Polite Dissent

Ultimate Fantastic Four #48
Mike Carey, writer
Mark Brooks, penciler

Sue Storm has been kidnapped and drugged by Doctor Kragoff and his assistant Rutskaya. Kragoff plans to send both Sue Storm and the body of late wife into the N-Zone where they will merge and Sue’s DNA will be re-written with Julia Kragoff’s. This will kill Sue, but bring Julia back to life.

Of course, he doesn’t tell Sue this. He lies to her and informs her that her brother has been injured in a plane crash and an N-Zone merge is the only way to save him. He also needs her advice on the finer points of the science:

Sue: No, it can’t work.
Kragoff: Why not?
Sue: Rejection. Host body will reject.
Kragoff: Yes, rejection has been the problem. How do we solve it?
Sue: Telomere splice. Telomeres from healthy genes. Stop DNA transcription before immune response’s triggered.
Rutskaya: How do we control the insertion points, Miss Storm? Donor transaminase or physical insertion?
Sue: Transaminase’s good.

NOTE: I’ve cleaned up Sue’s drug addled slurring, but I left intact her Tarzan-like phrasing.

What she’s saying is pure tecnhobabble, and as technobabble goes (particularly biological technobabble), it’s not bad — but there’s a couple of basic errors:

• First off, telomeres aren’t part of genes, they are parts of chromosomes. The ends of human chromosomes are composed of specialized sections of DNA known as telomeres. These telomeres are composed of a short DNA sequence repeated thousands of times. Telomeres serve several important functions: they stop the ends of the chromosomes from unraveling, they prevent chromosomes from fusing together, and they seem to have a role in programmed cell death and aging. As Susan suggests, they also play a role in DNA transcription — basically, they stop it when it reaches the end of the chromosome. Telomeres don’t stop all DNA replication, so you couldn’t use it like Susan suggests. It’s probably also a bad idea to place telomeres — which have evolved specifically to function as chromosomal “end caps” — in the middle of a DNA strand. That’s just asking for trouble.
• Transaminases are enzymes that transfer an amino group from an amino acid to an α-keto acid. They have nothing to do with DNA transcription. I’d also love to know how the doctor plans on going about physically inserting DNA strands — a very small pair of tweezers perhaps?

Finally, as a general rule, I would suggest that it is a very bad idea letting a drugged-out teenager provide the technical details of a science project, no matter how smart she may be.