage.

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if humans could be engineered to make their own web proteins; the issue isn’t so much making the proteins as getting them out of the body once they are made. It has been done with goats such that they produced web silk protein in their milk… Let’s just say that I don’t exactly look forward to the human version of this experiment.

So, you’ve got your Spiderman outfit, and you’ve built yourself some web shooters and some synthetic web. Are you Spiderman? Can you climb up walls?

Since you’re probably not sprouting barbed microhairs on your finger pads, you should probably get yourself some gecko gloves.

Yep, gecko gloves. If you’ve ever seen a gecko, you probably know that they stick to pretty much anything. Some folks out there have designed gloves and boots that imitate the sticky hairs on gecko feet, and they are estimated to be able to support a mass of about 1160 kg (hopefully enough for you and whoever you’re saving). There are also designs for hairy spider feet-imitation gloves that can support about 480 kg, and crazy van der Waals gloves that can theoretically support approximately 40 000 kg (!). Also, these gloves are superhydrophobic, so water just rolls off them and they won’t get all gunked up with your water-filled webs.

Alright now, kickin’ costume: check; webs: check; gecko gloves: check. What about super strength and Spidey sense? Well, short of taking steroids (…) and developing ESP, the long-and-short of it is that it is very unlikely that things’ll work out in your favour.

That aside, hurray, you’re Spiderman! Go save some civilians!

Though, really, anyone bitten by a radioactive spider would probably die of blood poisoning before anything super awesome like, oh I don’t know…the reorganization of his or her genetic blueprint … could occur.

(Don’t just take my word for it – I’ve got references!)

Gosline JM, Guerette PA, Ortlepp CS, and KN Savage. “The mechanical design of spider silks: from fibroin sequence to mechanical function”. Journal of Experimental Biology. 1999. 202: 3295 – 3303.

Kakalios J. The Physics of Superheroes. Gotham Books: New York, NY. 2005.

NM Pugno. “Towards a Spiderman suit: large invisible cables and self-cleaning releasable superadhesive materials”. Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. 2007. 19: 1 – 17.

Vollrath F and DP Knight. “Liquid crystalline spinning of spider silk”. Nature. 29 March 2001. 210: 541 – 548.

Watson PE, Watson ID, and RD Batt. “Total body water volumes for adult males and females estimated from simple anthropometric measurements”. January 1980. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 33: 27 – 39.