Could Superman Cure Cancer? Crunching the Numbers
In Superman #700, Superman is devastated when a woman accuses him of letting her husband die because Superman didn’t use his powers to cure his fatal brain tumor. She believes that Superman could have used his x-ray vision and heat vision to identify and safely eradicate the tumor.
Now, assuming Superman’s heat vision could cure the tumor without any significant side effects* and he wants to make sure no one else dies of a brain tumor:
There are expected to be 62,930 new primary brain tumors diagnosed in the United States in 2010.
If Superman were to work a 24 hour day, 7 days a week, he would have a little over 8 minutes to spend on each brain tumor patient.
If he were to work a slightly more humane 18 hour day (6 hours for sleeping, eating, bathroom breaks, and saving the world), then he would have 6 minutes to spend on each patient.
But why just stop at brain tumors? Why shouldn’t Superman use his abilities to treat all cancers? In that case, there are expected to be 1,539,560 new cancers diagnosed in the United States this year alone (and that’s not counting non-invasive tumors and certain skin cancers that account for another 2+ million cases).
Now Superman has just 20 seconds to see each patient (or 15 seconds if he wants to sleep).
And why not go worldwide? Then Superman would have just 2 seconds per patient.
(And these numbers all assume the patients with cancer have already been identified before Superman even sees them. If you add some sort of screening program into the mix, then the time-per-patient drops even lower.)
I think it’s also important to remember that for all his skills and smarts, Superman is not trained in medicine — particularly radiology and surgery. How many false positives (he thinks it’s a cancer but it’s not) or false negatives (he misses a cancer) will there be? Is a single treatment of heat vision enough? Is 8 minutes, let alone 15 seconds, enough time to correctly diagnose a patient and treat them?
The Bottom Line: The plotline you thought was ridiculous gets even worse when you take a minute to look at the numbers.
*Which I seriously doubt, but that’s another post.
June 25th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
I think it’s also important to remember that for all his skills and smarts, Superman is not trained in medicine — particularly radiology and surgery.
Couldn’t he just give himself a working knowledge of medical science with a few minutes’ study at superspeed?
June 25th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
And while he’s at it, can do something about our rotting infrastructure? Never mind the fact that he’d put a bunch of folks out of work.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Though I have not read the issue in question, it’s not ridiculous to think that a grieving widow would lash out and (irrationally) blame the closest person for the death of her husband, especially in a world where “normal” people constantly must be saved by metahumans. It’s also understandable that Superman, who feels enormous responsibility with his capability to save lives, would feel upset and guilty at the woman’s outburst, even if he logically understood there’s nothing he could have done.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Official Comment
I agree that the widow’s anger is understandable, and to some extent, expected. Anger is an important part of grief, after all. I have no problem with her actions.
The problem comes in the portrayal of Superman: the comic has him moping and wallowing in guilt — guilt over a situation over which he has no control, and a situation which he has faced dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of times before.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
[...] * Why doesn’t Superman cure cancer? [...]
June 25th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
If Superman really wanted to help, tinkering with Kryptonian technology would probably yield waaay more fruit than zapping heads one at a time, no matter how many hours he worked.
but eff that! Superman’s busy tinkering with Lois! Sorry, people… better holler at St. Jude, cause St. Kal is Oc-cu-pied!
June 25th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
and think of all the people he could have saved while he was spending those precious seconds wallowing!
June 25th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
But Superman can move at the speed of light, which is about 300,000*60 times faster than most people, so even allowing for a few seconds to speed up and slow down at the beginning and end, he would still have a lifetime of subjective time to spend with every patient.
Of course, while he was rushing around curing cancer Lex Luthor or Brainiac would be able to get on with enslaving the planet and exterminating everybody on it, so the whole exercise would be fairly futile.
June 25th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Funny you should mention that.
In another comic book, which i think was Justice League.
A homeless guy all of the sudden aquired god-like abilities.
He turned his anger towards League and was hitting them hard. Source of this power was some amazing entity that screwed the world bad already.
But them all of the sudden he reverted back.
The explanation that was given sounded something like
“The J’ohn J’ones (that green guy from Mars -) ) used his power of telepathy to link Flash and Superman’s minds together. By using Superspeed of Flash, and Heat precision strike of Superman’s heat vision – theн managed to find a section of the brain that controlled these powers and destroy them.”
Brain surgery preformed by non-doctors is nothing compared to cancer removal?
June 25th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
[...] here: Polite Dissent » Could Superman Cure Cancer? Crunching the Numbers This entry was posted in cancer and tagged correctly-diagnose, enough-time, [...]
June 25th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
I can’t believe I’m being fair to a JMS story…but in fairness, the widow did specify it was an “inoperable” tumor.
So, if you limit Kal-El’s patient list to pre-screened and “inoperable” (or otherwise untreatable) tumors, you do reduce his patient load a quite bit (not to mention at least partially alleviating concerns over side effects, because they’re going to die anyway).
But still, the story sucked on ice. One grieiving woman irrationally strikes out at Superman, and he’s going to brood for the next year. Because the world so needs a brooding Superman…
June 25th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
If Superman could heal with his powers the weight of responsibility on his shoulders would be unbearable.
He saves the world, by averting all sorts of disaster and people want him to be a Jesus or something?
But in that movie about his death, Superman was searching for a cure for cancer. Maybe he is secretly studying genetics and medicine in general?
June 26th, 2010 at 7:06 am
I don’t know why everyone thinks it’s so difficult. I’ve SEEN brain atlases. Everything’s got a little white label stuck on it. All Supes would have to do is read them: ‘Corpus callosum — nope. Substantia nigra — nope. Brain tumor — yep, that’s it.’ No problem at all.
June 26th, 2010 at 7:33 am
I’m sorry, but how is Superman’s heat vision supposed to GET to the tumor? I’ve never understood that. Does he simply fry all the tissue between his eyes and the tumor? Gee, the tumor’s gone. Sorry about that giant entry wound. Good news is it’s cauterized ….
June 26th, 2010 at 9:31 am
And actually, I’m pretty sure that Lex Luthor has invented the cure for cancer… he used it to convince Superman he’d reformed while in jail and then he destroyed it when his ploy was discovered. So yeah…
June 26th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Um …
Let me ask about another diagnosis from the same story.
Clark has just made a profoundly irrational decision to walk across the United States.
If this is viewed strictly in terms of a slap from a distraught widow, it’s patently ridiculous.
On the other claw, Straczynski spent the first page of the story reminding us that, no more than a few days previously, Kal-El just saw his species effectively become extinct, in a replay of an event that, heretofore, had just been an intellectual tragedy without a real emotional core. He always thought he was one of the last of his kind, but after a chance at rebirth, he just watched genocide.
And the people he identifies with emotionally, the people who are his cultural context, are blithely ignoring the fact of this genocide in their oh-so-sensitive interview questions.
Clark is maintaining. Clark is just barely holding it together, mostly through denial.
And this irrational, grieving widow slaps him in the face with her patently absurd application of blame.
… is it possible that, perhaps, the patient might be suffering from a touch of Post-Traumatic Stress?
June 26th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“The problem comes in the portrayal of Superman: the comic has him moping and wallowing in guilt — guilt over a situation over which he has no control, and a situation which he has faced dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of times before.”
Well, that’s just his Kent-upbringing-shaped psychology coming through. It’s not like he’s ever managed to be a Nietzschean Superman.
June 27th, 2010 at 8:55 am
As for curing cancer, Superman obviously can’t cure all brain tumors globally. But if he could use x-rays + heat (admittedly, a big if) he could still cure a couple hundred cancer patients a year. It’s not statistically relevant, but it matters to those hundreds of folks and their families.
June 28th, 2010 at 9:39 am
[...] que nos llega envuelta en ropaje mediático. Por ejemplo, uno de los últimos posts se plantea si Superman puede curar el cáncer. Desde hace varios años, viene haciendo un seguimiento a la serie House, que por algo se ha [...]
June 28th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Scans Daily had some scans of the issue (and some interesting comments), here
June 28th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Heh, the entry wound bit makes me think of the DC Animated episode Justice Lords, where Superman lobotomized people with his heat vision, leaving a distinctive two dot scar on people’s foreheads.
July 1st, 2010 at 3:01 am
[...] Superman storyline which appears to be receiving almost universal derision. (Though I do like this comment on Dr. Polite Scott’s site, which gives a possible psychological underpinning for this coming [...]
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:45 am
Bryan-
I see two possibilities. 1) With his microwave vision S seems to be able to focus very sharply. Perhaps he could combine this with his heat vision to concentrate the damage directly on the tumor; or 2) by orbiting the tumor Supes could distribute the damage to non-cancerous tissue and concentrate it on the tumor. I’m told both methods have been used for super-heroless radiation therapy.
July 2nd, 2010 at 4:33 pm
See?
This is why we need Tommy Monaghan.
Man could talk Supes out of a brood like nobody’s business.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Wow! What a post! What a blog! I love it. I used to do superhero Fermi problems over at my blog . Maybe you’d like them.
August 23rd, 2010 at 3:41 pm
“The problem comes in the portrayal of Superman: the comic has him moping and wallowing in guilt — guilt over a situation over which he has no control, and a situation which he has faced dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of times before.”
That’s common in these comics where Superman gets thrown for a loop by something that he has surely encountered before in previous stories.
One Chuck Austen comic had him rampage through Metropolis because a girl died from cancer.
More than one had him morose because a normal had died for something natural.
Dwayne MacDuffie’s Injustice League story had Luthor get under Superman’s skin by doing something evil to Superman’s friends.
It’s nothing more than bad writing.
June 16th, 2011 at 6:42 am
[...] of a comic, or something, where Superman faced a similar dilemma. You can read a bit about it here. (Spoiler alert: the guy who wrote this is even harsher than I am.) This guy actually wants [...]
January 11th, 2012 at 8:44 am
Stories don’t follow common sense.
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