X-Men – Legacy #209: A Medical Review

May 8th, 2008

Filed under: Comics, Medicine

X-Men: Legacy #209
Mike Carey, writer
Scot Eaton, penciler

After being shot in the head at the end of the Messiah X storyline, Charles Xavier lies comatose. He is captured by Exodus, the leader of the Acolytes. Realizing that he does not have the skill to heal Xavier, Exodus brings in Erik Lehnsherr, the ex-mutant formerly known as Magneto, to restore the professor’s consciousness. Eric is assisted by the woman/machine hybrid Karima Shapander, the Omega Prime Sentinel.

scene from X-Men: Legacy #209

Sentinel: Effectively, I’m creating a local super-conductor within the professor’s nerve tissue. It will lower neural trigger points exponentially — encourage his body to make connections…

Sentinel’s plan is, to put it succinctly, a very bad idea.

First, it’s clear that she has no idea what she’s talking about, because the resting potential of cells is measured in volts, not amps — which are completely different units of measurement. Amps measure current, but potential difference (i.e. voltage) is what is important here. For the record, the average resting potential of nerve cell is -70mV.

Lowering the threshold of nerve cells like Sentinel describes will not “encourage the brain to make connections,” instead it will cause thousands — if not millions — of neurons (nerve cells) to fire off all at once. We doctors have a name for this phenomenon; it’s called a seizure. It’s going to do nothing to make Xavier healthy; in fact, in his weakened state, a seizure just might kill him.

Thanks to Travis K. for bringing this scene to my attention. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at a different scene in the same comic (the Magneto-burns-out-the-eye-and-brain-with-a-laser scene)

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5 Responses to “ X-Men – Legacy #209: A Medical Review ”

  1. ScienceGiant
    May 9th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    Hey, Doc. I’m curious for your opinion on a related matter. I show my physics students the part of “The Matrix” where Morpheus talks about using the human body as a battery, and we talk about if its fesible. Certainly if it was just thermal generation (combined with a source of fusion of unknown efficiency), you could hook any large mammal and burn calories. So other than story telling, is there a reason the Matrix isn’t run on cows. Or lions, and tigers, and bears (oh my!)?

    Is it based on our prodigious production of brain lightning? Humans making more electrical discharges per synapse?

  2. Anders Sandberg
    May 9th, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    Human brains are energy hogs, accounting for about 20% of the resting metabolism, on the order of 20 W. Most of this is due to ion pumps maintaining the -70 mV resting potential. We do not have that much extra synapses compared to other mammalian brains, the number of synapses per neuron remains fairly constant (~8000) regardless of brain size.

    The only remotely plausible explanation for the “batteries” is that the system uses human brains as coprocessors and that Morpheus mixes up electric power with computing power. It is a big background process: Matrix@home!

  3. Bad
    May 9th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

    It isn’t even remotely sensible as an energy source. Simple thermodynamics would suggest that whatever they are feeding the humans on would be more efficient fuel to create energy directly than by feeding it to a human and then somehow collecting excess “energy” from that (and what sort of energy anyway: heat? electrical impulses?) Even if human beings didn’t expend energy on all sorts of cellular and organ processes that all constitute energy used up.

    Think of someone in a hospital on life support. Keeping a person alive is not a way to MAKE energy, it’s a way to EXPEND energy.

    The movie never really even explains why it needs to hook humans up to some vast inner world in which it must fool them into staying “asleep”… just to use them as fuel. Why not simply lobotomize them and be done with it?

  4. Kerlyssa
    May 9th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

    I always substituted processing power for electrical power when watching those movies. Made it so much more satisfying to watch, and made a stab at explaining why Neo could alter his surroundings. (Really now, if they were in a virtual reality that was run on processors entirely separate from their own brains, how could they magically change the programming just by thinking about it? I can only suspend my disbelief so much.)

  5. Jayunderscorezero
    May 9th, 2008 at 9:06 pm

    Bad: With regards to The Matrix, I think the film-makers were sacrificing actual scientific feasibility in favour of the metaphor that they were trying to communicate: a sort of mix of the “brains in vats” theory in epistemology and some neo-Marxist stuff (the system running on the blood/energy of the workers, etc); as well as a few other things as well, obviously. Thinking too literally about the whole thing may be detrimental to one’s enjoyment.

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