Polite Dissent

What exactly goes into Joker Toxin (aka Joker Venom, Smile Venom, Joker Juice, and sometimes, Smilex)? The recipe seems to have changed over the years:

1991
HUNTRESS: “Just tell me if any dimethyl silicate has changed hands lately. You know it Charley -– the poison the Joker makes his Smile Venom from.”
Dimemethyl silicate is most commonly found in cosmetics. For instance, it’s a common ingredient in lip gloss.
Source: Wonder Woman #282 (Admittedly, this story takes place on Earth-2)

1993
BRUCE WAYNE: “Some strange compound of chlorides and hydrocolloids with a protein catalyst.”
This one is little more than medical technobabble as all three terms, while real, are maddeningly vague. (FYI: Wikipedia entries on chlorides and hydrocolloids).
Source: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #50

2006
DR KOWALSKI: “I had never seen anything like the neurotoxin before. It blocked the calcium and potassium channels and also placed the victim in anaphylactic shock.”
More technobabble, but, like the best technobabble, there is just enough real science present to give it a whiff of truth: calcium channels are found throughout the body, but are especially common in nerves and muscles, and potassium channels are found in nerves and the heart muscle. Anaphylactic shock is a fatal allergic reaction — for example, people who die from bee stings.
Source: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #200

2010
BATMAN: “The most lethal element of authentic Joker Venom, hydrogen cyanide, is absent. strychnodide is present, though. It causes the muscle contractions that produce the hallmark grin.”
Hydrogen cyanide is a very real, very fast, and very deadly toxin (its symptoms don’t really match Joker Venom though). Strychnodide is a fictional derivative of strychnine.
Source: Detective Comics #867.
Though this is the first mention (to my knowledge) of this Joker Venom recipe in an actual comic, this combination of toxins was first mentioned in a DC Heroes Role Playing Game supplement in back in 1993 (DC Technical Manual: S.T.A.R. Labs 1993 Annual Report — I scanned in the relevant section here.).

Click on the image for the full ad

Quack diet aids are nothing new — here’s an ad from Captain America Comics #69 (November 1948) touting “Protam.”

I sure would love to know what, if anything, Protam was. The ad is little help — it tells us what Protam isn’t more than what it is: No drugs. No starvation. No exercise. No massage. Nothing to wear (does this mean they’re naked?). Not a drug. Not a laxative. Not a Thyroid.

The ad throws in a bunch of interesting claims and statements:
It works “even if burdened with Fat for many years (illness excepted).”
Drastically cuts down fat producing calories (But what about calorie producing fat?)
Lose Ugly Fat Economically, Simply, Pleasantly.
Protam Plan Good for Ladies, Too. (But not so good for verbs, apparently).
Sorry, no Canadian orders. (Damn Canada and their truth in advertising laws! OK, that’s just a guess…)

Protam wasn’t just advertised in comics, but in magazines such as Popular Science as well.

Batman: Shadow of the Bat #77 “Arwin’s Theory of Devolution”
Alan Grant, writer
Mark Buckingham, penciler

Streptomycin, a potent antibiotic, will indeed kill off the bacteria E. coli — and it’s particularly effective in a Petri dish, where you don’t have to worry about nasty side effects such as kidney damage and deafness commonly seen with such antibiotics.

However, the description of how the bacteria evolve resistance to the antibiotic is a little off:

The mutation in question (resistance to Streptomycin) occurred before the antibiotic was ever added. It may be a recent mutation, or it may be an old one, but when it occurred isn’t important — all that matters is that some bacteria in the dish have the mutated gene and are resistant to the antibiotic.

Once the Streptomycin is added to the dish, the non-mutated bacteria — those susceptible to the antibiotic — die off, leaving only the mutated bacteria to reproduce.

The surviving bacteria don’t “mutate rapidly” to pass along the gene because simply being one of the few bacteria that survived guarantees that their genes will be passed to the next generation. In other words, the mutation has already occurred, no more is required for survival¹.

In all fairness to the writer, these words are spoken by a college professor who is clearly more than a little nuts. So it is likely the character who misstates the science, and not Grant.

Notes:
1. There will of course be the usual random assortment of new mutations that may occur within any generation of bacteria.

I wrote this post a little over five years ago, but I think it is just as important now as it was then. It gives non-physicians a few quick guidelines on how to tell legitimate studies from nonsense studies when they are reported in the press. I originally wrote in about newspapers, but it replies equally well to television news programs and internet news sites.

Almost every day it seems that a new groundbreaking medical reports is mentioned in a front page newspaper article or on the cover of a weekly magazine. The claims are bold: eating red meat leads to colon cancer, drinking soda leads to diabetes, green tea extract cures strokes and so on. But are any of these claims legitimate?

Medicine can be a confusing field, and statistics even more so. T-scores? Z-scores? Power? P value? How is a non-physician (or non-statistician) supposed to find out which reports are reasonable and which are unfounded?

It’s not that difficult if you remember to be skeptical and follow these two simple rules.

Skepticism is Your Friend
Approach all medical articles with a great deal of skepticism. These articles and reports are trying to convince you to do something different, such as eat less of this or that or take this vitamin or medicine. Don’t just take their word at it. Make them prove it to you.

Rule #1
Where was the study published? To be believable, it should have been published in a well-known, well-respected medical or scientific journal*. These journals include the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.

Be very wary if the report is from a presentation at a conference and has not been published. Published articles are closely examined and reviewed by experts. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for a presentation.

Don’t trust a news release or report put out that is not published in a legitimate journal, or at least presented at a legitimate conference. Most suspicious advice, sloppy science and bad medicine comes from these “reports” (and the most eye catching headlines too).

(I would also add that readers should beware medicine by press report. A legitimate finding should be available in a journal that is currently available or one that will be shortly available. If no publication or pending publication is mentioned, then it is likely medicine by PR and less likely to be legitimate)

Rule #2
Look at the number of participants in the study. If it is for a well-known condition (such as heart disease, stroke or cancer) or addresses a common situation (diet, exercise) then there should be several hundred, if not thousands, of participants. A study that addresses a common condition or makes sweeping statements yet only has a hundred — or fewer — participants should be viewed extremely skeptically.

Following these two rules will allow you to efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff and discover which newspaper medical reports you really need to pay attention to, and which can be dropped at the bottom of the birdcage.

* That is not to say that smaller medical journals don’t produce quality groundbreaking articles; they do, but it is rare. Big name journals also publish poor papers from time to time. Still, if it is published in a journal even a non-physician has heard of, then it’s more likely to be believable and legitimate.

A mysterious Sleeping Sickness strikes Gotham City, yet strangely it is affecting only the contestants in the “Queen for a Day” beauty pageant. The doctors who examine the patients confidently declare that the women have contracted a “rare but harmless” disease that will cause them to sleep for three or four weeks before recovering. They place each victim in a glass case so that the “medical profession can observe this rare malady.”

Batman is instantly suspicious as the first victim was none other than Selina Kyle, better known as Catwoman. He believes she is faking the illness, but the guard watching over her case swears she has been asleep the whole time.

With all the contestants asleep, it looks like no one will win the Queen for a Day contest, but luckily, Selena Kyle manages to recover from the sleeping sickness in time to win. Batman stops her just before she is about to claim the prize – a bottle of perfume that just happens to be full of smuggled diamonds

It turns out that Catwoman was behind the Sleeping Sickness (I know, quelle suprise!). She had discovered a chemical that caused the Sleeping Sickness; she gave herself a small dose, and then in a display of pure Scooby Doo science, she rigged a couple of movie projectors in her case to make it look like she was still inside when she sneaked out to give the other contestants larger doses of the chemical. Her convoluted plan was to win the Queen for a Day contest so she could claim the perfume bottle where her overseas associated associates had hidden stolen diamonds.

Batman, of course, was too clever for her.

Me, I wonder what kind of quacks they have in Gotham City: they can’t identify a disease (but are quick to claim it is “harmless”), never realize their prime patient is faking (or even absent!), and yet voyeuristic enough to place their patients in glass cases. My advice: never, ever seek medical care in Gotham.

A solid outing on Fringe this week. I’m looking forward to next week’s season finale.

The Plot: The episode starts at Fringe headquarters in the alternate universe. A major breach is detected and a team – consisting of Olivia, Charlie, and team leader Lincoln Lee — is sent to an old theater to evaluate. The breach is substantial enough that the Fringe team plans to quarantine it, an act that will somehow cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. At the last minute, the quarantine is called off after the breach seals itself. Scouting the theater, the Fringe team finds a dead body with “multiple carcinomas” (sound familiar?) A search of the body reveals a drivers license and a twenty dollar bill, which they take to be a forgery because they’ve never heard of Andrew Jackson. Meanwhile, watching hidden from a few rows away are the Olivia and Walter from our universe, plus two others.

Thirty six hours before, Olivia is drowning her sorrows in a bar when an Observer drops off a note for her. Walter watches a video of Peter agreeing to cross back to other universe with alternate Walter and is disconsolate because he knows there’s something important about Peter that he’s supposed to remember, but can’t. When Olivia shows him the note, he realizes this is what he was trying to remember: Peter is somehow going to destroy the universes. He recalls one of the Observers warning him once never to let Peter cross back to other side, and this is why.

Walter and Olivia decide they need to cross over to the other universe and retrieve Peter. They head over to Massive Dynamic, because a sketch on the page the Observer gave Olivia looks like one of William Bell’s machines, but the team there knows of no way to cross over without suffering severe molecular damage. Walter theorizes that the Cortexiphan children could cross over safely, but Olivia is the only one who is mentally stable. Agent Broyles reveals that there are more stable Cortexiphan children: James, Sally, and Nick. They agree to help Walter and Olivia cross over to the other universe.

Meanwhile Peter wakes up in a hospital bed. He walks downstairs to find his mother — his actual mother — cooking him breakfast. They have a nice chat.

At the theater in our universe, the four Cortexiphan children form a circle with Walter in the middle. He leads them through a concentration exercise when suddenly James collapses, tumors forming on his skin. He points to a blimp that can be seen through the skylight as proof that they’ve crossed over. They hide as the alternate Fringe team arrives in force, just as in the beginning of the episode. Because of what they’ve found, the alternate Fringe team is brought before the Secretary, other Walter, who tells them his version of what happened. He explains to them that a group from the other universe has crossed over and needs to be found before they can start a war.

Over breakfast, Peter’s mother gives him some notes that alternate Walter left for him. They are for a project he would like Peter’s help with. As he looks through them, the plans are recognizable for the strange machine on the note left by the Observer.

Meanwhile, what’s left of our Fringe team is heading to Central Park to meet up with William Bell. When they arrive at the meeting place, there’s no Bell to be seen. A few seconds later, the alternate Fringe team, with several busloads of additional agents, show up. Nick is shot and killed and his girlfriend Sally uses her pyrokinetic powers to cause a fireball, consuming herself and Nick and severely burning the leader of the alternate Fringe team. Walter runs off, but is shot. He stumbles on and eventually collapses in front of a hospital. Olivia escapes, and uses a convenient street side white pages terminal to track down where alternate Olivia lives. As she is covertly spying on her double, William Bell appears and asks her to trust him, warning her that Walter is in trouble.

1. Bullfinch
There were a number of allusions to the two-years of Fringe mythology we’ve been building up.
The return of the Cortexiphan children
Alternate Charlie clearly never fully recovered from his first-season encounter in Unleashed.
A mention of the ZFT Manifesto (its first mention this season — they still need to explain the missing chapter, though).
And of course, the return of William Bell.

2. Vive La Différence
I liked how the blimps (as I’ve said before, you can never go wrong with blimps — well, except the Hindenburg), the Nixon silver dollar, the Martin Luther King Jr. twenty dollar bill, and the West Wing poster all clearly set the alternate universe apart from ours — in addition to its more militaristic stylings. I’m somewhat creeped out that Cabbage Patch Kids are still a big thing over there.
And how could I forget mentat Astrid?

3. Cellular Biology vs Molecular Biology vs Chemistry vs Physics
My only complaint about the science is a nitpick, when Brandon, the Massive Dynamic scientist, explains that the cells are separating on an atomic level. Once you’re dealing with individual atoms, you’re well past the cellular level.

4. Susan?
I know that Nick is from Bad Dreams and James is from Olivia, In the Lab, With the Revolver. I’m not sure where Sally is from, unless she’s somehow tied into the pyrokinetics from The Road Not Taken.

5. Let’s Be Frank
Clearly something is up with alternate Olivia’s significant other, the way they keep referring to his “last night.”

A nice solid episode that advanced the story greatly, but also tied into many old plot points. The Fringe Doomsday Clock regains a minute this week.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: WEAPON.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

All bad doctors and purveyors of pseudoscience and woo will be taken care of appropriately (though probably not this severely).

An average episode of Fringe. Nothing remarkable, but nothing particularly bad, either.

The Plot: Two teenagers are sitting in a car by an abandoned warehouse when they hear a disturbance from within. The boyfriend goes to check it out and is surprised and killed by one of the shapeshifters from the other universe. The shapeshifter take his form, and then his girlfriend meets the same grisly fate a short time later. When the girl’s body is discovered the next morning, the Fringe Team is called in after the medical examiner notices three puncture marks on the roof of her mouth. A quick search of the warehouse reveals the boyfriend’s body in the same condition. A three foot diameter protoplasmic blob is also discovered. When Walter cuts into it with a scalpel, it bleeds mercury, which leads him to hypothesize that it is a shapeshifter embryo and must be how they travel between universes. He has the embryo taken to his lab.

Television signal interference was reported at the same time the shapeshifters appeared. When the interference is analyzed by the science geek at Massive Dynamic, he discovers that it is interference caused by sunspot patterns – only the interference is slightly out of phase with the sunspot interference from our own universe. However, both patterns will be perfectly in sync at 3:31PM the following day, leading Agent Dunham to believe that something big is planned for that inter-universe conjunction.

Across town, the two remaining shapeshifters report to Newton, the leader of the otherworld forces in our universe. They decide to proceed with their plan even though they are down an agent.

With a bunch of car batteries, Walter attempts to “jump start” the embryo. It seems to work at first, but is ultimately unsuccessful and the shapeshifter dies — but not before he croaks the name “Daniel Voss Verona.” The FBI captures Verona, a medical examiner at Boston General, but when they discover he is human and they are unsure of his part in the plan.

Meanwhile, one of the shapeshifters has taken on the shape of a bank president and he and Newton plant a device in the floor of the bank vault.

Walter decides that Newton is going to use the convergence to bring something, or someone, across the universes. He suspects that Newton will accomplish this using “harmonics.” Newton has three devices generating harmonic waves set up equidistant from the transfer point. Using Verona’s location as one point, and the bank as a second (the bank president’s dead body has just been found), the team decides that an abandoned bridge over the Charles River is the likely crossover point. Walter has also worked out a method to stop the conjunction by setting up his own set of waves that will cancel out Newton’s waves.

The team arrives at the bridge just as the convergence begins. Two cops try to stop them, but Dunham realizes they are shapeshifters and a gunfight starts. Walter , and then Peter, set up Walter’s apparatus on the bridge. When a problem develops, Peter stays behind to fix it while Walter and Dunham head to safety. After a loose cable is plugged on, Walter’s device works and cancels the convergence, but not before somebody crosses over. Peter is also knocked unconscious by the force of the waves. Waking up in the hospital, he realizes the truth: that he is the Peter from the other universe. He has words with Walter and then kicks him out. He checks himself out from the hospital and disappears. Meanwhile, Newton is helping “Mr. Secretary” – the person who crossed over – recover from the effects of the transfer.

1. No Stiffies
Apparently Rigor Mortis doesn’t exist in Fringe. Ten or so hours after death, the girl and her boyfriend should been very rigid and not as floppy as they were.

2. A New Record
For the second week in a row, Agent Dunham shows herself to be a gifted investigator.

3. Fancy Equipment, Part 1
Amino acids are way to small to be seen and identified with a microscope.

4. Fancy Equipment, Part 2
I’m impressed the scientist’s computer could predict with exact precision two days’ worth of sunspot patterns for not one, but two universes.

5. Crossed Wires
If Walter was using car batteries to jump start the embryo, why did the fuse in the lab’s power supply blow?

6. Exacting Precision, More or Less
Using a Triple-A map, a thick pen, a crude protactor, and very inexact measurements (4 or five blocks is “close enough”), Peter is able to find the exact spot the convergence will occur. He must be quite the genius.

7. An All-too Common Cliche in Movies and TV
Pills take time before they start working. A capsule like the one Newton took would need to travel to stomach and be broken down, releasing the medicine, which would then need to be absorbed into the bloodstream and spread throughout the body. For most pills, this takes at least thirty minutes; not the three seconds Newton’s pill took.

8. Thanks to Mythbusters, We Know the Bridge Won’t Fall
Newton’s wave must be propagating in a predictable pattern for Walter’s machine to have any chance of success.

9. My Prediction
Mr. Secretary is otherWalter.

There was nothing specifically wrong with this episode, per se, but it just didn’t resonate with me. It may just be that the last couple of episodes have been excellent, and this one, while quite good, was not as good, and paled by comparison. It did advance the uber-plot nicely.

No change in the Fringe Doomsday Clock this week.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: BRIDGE.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

A solidly enjoyable episode, even with Walter’s Mary Baker Eddy-ish crisis of conscience. But then, I’ve always been a sucker for time travel stories

The Plot: The lights start flickering aboard a car on a commuter train and then a thin man in a trench coat suddenly blinks into existence. He exits the train at the next station, barely avoiding bumping into a beggar. When the beggar climbs aboard the train, he discovers that everyone aboard that car is dead. The Fringe Team is called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Walter is writing a letter to Peter that finally tells him everything. He puts the letter in his pocket and joins the rest of the team.

At the scene, Walter’s first thought is that everyone died of heart failure. Agent Dunham, an astute investigator for once, realizes the lights are out only in that one car. Digging deeper, Peter finds that every battery on that car — cell phone, laptop, MP3 player — all are dead as well. Walter has the bodies moved to his lab where he discovers that the victims are low in ATP, one of the main energy molecules used by the human body. He hypothesizes that whoever this strange man was, he somehow drained all the energy out of everything in that train car.

The FBI is able to track the man’s movements with surveillance cameras and they eventually identify him as Alistair Peck. A raid of his house reveals that he is an MIT astrophysicist. Peck enters the house while it is being searched and is detained by the agents on site. When Dunham questions him, he spouts out some confusing answers and then suddenly fades from view.

Now we’re back on the commuter train that started the episode, this time seeing it from Peck’s point of view. As he exits the train, this time he tells the beggar that he is sorry for putting him through this again. He also leaves a fingerprint behind which allows the Fringe Team to identify him sooner this time. The search of his house reveals walls of mathematical formulas, but this time, Peck doesn’t come home during the search. Checking at MIT reveals that Peck was a brilliant scientist who studied time travel. His research was over almost everyone’s heads and he quit a year ago. The MIT professor they talk to is able to provide Dunham with some of Peck’s recent research, which she then hands over to Walter. Reading through the research, Walter realizes that Peck has discovered how to travel through time, but it takes a tremendous amount of energy. Meanwhile, Dunham has learned that Peck’s fiancée died in a car crash just about a year ago and the team suspects Peck’s ultimate goal is to go back in time to rescue her.

The Fringe Team tracks Peck to his old lab at MIT. Walter goes in to see him alone, hoping a fellow scientist who has also lost family will be able to talk him out of his plan. He explains all the regrets he has about bringing Peter from the other universe and how he feels that God in now punishing him. As the conversation ends, the SWAT team enters, and Peck once again fades from view. This time, he reappears at the lab at his house, where he works feverishly to complete his formulas so he can jump back to save his fiancée. A SWAT sniper just misses, and Peck fades from view, appearing in the empty field he described to Walter in their conversation. His time jump worked! He rushes to find his fiancée and climbs in her car just before she drives off. He holds her hand and tells her that he loves her – and then a truck barrels into the car, killing them both.

Now we’re back to the scene where Walter is writing the letter to Peter. This time, instead of carrying it around, he throws it in the fireplace to burn. The mail comes, and within it is a letter from Peck – he had carried it to the past with him and left orders for it to be mailed on this specific day. In it is a simple drawing of a white rose tulip — the sign Walter was looking for that God has forgiven him.

1. I remember you! You’re dead. We killed you!
Heart failure and heart attacks are two different things. A heart attack occurs when the heart is not getting the blood and oxygen it needs and part of it dies. Heart failure occurs when the heart is not pumping as strong as it should. While a heart attack can lead to heart failure, but they are not the same thing.

2. I’d buy that for a dollar!
A Faraday cage is a box of fine mesh made of some conducting material (gold is common). It blocks EM waves of a wavelength larger than the holes in the mesh. I don’t know what Peck was wearing, but it wasn’t a Faraday cage. (Plus if he was in a Faraday Cage, he wouldn’t be able to use his fiancée’s cell phone).

3. Dead or alive, you’re coming with me
Loss of ATP is the main cause of rigor mortis (ATP is required for muscles to relax, so when it is no longer available, the muscles stiffen up). All those corpses should have had severe rigidity.

4 . You better pray that that unholy monster of yours doesn’t screw up.
I love all the science fiction shows, books, and comics where people have wires and implants of all sorts in their bodies, yet never get infections. Metal or plastic implants within the human are so easily infected it’s not funny. People with them have to take extra antibiotics whenever they undergo certain procedures (dental work, colonoscopy). And those are the deep surgically implanted ones like artificial joint, heart valves, or pacemakers. More superficially places implants, like the wires and all on Murphy Peck, become infected at the drop of hat. I’ve never seen one go for over a week or two without getting infected, and that was in the clean hospital environment, not a dirty old house or train station. Peck would be a walking mess of MRSA.

5. Murphy… I’m a mess…
So God is punishing Walter by killing a bunch of other people?

6. I want a recount! And no matter how it turns out, I want my old job back!
The time travel aspect of the story seemed to leave questions unanswered (which I’m actually fine with; I like time travel stories that are though provoking and raise questions).
For instance, what happened to the 9-months-previous-Peck who was standing in the field when now-Peck appeared? Did he wink out of existence? Was he drained of energy and killed?
It seems to me that Peck killed his fiancée, or at least caused her death. He delayed her a few seconds when he entered the car and grabbed her hand. If he hadn’t been there, she would have had time to drive off and avoid being hit by that truck (though, apparently, she would die in another accident). I can see how Peck would love his fiancée enough to want to die with her, but it seems to me he loved her so much his instinct would be to first save her life.
Also, did he stop to mail the letter in the past, or was the nice-clean letter somehow found on his mangled and crushed corpse?
I’m a big fan of time travel stories. Some of my favorites: By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies, both by Robert A. Heinlein; The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers; the various Time Patrol stories by Poul Anderson; the Paratime stories by H. Beam Piper; and the best of all, The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester.

7. Massive and immediate retaliation is the best policy
Finally, a question unrelated to this episode that just occurred to me: how do we know the Bell Olivia met with was the Bell from our dimension, and not the other one?

A good episode that left more questions opened than it started with, but in a good way. For the third episode in a row, the Fringe Doomsday Clock gains a minute.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: SECRETS.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

I thought this was a well done, poignant episode of Fringe. Mostly, the story was just a confirmation of things we already suspected, but it did throw in some new wrinkes (like whatever happened to Dr Warren?)

The Plot: Most of this episode takes place back in 1985, where Walter Bishop has invented a “window” that lets him see into the other universe. At that point, he has no idea of how to cross between universes other than, scientifically, it is probably a “very bad idea.”

Meanwhile, young Peter is dying of an unnamed genetic wasting disease. Walter is unable to develop a cure, but other universe Walter is hard at work one on. Our Walter is using his window to watch him, hoping he’ll develop a cure in time to save Peter. Sadly, no cure is found in time and Peter dies in his father’s arms.

Other Peter is still alive, though still very sick, and other Walter remains hard at work on a cure. Miraculously, he discovers one, but a poorly timed visit by one of the Observers causes him to miss it. Our Walter notices, however, and is able to use what he saw to produce the cure. It is too late for his Peter, but he resolves to find a way into the other universe to save that Peter.

Walter heads to the lake and sets up the apparatus he has developed to open a gate to the other universe. His co-worker Dr. Warren and Nina Sharp arrive to talk him out of it, but he can’t be dissuaded. He opens the gate and walks through, the gate snapping shut behind him. Unfortunately, Nina was still trying to hold him back, and her arm was injured by the dimensional gate.

In the other universe, Walter arrives at the lake house and convinces his other wife (who believes that he is her Walter) that he has found a cure, but has to get Peter back to his lab immediately. Peter is bundled up, and he and Walter head out. Walter takes Peter across the lake to the gate, which Walter reopens and they enter our universe. As they arrive, the ice over the lake cracks beneath their feet, and they fall into the freezing water. As fate would have it, the Observer is there and rescues them. He tells Walter that Peter is very important and must live. He then gets out of the car and walks away. Walter takes Peter to his lab and gives him the cure, which seems to help. Unexpectedly, his wife arrives looking for him, and is overcome with emotion when she spots other Peter. She makes it clear to Walter that, despite his original intention, he will not be returning Peter back to the other universe.

1. Oh The Humanity!
The other universe has zeppelins, which are cool. Need I say more?

2. I Knew I Should Have Paid More Attention in Class
The Casimir Effect is an actual consideration in quantum physics. Near as I can tell, it deals with metallic plates in a vacuum. Walter certainly had the metallic plates, but he seemed to be missing the vacuum. But — hey! — zeppelins!

3. Wonder What Green Would Have Meant
So a pink solution is bad, and a blue solution is good. Was the writer of this episode, perchance, male?

4. 1.21 Gigawatts!
According to Dr. Warren, the wormhole will require a tremendous amount of power that will devastate both universes — yet Walter manages it with a small generator. Either Dr. Warren is bad at math, or those generators put out way more power than I thought.

5. One Prozac a Day, Husband’s a CPA
The faux-1985 opening sequence was well done, as were the location titles (nice 80s computer font).
Back to the Future was a nice touch. Especially the Eric Stoltz part as he was the only other actor seriously considered to play Marty McFly.
By the time Nina whipped out her giant cell I thought they were pushing “the 80s” a little too much (and apparently it takes only three or four digits to reach William at his hotel in France)

A solid story, and the science, though Fringe, wasn’t over explained, it just was. The clock regains a minute and moves back to 11:57

This week’s Fringe cipher was: PETERS.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

Tonight’s episode of House tried to hard to be edgy and ended up losing a coherent plot and any semblance of logical medical care along the way.

Abby is a seventeen year old high school senior who becomes unresponsive while on a school outing to the planetarium. Foamy red sputum drips from her mouth and her boyfriend reports that she’s not breathing; she is rushed to the hospital and admitted to House’s service.

Abby is found to have pulmonary edema (fluid build-up the lungs). The team understands this to mean that she has either a heart problem or a lung problem. Her drug screen was negative and her blood alcohol level was barely positive. Foreman suggests she may have developed heart disease from binge drinking. A C-13 pyruvate MRI is ordered (a test that looks at blood flow within the heart muscle itself). It doesn’t show the heart disease Foreman was looking for, but there appears to be something wrong with the mitral valve. Fungus is considered as a possibility, but the team decides a fastidious enteric bacteria infection is more likely (enteric bacteria are found in the human intestine, and fastidious means they are difficult to culture). A TEE (transesophageal echo — an echocardiogram performed from the inside of the throat which offers good views of the heart valves) is ordered to get a better look at the mitral valve. Under echocardiography, the valve appears normal, but during the test Abby develops an aortic dissection (a tear in the wall of the aorta), a life threatening emergency. She is rushed to emergency surgery where Taub and Thirteen manage to successfully resuscitate her.

The question now is how did Abby develop the aortic weakness which led to the dissection? A genetic defect is mentioned, but quickly dismissed with the aside that she is not Marfanoid (Marfan’s syndrome is known to cause aortic dissections — of course, there are other genetic defects besides Marfan’s). An allergic reaction is also suggested as a likely cause. Thirteen believes that a severe immune reaction could have led to the aortic weakness. She goes on to suggest that Abby may be allergic to her boyfriend’s semen. A quick test is performed but shows no reaction. However, during the test, Abby develops excruciating abdominal pain and is found to have blood in her urine. “Kidney failure,” screams Chase.

The differential diagnosis now consists of neuropathy (by which they mean syphilis, which can lead to a weakened aorta), a blood clot, insterstitial cystitis, or cancer. A full body scan is suggested, but, for the second week in a row, House mentions how much he hates them (a point on which we agree — of course, House’s opinion would carry more weight if they hadn’t already ordered five or six this season — and he wasn’t a fictional character). Out of other options, House agrees to the full body scan, which is negative. This being House, no test can go smoothly, and Abby starts to hallucinate during the study. This causes the team to reevaluate their differential, which now consists of a vascular disease (probably vasculitis from the way Foreman is talking) or an aneurysm. An MRA (an MRI that looks specifically at blood vessels) is ordered to find the aneurysm, but it also is negative. Foreman suggests a parasite found in the Middle East, but House shoots him down abruptly, saying it was too ridiculous to even consider.

Abby continues to hallucinate, but now has also started to have seizures. House convinces the team to try an experimental technology (conveniently available at that very hospital): cognitive pattern recognition. In a scene more at home on Fringe than House, the team see the image of her boyfriend playing baseball, then the universe, then an older man (“her late father” they surmise) from Abby’s brain. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough to build any sort of diagnosis. Grasping at straws, Thirteen suggests something may be wrong with the liver. Chase suggests she may have polycystic kidney disease (which really would have been seen on that full body scan he wanted). Foreman notices the MRI shows that her pineal gland is calcified (which is normal), but wonders if it may be hiding a tumor. A high powered MRI is ordered to check but is completely normal. House is at a loss until a conversation with Taub triggers his Eureka! moment. It turns out that Abby boyfriend’s father travels extensively, to the Middle East even, where he picked up the parasite that Foreman mentioned earlier, which he passed on to Abby in a drunken sexual encounter. The parasite itself died, but it left enough behind to cause a severe allergic reaction which is causing all of Abby’s problems (Cerebellar schistosomiasis hypersensitivity allergy). A quick brain surgery (to the remove the parasite, presumably) and she is fine physically. Emotionally…is a different story.

As usual, major complaints are in red, minor complaints are in blue, and nit-picking ones in green:

Schistosomiasis is infection by the liver fluke. It is endemic in much of the world, including the Middle East. So far so good, however:
1. It is the eggs of the fluke that illicit elicit a potent immune response. The fluke can cause an immune response itself, but not the level the eggs do (the level Abby demonstrated)
2. The body walls the offending agent off in a granuloma which absolutely should show up on a scan.
3. Schistosomiasis is not transmitted from person to person; it has a complex life-cycle and needs an intermediate host.

Coincidentally, just this past Thursday, NPR ran a segment on using a computer and pattern recognition to read human minds. Suffice it to say that the scene on House bore little in common with reality.

5cc of Adrenalin is a high dose. Even in emergencies, it is generally given in 1cc doses (though it will likely take more than a single dose). Plus, in the medical profession in the United States we call it “epinephrine,” half the OR staff wouldn’t know what you wanted if you asked for “adrenalin.”

Taub is suddenly a cardiac surgeon now? There’s a great deal of difference between a plastic surgeon and a cardiac surgeon. They only share one year of residency — the rest is completely different.

We’ve discussed this before, many times, and in great detail last week, but once more: blood in the urine is not a sign of kidney failure.

If the offending parasite’s body was so small it didn’t show up on a scan, how did they know where to operate to remove it?

Only in the hospital for a few minutes, Taub breaks HIPAA (Health Information Portablilty and Accountability Act, a Federal law which deals with, among other things, patient privacy) by telling Abby’s boyfriend about her medical condition. That’s a big fine for the hospital. $$$$ Nice going, Taub.

I know I often complain about the unrealistic time course of tests on the show, but this week’s deserves a special mention: fungal cultures are very slow growing — weeks, not days — so there’s no way they’d be negative so soon.
To my knowledge, there are no blood cultures for parasites. They are generally detected by O&P (ova and parasite) studies of the stool and blood smears.

She seized for just about a minute, yet in that time they managed to hook up a multi-lead EEG and record the waveforms. That’s damn impressive.
And can we stop the “OMG! If she has another seizure she’ll stroke out!” That’s unrealistic and insulting to people who actually have a seizure disorder.

The medical mystery was average — nothing we haven’t seen before: C. The final solution really didn’t make much sense. If they wanted her to have schistosomiasis, they should have given it to her in a way which could actually happen. If they wanted the edginess of sex with her boyfriend’s father, they should have just made her allergic to his semen, as was discussed earlier. Combining the two was a bad decision: D. The medicine had holes this week, though no more than usual, other than House giving up so fast. I give it a B. The soap opera was good, though not as strong as the last couple of weeks: B+.

The review of the previous episode of House
A list of all prior House reviews

William Tenn passed away this weekend. He was one of the last of the great Golden Age science fiction writers. He was also the first writer I ever saw at a convention. I was about twelve and had convinced my father to take me to Rovacon, a small science-fiction convention in the neighboring town of Roanoke, Virginia, where William Tenn was the guest of honor. I was having fun exploring the con and I only made it to the last ten or fifteen minutes of his talk, but immediately wished I had heard the whole speech. In the portion I heard, he was talking about the difficulties of time traveling. Not the scientific or technological hurdles, but the social ones. He mentioned how a man from just one hundred years ago would find it extremely hard to function in today’s society, and vice versa. Think of all the differences between now and 1910: Technology, certainly. Health and sanitation, too. But think of societal attitudes and how they’ve changed: Women’s lib. Civil rights. The U.N. Non-isolationist policies. A person traveling back to 1910 could quickly find themselves in trouble just mentioning some commonly accepted modern beliefs. At the age of twelve, I found this fascinating, and I still do. Now more than ever I wish I had made it the entire talk.

My favorite of Tenn’s stories is Time in Advance. In the future, criminals are shipped out to harsh frontier worlds to serve out their sentences performing the back-breaking work of terraforming the planets. Few survive more than a few years, let alone their entire sentence. There is also the option of serving time in advance. In this case, you haven’t committed any crime yet, but you are planning to. By serving your sentence first, with a hefty fifty-percent reduction in length, you are entirely free to commit your crime upon your return to Earth — if you happen to survive. As the story begins, two convicts have just returned after serving their time in advance for murder. This is a big story for the media — only rarely does a single time-in-advancer survive, let alone two arriving on the same day. However, the two convicts find that having the freedom to commit a murder of their choice open up doors and exposes secrets they weren’t expecting. It’s a great story, with a nice undercurrent of dark comedy.

Time in Advance, along with 32 other stories can be found in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1. If you haven’t the story before, or Tenn at all, I recommend picking up the book, or (more economically) at least encouraging your library to do so.

It’s always nice to find new reprint collections of old pulp stories. I’m a big fan of these stories — sure, many of the characters are rather two-dimensional and the plots paper-thin — but there are enough diamonds in the rough to make it worth the time and effort. In the past year or two, a number of my favorites have managed to work their way back into print:

El Borak, by Robert E. Howard
The White Wolf — a.k.a. El Borak — is my second favorite Howard character (with Solomon Kane being number one). El Borak has swashbuckling adventures in the early part of the twentieth century: think Lawrence of Arabia with a liberal dash of sword and sorcery. His stories have been out of print for decades, but will be available Tuesday in a nice new edition.

Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith, by C. L. Moore
Moore was one of the first female adventure pulp writers — she wrote as “C. L.” instead of Catherine to disguise her gender. Most of her stories were published in Weird Tales and have a slight Lovecraftian feel to them.
Jirel is the ruler of a small medieval kingdom and her lands always seem to be under threat from natural, and supernatural, enemies. Her stories tend towards the darker aspect of fantasy.
Northwest Smith is a smuggler and anti-hero in the distant future. His stories have a darker edge to them as well.
The Science Fiction Book Club has inexpensive hardbound collections of Jirel and Northwest Smith. Paizo, under their Planet Stories imprint, also offers a Jirel as well as a Northwest Smith collection. (Paizo also offers several collections of Moore’s husband and fellow writer, Henry Kuttner. Sadly, I haven’t seen any recent reissues of stories by Lewis Padgett, which was the name Moore and Kuttner used when they collaborated together on a story).

Speaking of Paizo, they also are offering what look to be great collections of the Eric John Stark series by Leigh Brackett.

Big questions were answered, the science wasn’t that bad, but it still struck me as a surprisingly lifeless outing for the “Winter Finale” of Fringe.

The Plot: At an office building in Manhattan, the workers grouse about a series of small earthquakes the city has been experiencing. Suddenly, there is a larger tremor and one of the workers finds himself caught in the quake. He blacks out for a second and when he comes to, he is pinned by the rubble — and has four arms and four legs.

The Fringe team is called in to examine the office building. So far, no survivors have been found, but many dead bodies. The bodies aren’t normal, however, but each seems to be two separate people fused together. Walter hypothesizes that a “Quantum Tectonic Event” has caused a rip in space that caused the quake and fusion. A survivor is found upstairs: the worker from the opening scene. Walter converses with him while he is slowly dying and learns that the worker is from the alternate universe. Walter has a new theory: an office building from that universe has suddenly merged with the same office building from ours, killing all the inhabitants. Agent Dunham suspects this to be a deliberate act on the part of Newton (the leader of the team from the alternate universe that is trying to destroy ours).

Back at the lab, Walter realizes what has happened — and what will happen. Twenty-five years ago, he and William Bell sent a car to the alternate universe and a short time later, a car of equivalent mass from that universe appeared in ours, merged into a statue. Walter tells the team that a building from our universe will disappear within 35 hours. His only idea how to stop it is to use some of the abilities Dunham gained from Cortexiphan. He drags her and Peter to Jacksonville, where the original Cortexiphan experiments were carried out. He repeats the experiment on Dunham, but it has no effect this time. Belatedly he realizes that her abilities depends on fear, and Dunham no longer experiences fear, but channels it all into anger. Defeated, the three of them return to New York.

While they’ve been in Florida, small earthquakes have started in New York City, signaling that the calamity is impending. The scientists at Massive Dynamic are trying to find a pattern to the quakes, but Walter tells them there is no pattern to find. Instead, he suggests locating the building in New York City of identical mass to the one that appeared from the other universe. They are able to narrow the list down to 147 building, but the thirty-five hours is up. Concern over her failure and the likely loss of life scares Dunham, kick starting her spot-the-things-from-the-other-universe power. She is able to spot a building that weirdly glimmers, a sign that it is the one that is going to disappear. The team is able to identify the building and the authorities evacuate it just in time — with a massive inrush of air the entire building — basement, foundation, and all — disappears.

As the episode ends, Olivia and Peter are heading out for drinks, but when she looks at him, she realizes that he is glimmering too. Walter begs her not to tell Peter the truth.

1. Spellchecker
Manhattan was spelled wrong in the opening scene.

2. Island of Misfit Toys
If the building in Florida has been sealed for 25 years, why did it have toys from the Ice Age movies (’02, ‘06, and ‘09)?

3. Where’s Johnny? He Was Here Just a Minute Ago!
So did a child of identical mass to Peter get transported to the alternate universe when Walter brought Alterna-Peter here?

4. Glimmer Glimmer Glumpkin
If Olivia’s powers detect items from the other universe (that’s what Walter was testing in the classroom after all), why did the building from this universe glimmer?

5. Tick Tock
Why 35 hours? I’m guessing that’s how long it took for the car to appear.

6. Mass Effect
How are they going to be able to find the mass of the alternate universe building when it is merged with ours. Are they assuming it was identical to the one in our universe, just like their Nixon coins and double-decker cars are identical to ours?

7. There’s No Babble Like Good Babble
Quantum tectonic event. That is some grad-A prime of technobabble. It sounds impressive, but notice how none of the words really work together (or at least the two most important: tectonic and quantum. They’re pretty much contradictory — “quantum” suggest atomic or sub-atomic, while “tectonic” is very macro in its implications.)

I so wanted to like this episode with the Peter reveal (that we all knew anyway), but I couldn’t — it was dull. It wasn’t horrible, but an episode this big should be more fulfilling. The Fringe Doomsday Clock stays put.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: REVEAL.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

Volume Four of Apothecarius Argentum moves the action from Beazol to the neighboring kingdom of Navara, a poor and starving country with a widespread wasting disease brought on by overuse of a toxic pesticide. Princess Primula and her companions, including friend/love-interest/Royal apothecary Argent and his rival, Lorca, third Prince of Navara.

There’s probably a spoiler or two in the annotations, so consider yourself warned.

Belladonna
The young prince has been suffering from seizures and was given belladonna to treat them.

Belladonna is a plant that has a long history of use in traditional medicine and continues to be used, to some extent, in modern medicine as well. The plant is very potent and must be used sparingly because of the high potential of adverse events, especially death. This is especially true for children (especially sickly malnourished ones like the prince). Let me put it this way: the more common name for belladonna is Deadly Nightshade.

Historically, while belladonna has been used to treat a variety of different ailments, it has not been used to treat seizures. The only mention I’ve even seen of the use of belladonna for seizures comes from homeopathy, which is not traditional medicine — or really any sort of medicine at all (despite what its practitioners would like you to think); homeopathy can best be described as a delusion combining sympathetic magic, wishful thinking, and an early-19th century understanding of science.

Belladonna contains several potent chemicals, most notably atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine — all drugs that are used today. Belladonna extract itself is still used in a few modern medicines, Donnatal (a stomach medication) is probably the best known.

Dandelion
The prince has been given an overdose of belladonna, and Argent gives him dandelion extract to correct it.

Argent is correct that belladonna is excreted almost entirely through the kidney, so increasing kidney function should get rid of the medicine faster. Diuretics (drugs that increase urine output) are one way of doing this. Dandelion has long been used as a diuretic. While I have seen no recent studies or reports that confirm its benefits in this regard, I’m willing to give the plant the benefit of the doubt because the effects of a diuretic are hard to miss (if you pee a lot, it’s a diuretic).

Activated Charcoal
Activated charcoal is used again to treat the chronic wasting disease that is common in Navara. I covered this in depth in the Volume 3 annotations.

Cochineal
The cochineal is a tiny insect (Dactylopius coccus) that grows on cacti in Central and South America. When the females of the species are collected, dried, and crushed they produce the brilliant red dye carmine which is used for coloring fabrics, cosmetics, and food.

It takes 70,000 insects, all collected by hand, to make a pound of dye, which is worth about $36 in today’s market.

Prince Lorca mentions several times that the insects grow on citrus, but they don’t — they can only live on certain species of cactus. I wonder if this might be a translation error, either in the translation of the manga, or from the author’s original sources. (There is a similar insect known as “Polish Cochineal,” and while it doesn’t grow on cacti, it doesn’t grow on citrus either.)

Marijuana
The story mentions a link between marijuana use and psychiatric disease. There haves been several studies that have looked at this very subject, but the results have been unclear. Can marijuana use lead to psychiatric illness, or do people with pre-existing psychiatric disease tend to use marijuana more? Studies have suggested both results, so just leave this one as “undecided.”

Is it possible to die from a marijuana overdose? Again, sources vary, but almost all seem to agree that it would take an incredibly high level of exposure to be fatal, and many experts suggest that it would be physically impossible to achieve this high a dose. (On the other hand, with incense burning in a sealed room with heavy curtains, I suspect the king suffocated to death when the incense used up all the oxygen).

Does Godwin’s Law apply to television shows? Actually, though the science was questionable, I thought the storyline was sufficiently creepy to be a good episode overall.

The Plot: At a wedding, the groom’s grandmother notices someone standing in the back who alarms her. As she moves to confront him, she starts gasping for breath, turns an ashen gray, and then collapses, dead. Soon, other members of her family start dying as well – fourteen total – and the Fringe team is called in. After examining the corpses, Walter and Peter declare that everyone has died of asphyxia (suffocation). Agent Dunham notices a tattoo on the grandmother’s arm that indicates she was a concentration camp survivor. Poking around the church, they find the groom, still alive, but gasping for air. He dies at their feet, bringing the death toll to fifteen.

At the lab, Walter starts his autopsy of one of the victims and notices that the blood is a deep blue (Prussian blue, perhaps?), indicating some form of toxin exposure. The team also realizes that everyone who died was a blood relative and a direct descendant of the grandmother. Re-examining the church, Peter finds a candle that is different from the others and brings it to Walter. A quick run through the lab equipment shows that the candle contains some sort of cyanide compound. Walter suspects the deaths at the wedding were an experiment by the murderer to see if his toxin would work, and predicts that he will strike again soon. Sure enough, in a similar episode, nine people die in a coffee shop. The connection this time is that they all have brown eyes.

Back at the lab, Walter has isolated the toxin and shows how it can be set up to target different proteins, depending on who the murderer wants to kill. He points out a carbon chain on the toxin that he claims in the creator’s “signature.” When Peter remarks that it looks like a seahorse, Walter realizes that the poison was created by his own father who had been a scientist in Berlin until fleeing in 1943 (his nickname was “seahorse”). He has kept his father’s formulas in some old German books, Peter sold them ten years ago when Walter was in the asylum. It all turns out to be a red herring though, as they are not connected to the mysterious murderer.

Meanwhile, Walter has managed to get a partial DNA profile of the killer from skin cells left on a fingerprint. He claims that it’s a bad sample though, because the telomeres are severely damaged, suggesting that the person must be at least one hundred years old. The FBI is able to track down the chemicals used in the making of the toxin, and get the killer’s address. They search the house (poorly), but find nothing, as their target is at that very moment escaping from his lab in the basement. Eventually, Agent Dunham finds the basement lab, but the killer has set a trap for them, with some of the toxin specifically targeted to Walter. Luckily, Dunham and Peter get Walter to medical care in time, and he survives. A clue (found by Dunham even) tells the team that the killer has his sights set on a World Tolerance conference going on in Boston. Peter, Dunham, and the FBI head over to the conference to look for the killer. Walter stays behind, mixing up something in the lab, and then he heads over to the conference himself. Peters spots the poison and he and Dunham are able to confiscate it before it can be activated – but they are interrupted by a horrible coughing sound and rush over to find the killer, disguised as a waiter, gasping for breath and dying. Walter has turned the tables on him and made a version of the poison specifically tuned to his DNA. As the episode ends, Peter and Walter are still puzzled how the murderer got his hands on Walter’s father’s research, not realizing that the killer was a Nazi scientist himself, somehow still alive sixty years later.

1. Stay on Target
According to Walter, the toxin binds to a particular protein, and this protein can be altered depending on who the target. Unfortunately, the Nazi scientist’s poor understanding of molecular biology has doomed more people than he realizes. For instance, there is no protein specific to brown eyes. Brown eyes simply have more melanin than other eye colors — but the other eye colors still contain melanin. Everyone in that coffee shop, including the Nazi, should have died. Similarly, there is no special protein in dark skin that sets them apart — people with darker skin simply have more melanin than lighter skinned people. Trying to kill off the darker skinned people would have killed everyone — well, except the albinos. Good job, Nazi scientist. Now the albinos rule the world.
Suddenly, in a virtual deus ex machina, the toxin can be programmed with a specific DNA — even though Walter made it point, repeatedly, to mention that it was created before DNA was understood.
Even if the poison could target DNA, how are you going to get that big of a molecule into the nucleus of the cell, let alone through the cell membrane?

2. Those Who Do Not Know History…
Walter is off on his history: the discovery of DNA predated the Nazis, not the other way around. DNA was discovered in the middle of the 19th century, well before the Third Reich. By the 1920s, there was strong evidence that DNA was involved in inheritance, with the first definitive experiment performed in 1943. Walter is probably thinking of Watson and Crick’s famous work on the structure of DNA, which was published in 1953.

3. Sure Hope He Never Testifies in Court
The signs Walter mentions — petechiae, bulging eyes — are seen in asphyxia caused by strangulation (they are related to increased venous pressure in the head from the compression of the blood vessels in the neck), not by asphyxia due to toxin inhalation.
Can the vitreous humor, a gel-like liquid, really swell?

4. How Dare You Kill People With My Dad’s Poison!
Walter was upset that the murderer was “perverting” his father’s work, but let’s not forget that his father’s work was a nasty chemical warfare agent.

5. It Is Impolite To Inquire As To A Telomere’s Age
Telomeres are special DNA sequences on the ends of chromosomes that keep it from breaking down or fraying. There has been some good research suggesting a link between aging and the break down of telomeres. Still, it’s a dubious stretch to tell someone’s age from looking at their telomeres.

6. Nasty Poison
Hydrogen cyanide can kill remarkably fast, depending on its concentration.

6. Comes With A Certificate of Authenticity
That seahorse “signature” is so incredibly bulky and large that it would interfere with the biological activity of the toxin. Plus, it’s bad planning because it provides an easy target to identify and develop an antibody against.

7. Two Puffs Four Times A Day
A nit-pick here, but the groom sure has poor inhaler technique (but then, so do many of my patients — and a quick Google search reveals that much of the internet has a similarly poor understanding.) The inhaler should be held an inch or two in front of the mouth, not actually in the mouth.

The science was quite questionable this week, but I thought the story did a good job keeping the suspense going — and the Nazi scientist was truly creepy — so it’s a wash and the Doomsday Clock stays at 11:58.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: FATHER.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say. And he’s still talking about it a week later.

Another DC Comics Public Service Ad teaching about science — this time the topic is “The Atom” — more specifically radiolabeling (using radioactive isotopes to mark certain chemicals, which can then be traced), since that is what most of the vignettes depict.

As usual when dealing with these science PSAs, I have some questions and concerns:
Did the Brazilian doctor use radiolabeling to find the tumor (such as a bone scan or PET scan), or did he use radiation to treat it?
By 1959, there was already a Yellow Fever vaccine available, which would probably do more to eradicate the disease than making radioactive mosquitoes (wasn’t that a SciFi SyFy movie?)
The fourth panel is what really worries me. I think they’re using radioactive fertilizer in Canada to grow mutant tobacco plants.

This PSA was found in Batman #128 as well as the other DC comics from December 1959. This ad was written by Jack Schiff. There is some debate about the identity of the artist, but most sources list Lou Cameron.

More PSAs

Tags: comics psa atom isotope mosquito jack schiff lou cameron

The plot of this episode of Fringe was, at best, so-so. They could have at least played up the “trapped in a building with a possible killer” angle. The science — and it’s generous calling it that — was painfully bad.

The Plot: In a large office building in Boston, a man walks into the office of a petroleum corporation, then drops dead, with his last breath spraying a fine mist of blood on all around him. Given the strange nature of the man’s death, the Fringe team is called in. Peter and Olivia arrive first and are interviewing bystanders. Walter, Broyles, and Astrid are on their way into the building, when one of the people exposed to the dead man’s blood comes walking toward the door, as fast as he can. Walter quickly shuts the door before the man can escape, and the man dies, spraying blood against the closed door. Fearful of an unknown contagious disease, the CDC is called in and the building quarantined — with Peter and Dunham still inside.

Some blood samples are obtained, and Walter takes them back to his lab. In the office building, the receptionist falls ill. Doing a little detective work, the team determines that the first dead man was a corporate spy from Dubai who was selling information on the peteroleum company’s competitors. The ill receptionist becomes frantic and violent. She scuffles with Peter, then jumps through a window, plummeting to the street below, dead. Unfortunately, Peter has been exposed to infected blood and now may be infected himself.

Inspecting the car of the corporate spy, the FBI and Center for Disease Control (CDC) find a core sample from 10 miles down that he was trying to sell. They also find the mysterious virus behind the outbreak contained within the core sample. Walter speculates it is 75,000 years old and was responsible for killing most of the mammals on Earth during the Ice Age (as opposed to the ice and cold). From this virus, Walter is able to concoct a test to determine who is infected and who isn’t. Walter believes that the virus has human-level intelligence and is purposefully acting to infect as many people as possible. He and Astrid enter the office building and test the staff. Most are not infected. Peter is showing signs of infection, but through sleight of hand, makes sure he has a negative test. The people who tested clean are escorted out of the building — except Peter. The guard at the door (a competent FBI agent at Fringe?) notices he has a nosebleed and keeps him in quarantine. In the end, eleven infected individuals remain in the building. Walter and Astrid also elect to stay.

Walter deduces that sulfur is a cure for the virus and relays the information to Dunham. Meanwhile, the CDC has called in the US Army to “take care of” the people remaining in the building. Dunham and Broyles ask for more time to synthesize Walter’s cure. Broyles suggests pumping the building full of Fentanyl gas (a strong narcotic) to knock everyone out and buy time. Dunham volunteers to enter the building and turn the HVAC back on. She scuffles with an infected Peter but succeeds in her mission. All the infected people are knocked out, Walter’s cure is made, and everyone (well, except for those already dead) survives.

1. I Give Him Credit For Trying
I applaud the bike messenger for attempting CPR (even if it was the 5 compression/1 breath technique that is not recommended anymore), but give it some time before you declare the guy dead. Ten compressions doesn’t cut it. At least continue the CPR until the EMTs arrive.

2. You Know What They Say About “Assume”
Walter believes the virus is transmitted by bodily fluids. How does he arrive at this conclusion? Certainly blood transmission seems probable, but how does he know about other bodily fluids? Is he surreptitiously testing saliva and semen?
He claims the virus is not airborne, or more people would be sick. How is he so sure about the incubation time? Maybe more people could be sick than he knows, they’re just not showing it yet. Sure, the bike messenger fell ill fast, but how do you know he was not exposed before (maybe the Dutch guy wasn’t patient zero), or maybe the messenger had a weakened immune system and succumbed faster than normal. Walter is making way too many assumptions.

3. Do You Even Know What You’re Testing For
There are way too many problems with Walter’s test.
Why the cheek swab? That’s used for DNA samples. Is he saying the virus can be found in the DNA of cheek cells?
Most viral tests look for antibodies against the virus — they’re a lot easier to develop. Of course, it usually takes several weeks for these antibodies to appear. There are some tests that look for the actual virus, but I don’t care how much of a genius Walter is, he couldn’t have cobbled one together so fast, or made enough of it to test the entire office building.
Most importantly, there was no prior testing to determine the false negative/false positive rate of Walter’s test. No test is 100% right all the time. They are risking everybody’s life on an unknown test.
Then Peter’s test was negative but he clearly was infected. We the viewers know he faked the test swab, but the characters don’t know that. Their first thought would have been: “Peter’s test was negative, but he has the disease. How many of these other people we let outside also had false negative tests?” And then they would have hustled them all back inside and left them there.

4. If Only My Labs In College Were This Easy
The scene in Walter’s lab was laughable.
No protective gear.
Isolating a virus in a test-tube using a centrifuge (and using it poorly) would never work. It’s not even close to being right.

5. Down In The Hole
Admittedly, I’m not a geologist, but how does 10 miles down equal 75,000 years. I would think it would be a lot more (years) than that.
The virus lived 75,000 years without a host — that’s impressive. Plus this virus can apparently be visualized without an electron microscope.

6. It’s A Gas
Fentanyl gas has been used at least once before to subdue a building full of people. In this case, it was a hostage situation in Russia with Chechnyan separatists. The Fentanyl didn’t work as well as expected and actually killed 117 hostages. In situations like that, it’s hard to control the inhaled dose — and Fentanyl can kill at the wrong dose. Plus, a fair number of people are allergic — fatally allergic — to narcotics.

7. Dire-Swine Flu?
Neuraminidase inhibitors are used to treat influenza viruses and … that’s about it. So this is a flu virus now

8. Eli Lilly Is Spinning In His Grave
In vivo does not equal in vitro. In other words, what works great in a test tube often doesn’t turn out to work so well in an actual living organism. If creating a new drug were as easy as Walter makes it out to be, we’d be neck deep in fancy new medications and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be laying off people left and right.

9. Not So Smart, Is It?
If the virus really wanted to infect as many people as possible, why not infect the airplane instead of an office building? Those people would be in an airport and then other planes, not trapped in a building.

8. Nice Try, But…
The US Army is not authorized to act on US soil. National Guard, maybe.

9. Georgia On My Mind
I’m not sure of the actual powers of the CDC in a situation like this, but this seemed unrealistic to me. Their response was incredibly fast and a lot like a sledgehammer. I’m not saying the CDC isn’t fast — they are easily the best in the world at what they do — but they’re not that fast. And they actually do research, rather than just shoot people. Wait, was that a knock at the door?

I thought last week’s science was bad, but this was even worse. I have no choice but to move the Fringe Doomsday Clock forward two minutes to 11:58.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: WINDOW.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

Not the best episode of Fringe. The storyline was pretty cliche (the sheriff involved, really?) and the science was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Plot: A state trooper picks up a young boy running away from home. A few minutes later, he looks over at his passenger and discovers that the boy has suddenly become horribly deformed. The trooper arrives at the station and he and two coworkers photograph the child and enter him into their database. They all mention that they’ve heard rumors of deformities such as this, but never actually seen one. Suddenly, a car pulls up and three adults, all as deformed as the child, enter the station and kill all the troopers, reclaiming the boy.

The Fringe team is called in because of the picture of the deformed boy. Looking through other files at the station, the team finds thirty years worth of similar reports, though no actual evidence, all centered on the nearby town of Edina. Deciding that it’s their next logical stop, the team heads over to Edina where they meet the local sheriff. He tells them he’s also heard stories of deformed people nearby, but never seen one. He also identified the sound the team has heard since entering the town as the “Edina Hum” – which he blames on turbines at a nearby military base. Strangely, the hum causes Walter to start singing nonsense words to Bizet’s Carmen.

As the team heads out of town back to their hotel, they are run off the road by a pick up truck. Dunham was knocked out by the crash but Peter stayed conscious. Walter is blissfully asleep in the back seat. The pickup that ran them off the road comes back and a deformed men gets out and starts shooting at the wrecked car. Peter gets off a couple of shots, and actually thinks he hits the shooter, before he gets back in his truck and drives away. Other federal agents arrive and inform the team that they’ve found an abandoned truck that matches their description. Peter spots a blood trail leading into the woods, and they find a dead man –- but he’s not deformed at all. The corpse is sent to Walter’s lab for autopsy.

Agent Broyles tells the team that the nearby Army base was once home to classified experiments known as “Project Elephant” back in the ‘70s. Meanwhile, in Walter’s lab, when the body bag is opened, the corpse has become deformed once again. Walter continues to sing Carmen and Astrid realizes that the song is really a mnemonic for “Harkness,” which Walter recognizes as the name of the campus’s law library. Furthermore, he remembers that he did work on “Project Elephant” –- which dealt with camouflage — and hid some papers in the library, which he and Astrid successfully recover.

Peter and Dunham are going through the county and federal records on the town of Edina and realize that several key files are missing. The census date shows the town population has only changed by deaths and a few births — no one has moved in or out of town in the past thirty years. The town sheriff calls to tell Dunham that he has located the owner of the truck and wants Peter and Dunham to join him at the subject’s house. They agree, unaware that the sheriff is setting a trap for them.

Walter tells Astrid that the people of Edina are all hopelessly deformed because they lived too close to the military experiment. However, in order to help the people of Edina, one of the scientists built a giant transmitter that sends out powerful EM waves which fool the eyes into thinking what they see looks normal. Thus, as long as the residents stay within Edina and range of the transmitters, their deformities are hidden. When they leave town, their deformities can be seen again. Walter and Astrid find the transmitter and shut it off, proving his theory, as all the deformities are suddenly clear. Across town, the sheriff is not particularly good at his ambush and loses a few men, but he ultimately gets the drop on Peter and Dunham. Luckily, one of the town’s residents – sick of all the death of innocents – steps up and shoots the sheriff, saving the team. In the end, the transmitter is left on for the residents and it is decided that no one outside of the Fringe team and the residents will learn the truth about Edina.

2. Are You Still Rose or Am I Hitting on Susan?
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the EM camouflage does work. How would it remain constant from person, to person, time to time? I see Rose as beautiful brunette instead of a Troma look alike. Does the person next to me see the same Rose as I do? If I leave town and then come back, does she still look the same to me?

3. A Window To the Soul (Kinda)
A Johari window is a cognitive tool that compares how we see ourselves with how others see us. It looks into four areas of personality: Arena (known to others and known to self), Façade (known to self but unknown to others), Blind Spot (known to others but not known to self), and “Unknown.”

4. God, that hand! The window! The window!
This is another episode this season (the third, I think) that had some definite Lovecraftian overtones, in this case “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, about an isolated town with a deformed populace and a hidden secret.

5. Not What I Expect To See In a Corpse
Frankly, I’d expect histolysis (tissue decay) to be present in any corpse, not just shapechangers.

6. A Generation Unexplained
A germline mutation would be inheritable, but it wouldn’t have a tremendous (really any visible) effect on those originally exposed to the mutagen. So Teddy would be visibly deformed, but if Walter is right, Rose shouldn’t be.

Painfully bad science this week, the Fringe Doomsday Clock advance to 11: 56 (ironically, the real Doomsday Clock was moved back a minute this week)

This week’s Fringe cipher was: MUTATE.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

I liked the plot of this week’s episode of Fringe — at least for the first two thirds (until Walter was captured, when it started going downhill) — but the “science” and “medicine” was ridiculous.

The Plot: Mysterious men break into a mental health facility and perform some sort of brain operation on one of the patients. They remove some sort of foreign tissue from his brain, but are disturbed before they can finish the operation, so the patient is left with part of his brain exposed. Strangely, the patient has also been completely cured of his schizophrenia.

The Fringe team is called in and it is clear that Walter is uncomfortable with being back in a mental health institution. The security tapes manage to capture the face of the intruders’ leader, and Olivia recognizes him instantly. It was one of the frozen heads that was stolen earlier in the season and belongs to a man named “Newton.”

Looking through the patient’s medical records, Walter finds reference to a mysterious psychiatrist by the name of “Paris.” Astrid can find no records of the mysterious doctor, but with Walter’s help, is able to track down some prescriptions he wrote. They find two other institutionalized patients with prescriptions from Dr. Paris. Visiting these patients, they find that they have also been recently miraculously cured of various psychiatric diseases and show evidence of recent brain surgery. Walter recognizes that one of the drugs they’ve been given is used to prevent tissue rejection in organ transplant patients. He then realizes that the patient’s brains had been used to store the tissue from someone else’s brain.

The team is informed that Walter’s old mental health records show that Dr. Paris visited him six times while he was in the asylum — visits which Walter does not remember. Peter check’s Walter’s scalp and, sure enough, there’s an old surgical scar. An MRI of Walter’s brain is obtained and it shows three missing sections of brain — missing sections that perfectly match the pieces implanted in the other patients. Someone has removed part of Walter’s hippocampus (important in memory storage) and placed it in other people’s brains. And now someone has taken these pieces back.

Meanwhile, Walter has been captured by the Newton and his cohorts. They hook him up through some sort of contraption to the missing pieces of his brain. Once the connection is made, Walter seems suddenly awake for the first time since the show began. Newton is able to get Walter to tell him how to make a door to the other universe. He then injects Walter with some sort of drug before high-tailing it just before Dunham and the rest of the team arrive. While Peter helps Walter, Olivia chases after the bad guys. She manages to shoot the driver of their van (who bleeds silver — one of the shapeshifters), and then the second man (regular blood). Newton is captured — but only for a moment — because he tells Dunham that Walter has been given a neurotoxin, and he’ll only tell her how to administer the antidote after he is allowed to escape. Dunham acquiesces and Walter survives, but she is chided by Newton for her “weakness.”

In a final flashback, we see that the mysterious Dr Paris was actually William Bell and Walter’s brain surgery was done — apparently with Walter’s consent — to remove the knowledge of how to open the cross-dimensional door from his brain and store it someplace “safe.”

2. “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!”
There were a couple of H.P. Lovecraft references this week (purposefully?)
Dr. West (as in Herbert West, Reanimator)
Dunwich Mental Health Facility (as in The Dunwich Horror)

3. Department of Redundancy Department
“Global destruction of biblical proportions.” That’s ridiculously redundant — global destruction, by definition, is of biblical proportions.

4. The AMA Does Not Do What You Seem To Think It Does
A common mistake, but an irritating one. The American Medical Association is really nothing more than a professional organization for doctors, like a union or lobbying group. It has no official sanction. It is not in charge of medical licensing, and keeps no “official list of doctors.” Depending on which source you use, only 15-30% of the physicians in this country are members of the AMA, so someone not being on their roster is no proof that they’re not a doctor or don’t exist. [I've blogged about this several times before, most recently here, in relation to the Beast and Dr. Mid-Nite.]

5. But I Asked For Infinite Refills
You cannot write an “indefinite prescription.” One-year, maximum.

6. I Reject Your Rejection
The four drugs listed on the patient records (Sirolimus, Muromonab CD3, Basiliximab, Azathioprine) are used to prevent rejection in organ transplant patients.
You would think that in their years in the asylum, at least one doctor or nurse would realize the drugs make no sense.

7. Bad Radiology
Those spots on the patients’ brain MRIs were way too big to be thought of as artifacts. The brain tissue was large enough that it would show up on multiple MRI slices (images).
No radiologist ever noticed the three holes in Walter’s brain before?

8. Respiratory Depression and Death
Tolerance or no, 50MG of Valium is one helluva dose. That’s two-and-one-half times the maximum daily dose of Valium.
Dr. West is either extremely trusting or extremely naïve to give that much Valium to Walter just on his say so, especially when it’s clear that Walter is not all there.

9. It’s Not a Two-Dimensional Jigsaw Puzzle
The brain is three-dimensional. The tissue cut out was three-dimension. It was inserted into people’s brains (crammed in, basically, because there was no “slot” to put it in), but somehow manages to show up on a two-dimensional MRI as a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle piece. There was no way they could fit the extra piece in the brain so precisely at just the right point and at just the right angle for this to be true. [A similar problem occurred in the infamous autopsy scene in Identity Crisis #6, where Dr. Mid-Nite managed to find just the right slice to find perfect footprints in the brain.]

Good plot but goofy science cancel each other out. The Doomsday Clock stays at 11:55

This week’s Fringe cipher was: PORTAL.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

This week’s episode of Fringe was fairly creepy, and the science wasn’t all that bad

The Plot: A boat from Hong Kong has run aground in the harbor and dozens of illegal Chinese immigrants have washed up on the shore, dead. It turns out it wasn’t the water or cold that killed them, but giant tentacled parasite worms lodged in their gastrointestinal tracts. The Fringe team is called in. One of the immigrants, Mai Lin, managed to survive. She tells the team that all her fellow immigrants were given a strange capsule to treat sea-sickness, but since she was raised in a fishing village and never got sea sick, she didn’t take it. The team suspects these capsules contained the larvae for the giant worms. She tearfully tells the team that her husband and daughter are on the next boat arriving in few days.

The immigrant smugglers are tied to a local Triad gang best known for smuggling and selling illegal drugs. The team initially surmises that the worms secrete some form of opiate, and this is why they’re being smuggled. After being bitten himself, Walter realizes that the worms produce a powerful immune boosting agent. Walter does some research and discovers that the worms are genetically modified Ancylostoma duodenale (hookworm), an intestinal parasite used in traditional Chinese medicine. The genetically modified versions make an immune boosting agent that is stored in their lymph glands.

Some financial documents tie a local woman to the one of the Triad’s front. She tells Agent Dunham that she has no knowledge of any illegal activity and only invested the money where her financial adviser suggested. Peter notices that her house has a surprising number of air filters and hermetically-sealed windows. Once the team learns about the immune-boosting aspect of the worm, they realize this woman knows more than she is telling. This time, Peter approaches her son who tells him that he has a rare immune deficiency. He receives a special monthly treatment of worm-powder delivered surgically, directly into his spleen.

Walter, with some reluctant help from Astrid, heads off to Chinatown to find a herbalist that sells Ancylostoma that is genetically similar to the giant worm. He finds several shops that sell the worms, and inadvertently discloses to one of the shop owners — the wrong one, of course — that he has a giant worm back at the lab. The Triad follow Astrid back to the lab, beat her up, and steal the parasite.

The ship carrying Mai Lin’s family is found and boarded, but it is too late — all the immigrants have already been carted off. Luckily, Peter is spying on the shop in Chinatown where they have been taken. He calls Agent Dunham then decides to do some investigating of his own. He breaks in to the shop and is in the process of freeing one of the immigrants when he is captured. The Triad and their crooked doctor are force feeding Peter one of the larva when the FBI team arrives, just in the nick of time. The villains are shot or captured, Peter is saved, the immigrants are taken to the hospital where they are treated, and everything ends happily.

(Oh, and Walter implanted a tracking chip in his neck.)

1. As the Worm Turns
Nematodes such as Ancylostoma are too primitive an organism to have a lymphatic system. They don’t even have a circulatory system.
Admittedly, these are “genetically engineered” hookworms, and for a worm to grow as large as those shown, thanks to the square-cube law and other similar concepts, they would have to have some sort of circulatory system.
In the actual worms, the many-tentacled end is the tail, not the head.

2. Glad I Don’t Have to Take Them Out
Matt’s staples should have been removed long ago. He was 3 ½ weeks out from his surgery. By this far out, the incision is healed with 80-90% strength. Leaving in staples or stitches that long serves no purpose, is going to lead to train-track scarring, possible stitch abscesses, and skin-growth around the staples.
Open abdominal surgery is to be avoided whenever possible, especially in immune compromised individuals. Why not just inject the powder into the spleen?
Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due Dept: That is where an incision for splenic surgery would be made.

3. High is Not Always Better
A high white blood count is a sign of infection (or leukemia, not the sign of a healthy immune system).

4. Ahhh, Just Right
I was starting to have concerns with Walter’s mention of “boosting the immune system” — a common alternative medicine/quackery claim. In reality, the human immune system is finely tuned: too little leaves you open for infection; too much and you get allergy problems and autoimmune disease. If all the alternative “medicine” boosted the immune system like it was claimed, we’d have an epidemic of autoimmune problems in this country. I’ll give the episode credit for having the medication be used by immune-compromised patients — a proper use.

5. What Does the FBI Teach These People?
Walter’s about as good an investigator as Olivia — that is, very bad. The logic of his whole “find a matching worm” plan had more holes than Swiss cheese (though this is Walter we’re talking about). For instance, who’s to say the various different herbalist shops didn’t all use the same importer of worms — which they probably did — so the worms from the various shops would be identical.
And Peter’s not any better. Why would he think breaking into a shop owned by the Triad — known for their brutality — would be a good idea at all?

5. Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
The song Walter was singing was “The Menagerie“, which was also mentioned in the first season (episode 16, Unleashed).

While there was some errors of scientific-concerned, most of them were minor and could be hand-waved area. Thus, for the second week in a row, there is a one-minute improvement on the Doomsday Clock.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: HIDDEN.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

Time for another look at science, 1950s style, courtesy of this public service ad from 1957.

This PSA refers to the International Geophysical Year, taking place from July 1, 1957 until December 21, 1958, which was an international effort to focus on the Earth Sciences (and also includes the study of various space phenomena). Overall, at least according to Wikipedia, it was a very succesful program.

This PSA was found Adventure Comics #237, and can be found in other DC comics from June 1957. The ad was never repeated, undoubtedly because the International Geophysical Year would be long over before it could appear in print again (plus the fact that the ad was wrong about the US having the first satellite in space.) This PSA was written by Jack Schiff with art by Ruben Moreira.

More PSAs

Tags: comics psa earth science space jack schiff ruben moreira

Since today is the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin publishing his most famous work, On the Origin of Species, I thought that natural science would be the perfect subject for tonight’s public service ad.

Unsurprisingly, DC comics published no evolution themed PSAs in the ’50s and ’60s. I did manage to find some interesting science PSAs (or more correctly, SCIENCE! PSAs), speculating about the future from a 1950s perspective, but they didn’t really fit the theme I had in mind.

I also came across this Buzzy nature PSA, and I think it’ll do just fine.

As a bonus, the PSA features birds. Sure, they’re no Galapagos finches, but it’s a start.

This PSA was found Action Comics #182, and can be found in other DC comics from July 1953. This ad was written by Jack Schiff, with art by Win Mortimer.

More PSAs

Tags: comics psa buzzy nature jack schiff win mortimer

The Last Days of Animal Man
Gerry Conway, writer
Chris Batista, penciller

I just finished reading The Last Days of Animal Man, and I’ve got a couple of problems with it, particularly the last issue.

1.
Animal Man defeats the villains by using his powers to infect them with Yersinia pestis, the Bubonic Plague. At first read, this is extremely clever — in a Merlin versus Madame Mim sort of way. But the more you think about it, the less sense it actually makes.

Animal Man’s powers allow him to gain the abilities of any animals he is near. He can gain the strength of a gorilla, the flight of a bird, the swimming ability of a fish, and so on. In this case, it appears he used his powers to gain the virulence of the bacteria.

Animal Man doesn’t become the animal in question; he just gains some of their abilities. So if he had won by incapacitating his opponents with a nasty bacterial toxin, that would make a certain amount of sense. But instead he actually infected them with the bacteria. How did he manage this? His powers don’t work this way. You need the actual bacteria to cause an infection, let alone one which is “overwhelming their immune systems.” Animal Man wasn’t infected himself, and he didn’t come into contact with the bacteria, so how did he infect the villains? He seems to have achieved abiogenesis – creating life (in this case the bacteria) from nothing.

2.
The biggest problem is basic biology. It goes back to something I first learned in seventh-grade science. Everyone read what Superman says, and then repeat after me: bacteria are not animals.

They belong to a separate kingdom entirely.

A fairly light episode of Fringe, but an enjoyable one

The Plot:The Observer is patiently standing in front of a museum in Boston, taking notes, and spying on brunettes. After a few minutes, he finds the one he wants, grabs her, throws her in the back of a stolen car and drives off. Arriving at an out of town motel, he gags her and ties her to a chair, and then leaves.

With the Observer involved, the Fringe team is called in. The kidnap victim is identified as Christine Hollis, and seems to be an entirely normal young woman. They review the surveillance camera footage and realize that this is a different Observer than the one they first met. It turns out that the Observer accidentally left his notebook behind, so it’s turned over to the team; however, they are unable to decipher the code/language in the book. Astrid identifies over 1200 different symbols, without any repeats. Looking online, she discovers that one of the researchers at Massive Dynamics is also interested in the code. He has not been able to solve it either, but he has documented evidence of Observers at important historical events including the Boston Massacre, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, and the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. Peter finds a drop of what appears to be blood in the Observer’s journal. Walter notes its orange cast and wonders if the Observer might not have hemophilia.

At a restaurant across town, a group of three Observers are meeting to discuss the actions of the rogue Observer, whom they call “August”. They mention a plane flight and imply that Christine is supposed to be dead, so they send an assassin after her.

August returns to the hotel room, unties Christine, and shows her the television news, which reports that the flight she had booked to Rome crashed en route with no survivors.

The labs tests come back and the drop in the journal wasn’t blood, but hot pepper sauce — and sauce from a particular hot pepper: the King Cobra Chili. Astrid is able to find the address of the individual who imported some last year, so Olivia and Peter head over to check it out. As luck would have it, the Observers’ assassin is there at the same time. There are some fisticuffs and Peter sustains a small wound, but the assassin escapes.

August meets with the other Observers. They tell him that Christine must be killed to set things right. This is not what he wants to hear. He manages to set up a meeting with Walter, asking for his help. All Walter can tell him is that he must somehow make Christine important to the Observers, so they won’t kill her.

August returns to the hotel room and unties Christine. He tells her that she must do exactly as he says. A short time later, the assassin appears at the hotel and in the ensuing battle, August is shot and critically wounded. Olivia and Peter arrive, and August gives his gun to Peter. Together, Peter and Olivia are able to kill the assassin. They find Christine and return her home.

The first Observer picks up August and drives him away from the hotel. As August lies dying in the back, he tells the other Observer that he had developed “feelings” for Christine, even loved her — and that is why he saved her. The first Observer tells August that she is safe now because she is responsible for the death of an Observer, and that makes her important.

1. Hot, Hot, Hot
The King Cobra Chile is the hottest chile known to man, scoring 850,000 to 1,000,000 Scoville units. It is also known as the “ghost chile”, which should be familiar to you if you watch Man v. Food.

2. 15% Tip
Why would it be a surprise that the tip about August was called in from the same hotel? Would it really be a shock that one of the other guests, or an employee, saw him and phoned it in?

3. Color of Love
This is the first I’ve ever heard of hemophiliacs having orange blood, and I don’t buy it. Hemophilia affects the clotting of the blood, not the hemoglobin (which is what gives blood its red color), so why would the blood be a different color?

4. You Go That Way, I’ll Go This Way
I would not want to be Olivia’s insurance agent, and I hate for her to be my backup. Tonight she: 1) was easily distracted by the assassin, 2) nearly shot Peter, and 3) only avoided being shot by the assassin due to dumb luck and Peter.

A much better episode this week. The show does much better when they stick with the Pattern. There is a one-minute improvement on the Doomsday Clock.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: BLIGHT.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.

Could have been a contender, but was KO’d by bad science and too many clichés

The Plot: A married man in Boston mysteriously turns to ash while waiting to spring an anniversary surprise on his wife. The Fringe team is called in to investigate. Broyles tells Dunham that he’s seen this before — there were five similar deaths several years ago at a hospital in Washington DC. He tells her he was contacted by an “Eastern European” man who provided a strange formula to him and indicated it was the solution to the deaths. Unfortunately, none of the FBI’s scientists could decipher the formula several more deaths occurred before they suddenly stopped — until now.

Dunham digs a little deeper and finds that the victim had recently been visiting his sick mother at a hospital. The Fringe team stakes out the hospital, trying to find a link between this hospital and the one four years ago in DC. They find a critical care nurse named Tomas Koslov who has worked at both institutions. Meanwhile, another ash-death has occurred on the in the hospital. A review of the hospital’s surveillance tapes show a strange being made entirely of shadow moving down the hall right before the death was discovered.

The team locates and searches Koslov’s apartment but discover he has abandoned it. They are able to find a fingerprint. When they run the fingerprint they find that their suspect is man by the name of Timur Vasaleiv who is wanted by both the CIA and the Russians because he stole something important from Russia. Broyles is told that the CIA will be taking over the case, but he decides to keep his team on it anyway. A contact at the Senate sends him Timur’s file. It turns out that his brother Aleks was a cosmonaut who returned comatose from a space mission, and it is his brother that Timur has stolen from a special Russian quarantine facility. He has been keeping him in various American hospitals while posing as an ICU nurse.

Walter has been working on the formula and realizes that it represents an organism that seems to feed on radiation. The hospital patients died because they all had been undergoing radiation treatment, and the husband died because he had been on a recent cross country flight (where he had been exposed to higher than normal levels of background radiation).

Timur returns to the hospital and takes his comatose brother out of the ICU and to a hotel. The shadow tries to emerge, but using a series of car batteries, Timur shocks his brother enough that the shadow retreats. He also knocks his brother into asystole (flatline), but after a few moments, a normal heartbeat returns.

Confident that Walter can crack the formula, Agent Broyles reaches out to Timur and offers his help. Timur is trying to decide whether to take Broyles assistance when he slowly turns to ash — the shadow is loose. The FBI arrives to find the comatose cosmonaut and the dead Timur. Peter thinks Walter can shock Aleks to make the shadow return, but Walter cannot read the equipment as it is all in Russian. When they hear a young girl scream from another motel room, Broyles takes unhesitating action and shoots Aleks in the head, killing him. The girl tells her mother that there was a shadow man in the room, but he disappeared. Later, when the CIA approaches Broyles to warn him off their case, they tell him that despite being shot in the head, Aleks returned to life, and they apparently sent him back into space.

2. Feed Me, Seymour
What had the shadow been feeding off of for the past four years, after DC but before the husband died?

3. I See You
There is no way a patient is going to sit for four years in a hospital ICU like Aleks apparently did.
ICU beds are incredibly expensive. The hospital billing department would have been on the phone to his insurance company as soon as he was admitted. No insurance? While they wouldn’t have kicked him out (unless he was medically stable and had a place to go), they would have been looking at the records very closely.
If someone is in a permanent coma, they would be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital or a nursing home as soon as they were medically stable. They wouldn’t keep them in a regular hospital ICU indefinitely.
How did he get him admitted to each new ICU? ICU transfers are very irregular unless one is going from a less-equipped hospital to a better-equipped one, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

4. Eleven Herbs and Spices
In my brief look at the formula, there seemed to be a number of carbon atoms with more than 4 bonds. I admit that Ionly had two years of Organic Chemistry, but that seems quite unlikely to me.

5. Blackjack
Your Osama Tezuka link for the day: the little girl was watching Kimba, the White Lion.

The plot line had potential, but was dragged down by too much bad science, reliance of clichés, and deep piles of nonsense they didn’t even try to explain away. The clock moves closer to midnight.

This week’s Fringe cipher was: DEJAVU.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.

UPDATE: And I should mention that I’m already dreading next week’s show, just based on the preview, where they mention the completely debunked “most people only use 10% of their brain” myth as if it were fact.

The science, while a little sketchy, wasn’t half-bad in this episode of Fringe. Despite this, I found the story itself rather lackluster.

The Plot:In Seattle, Greg, a businessman, walks through his office, late for a meeting with his boss. As he moves through the office, he notices that everyone he sees has the heads of demons rather than their proper heads. When he enters the conference room, he sees that his boss is also a demon, so he bludgeons him to death with his briefcase. The co-workers who wrestle Greg to the ground notice that his eyes are cloudy and twitching.

The Fringe team is called to Seattle to evaluate the case. They interview Greg at the hospital and he tells them what he saw in the office. Suddenly, he begins thrashing wildly in bed, his hair turns completely white, and he collapses, dead. Walter assists that local medical examiner with the autopsy and determines that Greg died of “acute exhaustion.” He arranges for the body to be sent to his lab at Harvard for a more complete, Walter style, autopsy.

Talking with Greg’s wife, Dunham and Peter learn that he had a history of sleep walking, but it hadn’t been a problem for several months since visiting some specialists.

A second incident has occurred: a woman driving a mini-van told her husband she saw a monster and drove her car into an innocent cyclist. She died at the scene and was found to have the same white hair Greg did.

Back in his lab, Walter finds a microchip implanted in Greg’s midbrain. A quick look at the body of the second victim shows an incision on the neck suggesting she had the same operation. Broyles takes the microchip to Nina Sharp at Massive Dynamics who identifies it as a chip designed to work on the thalamus to promote sleep. She identifies its creator as a Dr. Nayak, also in Seattle.

Dunham and Peter pay Dr. Nayak a visit. He identifies both victims as patients of his who are taking part in a clinical study on the brain chip. He takes Dunham and Peter to his office only to finf there has been a break-in. Nayak’s office has been trashed and the computers containing all the patient data are missing.

Walter and Peter hypothesize that someone is using the chips as a rudimentary form of mind control. Meanwhile, in a dark room, we see shadowy someone access the clinic’s computers and select a patient — a waitress at a local Greek restaurant. Soon she begins hallucinating before attacking the chef and then collapsing, dead. Nayak identifies her as one of his patients as well.

Back on the east coast, Walter has been experimenting with the chip and discovers that it siphons the patient’s dreams away so that they never dream. The chips can also be used to place the patient in a dreaming state while awake. Finally, he discovers that whoever is on the receiving end of the chip gets an incredible high from the stolen dreams. Olivia realizes that they are looking for someone addicted to the dreams. A brief amount of detective works reveal that Dr. Nayak himself is the perpetrator. He has a dream-addicted dark side that is causing all the problems. They track him to his home just as he is using his machine to activate the chip in an airline pilot’s head. Dunham destroys the computer, saving the pilot (and his crew and passengers), but killing Dr. Nayak in the process.

1. Wherein I Make Some Concessions
I agree that exhaustion/stress can cause high cortisone levels and dehydration. For the sake of the story, I will also accept that it can cause sudden loss of hair pigment (a la Jean Valjean) and thyroid disorders. However, I am at a loss to explain how it can cause the sudden appearance of large patches of thickened flaking skin. Sure, dehydration and low thyroid can cause skin problems, but it is the entire skin, not just large discrete patches.

2. We Solve the Problem by Breaking the Space-Time Continuum
Let me get this straight: the brain chip is used to correct non-REM sleep disorders. It does this by siphoning off dreams. Now, dreams generally occur in REM sleep, which comes after non-REM sleep. So the chips fix the sleep by removing something that hasn’t even occurred yet.

3. Department of Redundancy Department
“Blood CBC” is hopelessly redundant. CBC stands for complete blood count, so a blood CBC is a blood complete blood count.
A CBC looks at the blood cells (white, red, platelets). It doesn’t look at hormones like thyroxine and cortisol, that’s a different test entirely.

4. OMG, n00b
Yes hackers steal passwords. They also mount DDOS attacks, but these are two separate things. Claiming the lack of DDOS attack means that a hacker couldn’t be involved means the FBI (or the Fringe writers) need much better forensic computer experts. (And what would a DDOS attack against a single clinic server accomplish, anyway?)

5. It’s Not Brain Surgery — Wait, Maybe It Is
The thalamus is located deep in the center of the brain. Any surgery to reach it, let alone implant a chip in it, is going to be a major undertaking — a hole in the skull needs to made after all — and wouldn’t be performed as an outpatient clinic procedure.
The thalamus is part of the diencephalon, making it forebrain, not midbrain.
And good luck getting the clinical trial approved by the IRB.

6. Your Suspicions Are Suspicious
Hearing that one of his employees was suspected, one would think that Dr. Nayak would have volunteered the information about his assistant being missing earlier in the day, rather than waiting until the end of it (or was that the effect of Hyde-Nayak?).

7. A Shot In The Dark
Peter, Dunham and the other FBI agent can’t find an on/off switch or a plug or a circuit breaker between the three of them? So the next logical step is shooting the server?

It’s the reverse of last week. This time, I found the science acceptable, but the story tepid — so they cancel out and the clock stays at 11:55

A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.

Tags: television medicine fringe sleep rem hacker adrenalin

Amazing Spider-Man #600

When evaluating the pupillary response in a patient, have them take off their sunglasses first.

Invincible Iron Man #14

We already know that Norman Osborn is no good at anatomy, but it turns out he is clueless at computer science as well. Here, when he is trying to convince the Russians to allow him in their county to look for fugitives Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, he refers to “picobytes of…data.”

There is no such thing as picobyte — it is impossible. A byte is made up of 8 bits*, and a bit is as small as you can subdivide a byte. A “picobyte” then, would refer to one trillionth (10^-12) of a byte, which is orders of magnitude smaller than a byte can be divided.

I assume Osborn meant to say “petabyte” (a quadrillion bytes) — or maybe he meant Pikabyte, the loneliest of the Pokemon.

*There have been computer systems in which a byte is more or less than 8 bits, but 8 bits is standard now, and it was never more than 36 bits-per-byte.

I found this the best episode of the season, so far, and one of the better ones overall. There were certainly scientific mistakes, but it was nice to see some of the “police procedural” scenes well done, fo once

The Plot:Officer Gillespie, a policeman in Philadelphia receives a mysterious phone call from the “Colonel” and is told to head to a nearby subway station and stop a man in a black trenchcoat with a black briefcase. When the officer spots the suspect and tries to grab the suitcase, he suddenly begins to crystalize. Gillespie screams in pain, then explodes, killing all around him

The Fringe Team is called in to evaluate the Philadelphia explosion because no evidence of any explosive material can be found. Poking around, Walter finds some crystallized parts of Office Gillespie, and realizes that it was the officer that exploded. He takes the bodies back to the lab for autopsy. As he pieces the crystallized officer back together, he finds needle marks between the toes — Gillespie had been injecting himself with some unknown medication.

Meanwhile, Peter takes the subway station surveillance tapes to one of his contacts, because the tapes all were strangely full of static. Peter’s friend is able to remove a little of the static but not much, so what led up to the explosion of Gillespie remains unclear. His friend speculates radio wave interference caused the static. Later, Peter and Dunham are talking to the officer’s widow when Dunham stumbles across a hidden case consisting of a syringe and a strange injectable medicine.

Across the country, Captain Burgess, once a military officer, now a suburban housewife, is seen injecting herself with the same medication. Later that day, the Colonel appears and tells her she is needed on a mission to Washington D.C. He provides her with airline tickets and hotel reservations.

Dunham and Peter discover that the Gillespie was part of an experimental medical program while he was stationed in Iraq. They travel to Iraq and track down one of the doctors who worked on the program, which was developed to produce an antidote to the chemical agent cyanogen chloride. The experiments weren’t very successful — only four out of 200 patients survived. Plus there was another unfortunate side effect: the serum turned the users into human bombs if they were exposed to a certain radio frequency.

Back in the United States, Broyles in charge of taskforce put together to capture Captain Burgess and the Colonel. They track her to a Metro station in Washington. Peter spots the Colonel and a brawl begins. Dunham is able to shut down the radio signal the Colonel had been sending just in time to stop Burgess before she exploded.

Back in FBI custody, the Colonel tells Broyles that he was trying to stop the “others” — who were planning a war and passing intelligence by a network of couriers. In the end, we see a courier hand a briefcase to the Observer, who opens it to reveal surveillance photos of Walter.

1. A Quick Summation
The idea of a person being turned into an explosive device is clever, but I just don’t see how it would work. Where would the energy of an explosion that powerful come from — even if the person were injecting a strange medication and turning to crystal? I just don’t think there are that many high-energy bonds to break in a human (particularly since the explosion left behind identifiable pieces). Admittedly, this is all “back of the envelope” math so I could be wrong, but color me suspicious.

2. Deus Ex EMP
Does an “EMP disabling device disable” EMPs, or is does it utilize EMPs to disable devices?
If the former, wouldn’t the EMP disabling device itself be disabled by an EMP?
If the latter, how did it know which device to disable or when to activate? It can’t be “always on”.
Regardless, if the device scrambles all radio waves, you wouldn’t be able to listen to the radio or talk on your cell phone inside the station.

3. Moses Supposed his Toeses are Roses
The webspace between the toes is used by addicts to inject drugs because the track marks are harder to find. It is commonly used by medical personnel who are addicted.
Captain Burgess’s injection was horrible as she has apparently never heard of sterile technique. There are nasty germs on the soles of the feet, why invite them into the body?

4. Just Like Detective Comics
Cyanogen chloride is a nasty chemical weapon. It acts as both an irritant (to the skin, mucous membranes, and respiratory tract) and a cyanide agent. Like most cyanide agents, it is quick acting (less than 10 minutes, usually). Treatment involves skin decontamination and use of cyanide antidotes.
With treatment, the chemical is cleared from the body quickly, there would be no need for continuing injections. And even if the soldiers were lied to about the serum, their own NBC training should have raised questions.

5. Video Killed the Radio Star
316 megahertz is technically UHF, not VHF, and falls in the band controlled by the government.

While there was questionable science this week, the episode score points by actually showing some detective work (though mostly by Peter, Dunham — as usual — stumbled into clues) and having an enjoyably suspenseful chase at the end. The Doomsday Clock gains a minute, and goes back to five ’til midnight.

Last week, I discussed a vaccination that prevented you from becoming a zombie. Tonight’s subject is the opposite: a vaccination that turn you into a zombie (actually, it turns you into a mindless super-strong drone, but close enough). This comes from the Pyroman story “The Saboteurs of Steel” in America’s Best Comics #4 (1943).

Evil gangster Ornitz sneaks into a nearby Army base and slips his mind control serum into the paratyphoid vaccine. The next day, the soldiers are vaccinated…

…and they all become the invulnerable super-strong mindless slaves of Ornitz who uses them to take over the Army base.

Can Pyroman stop Ornitz and his army of Army men? Of course he can, this is his story after all. To understand how he does it, it helps to understand the story as a whole:

Paratyphoid fever is similar to the more famous typhoid fever, though it is usually milder. It is caused by a bacteria from the Salmonella family, which is found in contaminated water. It is rare in the United States, Canada, and Europe but fairly common in developing nations. There is a vaccine available, but it not used very often as it is only partially effective.

As the vaccination is labeled “serum,” I suspect the soldiers are getting an immune globulin injection to ward off paratyphoid, and not actual paratyphoid vaccine. In immune globulin injections, the patient receive an injection of antibodies against the disease. These antibodies will circulate for several months, protecting the patient, before eventually breaking down. The patient does not gain any permanent immunity from the injection. This is known as passive immunity, as opposed to active immunity, which occurs when patients are exposed to the germ in question and develop their own antibodies. Active immunity can occur by natural exposure, or by vaccination. All the vaccines routinely given in the United States induce active immunity.

Dark Elektra #1

A “cracked inner ear?” There really is no such term — most people would refer to it as a skull fracture or more specifically a temporal bone fracture.

Frankly, the whole sentence is awkward — she specifically mentions which arm bone is broken (the humerus), but doesn’t mention which foot bone was broken (there are quite a few; for all we know it could be a broken pinky toe; which is no big deal for anyone, let alone a resurrected ninja). Of course, this should really come as no surprise as the woman works for Norman Osborn, whose grasp of anatomy is rather poor.

I hate to disagree with Ivy, but her “homeopathic” would not even work on humans — unless you count the placebo effect — because the entire “science” behind homeopathy is pure quackery.

I suspect writer Kevin Smith meant to say “herbal” instead of “homeopathic”. It’s an all too common mistake, as is using the term homeopathic as a general term for non-traditional medicine (see also Vaughan and Bendis), but the terms are not interchangeable and mean very different things (not that you could tell by what is sold as “homeopathic medicine” in you local drug store).

Here’s a quick scorecard:
Herbal remedy — might work.
Homeopathic remedy — expensive water/quackery.

One of America’s leading nuclear scientists has been struck down by the mysterious Virus X. Traditional medical treatments have been unsuccessful, so the Army needs Aquaman’s help. Their plan is to reduce Aquaman to microscopic size using a shrink ray, and then inject him into the scientist where Aquaman can confront the virus directly.

Aquaman agrees and is quickly shrunk and injected into the scientist’s bloodstream. Once there, he quickly spots the evil octopus-looking Virus X in the middle of chowing down on some red blood cells. The body’s white blood cells swoop in to attack the virus, but it is too strong for them and easily shrugs off their feeble blows.

Discovering that his telepathic powers work on the white blood cells, Aquaman decides that advanced tactics are required, and he quickly lines the white blood cells up into battle formation and throws a coordinated assault against the virus.

It is a close, vicious battle, but once again, Virus X proves too strong for the body’s defenders. Aquaman and his army flee down the bloodstream with the virus in close pursuit. Aquaman now realizes that a flank or rear attack is his only viable option. He traps the virus by physically closing one of the heart valves so it can’t follow. Meanwhile, he and his troops make a complete circuit of the body’s circulation which brings them back to where the virus is trapped, allowing them to attack it from behind.

The battle is “brief but furious” but in the end Aquaman and his army are victorious.

With the virus vanquished, Aquaman swims off and exits the body through the same hole the hypodermic needle left when it injected him — and once again, America’s nuclear science is saved.

This story is from Adventure Comics #200, published in May 1954, which means that it predates Fantastic Voyage by a dozen years (and predates the fairly similar Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode “Journey to the Center of the Bat” by even more). I know there’s an Astro Boy story with a similar theme from around the same time, but I’m not sure which one came first.

I suspect this is an entirely different “Virus X” than the one that causes “Kryptonian Leprosy” and felled Superman in Action Comics #363-366 (storyline reviewed here and here).

Apparently the scientist’s disease was caused by a single virus — but what a virus it was! It’s the same size as a heart valve (about the size of a quarter).

I don’t think forcibly closing a heart valve, even “momentarily,” is going to be at all good for the scientist’s heart. And it also brings up a question: With the valve closed, will there be enough arterial flow and blood pressure to push Aquaman and his army through the circulatory system?

It starts, as good stories often do, with the hero visiting an unassuming hospital:

While touring a research hospital, Dr. Standish surreptitiously injects Captain America with the Commie Serum (sure, he calls it the Virus of Evil, but we know what it really is: the Commie Serum). Within mere moments, Captain America is suddenly agreeing with communist propaganda and even spouting off some himself. Bucky is horrified, but Cap plays him no mind, and agrees to perform missions at the behest of his new Soviet friends, including destroying a U.S. ammunition dump. Delighted with how well the drug is working, the doctor has Captain America row out to meet a Soviet submarine laying in wait off the coast. It is here that Cap is to meet the head Soviet spy and be taken to the Soviet Union.

Once on the deck of the submarine, Captain America shows his true colors. He decks the Soviet leader and then he and Bucky sabotage the submarine so that they can’t escape. It turns out that Captain America was never affected by the Commie Serum at all, but just played along so that he could capture the head Soviet spy:

There are two parts of this story that straddle that fine line between genius and insanity:

1. The deus ex machina explanation for Cap’s resistance to the drug is priceless: the scientists who created Captain America knew that he’d be facing a drug like this, so they designed immunity to it into the Super Soldier Serum. Genius! That same concept can be used to make Cap immune to anything: Radiation? Protected by immunity designed into the Super Soldier Serum. The vacuum of space? Protected by immunity designed into the Super Soldier Serum. The cloying sounds of Kenny G? Protected by immunity designed into the Super Soldier Serum. Current Captain America writer Ed Brubaker could have used it himself to resurrect Cap by claiming that the scientists behind Captain America knew he’d be facing bullets someday, so they made him immune to them.

2. How about the manner by which Captain America discovered that Dr. Standish was actually a Soviet spy? When the good doctor stepped behind the x-ray machine (the fluoroscope) to demonstrate how it worked, Cap noticed a Soviet medal in his stomach. Brilliant — at least until you stop to think about it. One of the Soviet’s top spies, instead of leaving his medal back in Russia with all his other belongings, decided it along with him to America. To hide it, he then swallowed it. Soviet medals are not small, they’re about the size of a fifty-cent piece or dollar coin — and that’s not counting the ribbon that’s usually attached. And these medals are, well, metal…and frequently pointy. Not only why would he swallow it (and did he hope to get it back?), but how did he swallow it?

The Hangman #1
J. Michael Straczynski, writer
Tom Derenick, penciler

The biggest problem in this scene is the doctor’s use of the EEG to look for neurological damage.

Other thoughts:
Intubation is a good choice given that this patient is a hypothermic near-drowning victim and has a high change of developing breathing problems, if he hasn’t already.

An actually core body temperature would be important to know rather than the vague answer of “close to critical.”

Starting to warm up the patient en route is laudable, providing the medics are monitoring his heart, as arrhythmias are common in this situation.

Dr. Dickering sure spends a great deal of time futzing around instead of actually intubating the patient — which is not necessarily a bad thing since the patient is awake and talking — but it does make you wonder why he wanted the intubation RIGHT NOW!

The rest of the scene is little better (I only posted the most egregious panel). The “med-speak” is awkward and lacks the flow one sees in trained professionals. For ER talk done right, compare this scene to the ER scene in Blue Beetle #31. Hint for the aspiring writer: Get a doctor, ER nurse, or paramedic to help with the med-speak, it makes a all the difference in the world.

Here’s a good online case study of a near drowning patient. It’s a pediatric patient, so there are some differences, but it will give you a good feel for how such a situation is handled.

Time for another Comic Book Medicine Case Study. There’s a fair amount of discussion after the case study — not about the actual diagnosis — but about what the patient thinks it is.

Read more…

In Las Vegas the next few days for a couple of conferences. First, the Science-Based Medicine Conference, then a couple of days at The Amaz!ing Meeting.

Then, we’ll squeeze a few days of vacation before heading back home.

In addition to watching the television show Fringe, I also read the Fringe comic published by WildStorm. The comic takes place years before the show, and features two stories per issue — one a continuing story featuring scientists Walter Bishop and William Bell, and a second stand alone story. This post is about the continuing “Bishop and Bell” storyline, the third chapter in particular.

When we meet William Bell in the first issue of Fringe, it is 1970 and he is a twenty year old college student at Harvard. He meets up with Dr. Walter Bishop and becomes his lab assistant.

The next issue takes place at some undetermined point later. Dr Bishop and William Bell are still working in a lab at Harvard. There is reference to experiments the duo performed “last year.” William Bell is also referred to as “Dr. Bell” which suggests he has had time to complete not only his undergraduate degree, but also his doctorate. Depending on how much credit you want to give him for being a genius, that would make it 4 to 8 years later, so the story takes place sometime between 1974 and 1978.

Why is this important? Because the timing seemed off to me — and it turns out I was right:

Neurontin is the brand name of Gabapentin, a drug originally developed to prevent seizures. Gabapentin wasn’t discovered until 1973 and was an experimental drug for years after that, so it’s unlikely that the doctors would be able to get there hands on any. Even if their mysterious “Soap Company” benefactors somehow managed to obtain a supply of the medication, it wasn’t known as Neurontin until 1983.

I’ll also point out that injecting serotonin into the body is not a good idea. It doesn’t cross over from the blood to the brain well (which one assumes is where they want it), and it acts as a potent vasoconstrictor (causes the blood vessels to clamp closed) in the bloodstream. High levels of serotonin in the blood have been linked with fatal lung and heart conditions.

Injecting LSD into the body — probably not the best idea either, but for different reasons (mainly due it being a potent hallucinogen). Speaking of LSD, it’s the chemical structure the worker holding the clipboard is looking at in the second story in issue #3.

scene from Young X-Men #11 (Guggenheim, Sandoval)

Does Henry have anything to worry about? Can he be kicked out of the American Medical Association for breaking doctor/patient confidentiality?

Yes, and no.

1. You can be expelled from the AMA for breaking its ethical rules, and these rules include patient confidentiality.
2. On the other hand, Henry can’t be kicked out of the AMA because he can’t be a member: he’s not a physician. Sure, he practices medicine for the X-Men, and he has at least one Ph.D., but he has never earned a medical degree, and thus he cannot be a part of the AMA.

While I’m talking about the AMA, there seems to be a misunderstanding among writers (both comic book and television) about what exactly the American Medical Association does.

It is a physician and public health advocacy organization whose mission is to “promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” It has a charitable wing and it has a powerful political wing. The AMA publishes a number of medical journals, the best known is the eponymous JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association).

scene from Dr. Mid-Nite #1 (Wagner, Snyder)

The AMA does not issue medical licenses or revoke them; that is the duty of the medical boards of each individual state. From the AMA website: “the AMA is not in a position to take action against a physician’s license to practice medicine.”

Despite what most people seem to believe, membership in the American Medical Association is not mandatory — in fact, less than a third of physicians are members of the AMA (15-30% depending on whose data you accept).

Action Comics #871 “New Krypton, part 2: Beyond Doomsday”
Geoff Johns, writer
Pete Woods, penciler

Geoff Johns is usually one of the better writers at incorporating science — or at least decent pseudo-science — into his stories. But in this scene from a recent Action Comics I have to call his bluff:

Superman: You know of Doomsday, Zor?

Zor-El: We know of him.

He was scientifically created on ancient Krypton through the the violent and vile process of Forced-Evolution.

A child was sent into the wild, killed and then cloned from the remains and the process was repeated…

…until that child had evolved to withstand the harsh environment and bloodthirsty creatures of our primordial world.

Here are three good reasons that this “forced-evolution” is utter nonsense and could not have worked:

1. Evolution requires change, particularly change at the genetic level. In the process Zor is describing, there is no change. Cloned individuals have identical genetic codes. Since each generation is a clone of the previous generation, their genetics are identical and the scientists are essentially sending the same kid out again and again and again. This is not evolution; it’s stagnation.

2. Zor seems to imply that the child abandoned in wilderness develops some new skills or abilities to help him survive and this is what leads to evolution. The child may certainly have acquired what he needed to survive the wilds (but not, apparently, survive the scientists), but it’s all a moot point: acquired abilities cannot be inherited.

3. Finally, species evolve, not individuals.

If the Kryptonian’s grasp of geology is as good as their understanding of biology, it’s no wonder nobody but Jor-El noticed the planet was going to explode.

They almost made it for a complete episode without screwing up the science…almost.

The Plot: Strange murders have been occurring in Boston, murders where the victim has their spinal column ripped open and have been drained of spinal fluid. Agent Dunham and her team are called in after the second murder. While examining the body, Walter finds traces of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that causes syphilis — only it’s a variety of syphilis that has been extinct for decades. They trace the syphilis to the CDC who note that they recently sent a sample of that very syphilis to Lubov Pharmaceuticals. The CDC also mentions that the same research lab ordered RND-390, a component of the rapid skin growth bioweapon seen previously.

Olivia and her team raid the lab — only it’s not a real lab, just a split-level house in a residential area. They arrest a wheelchair-bound scientist named Boone and bring him in for questioning. He admits to working for the ZFT and having developed the rapid skin growth weapon, as well as playing a role in whatever is terrorizing the city now. He tells Dunham that he will help her, only they need to rescue his wife who was kidnapped by the ZFT to ensure he keeps working for them. Eventually, Boone admits that his wife is not a hostage, but has been dosed with a contagion that has turned her into the killer stalking the city. If Dunham and her team can capture his wife, he will concoct an antidote and then tell Dunham everything he knows about the ZFT.

Dunham, Peter, and Charlie capture the wife and brings her back to the lab where Walter and Boone have concocted an antidote. The cure is a success, unfortunately Boone died of a stroke while making it. He leaves a videotape for Dunham naming names. He doesn’t know much, but reveals to her that the money man behind ZFT is William Bell.

1. Free Samples
The CDC is a little free with their germ samples, aren’t they? Particularly the bioweapon ones.
And they know the lab is in a residential area, but don’t seem to think twice about it.

2. It Goes to Eleven
How does giving cerebral spinal fluid to his wife going to cause Boone to become paralyzed? If that’s the case, then everyone who ever had a spinal tap would be in a wheelchair.

3. FBwhat?
Astrid gets the “Only Agent Actually Investigating” Award for her finding-the-club-stamp moment.

4. Billy Squire
Taking too much spinal fluid is not going to cause a stroke; if anything, it’s going to cause a herniation (the brainstem is pushed downward over sharp bony prominences and damaged — and not in a good way). At the least, it’ll give him a nasty spinal headache.
Because it’s not a stroke, the medication tPA (tissue plasminogen activator, a “clot busting” drug) is not going to do any good. And even if it were a stroke, tPA is not necessarily a good idea. If it is a stroke caused by a clot, then tPA is indicated, but if it is a stroke caused by bleeding in the brain, then tPA will make it worse. There are very specific rules about giving tPA to minimize the risk of bad outcomes.
Regardless, you don’t stab someone in the neck with a syringe of the medication.

5. K.I.S.S.
Why inject the antidote into the spinal column at the cervical spine (neck level)? It’s a tough shot, and runs a risk of injuring the cord. Since the CSF circulates throughout the spinal column as a whole, injecting the medication at the lumbar level will have the same effect, only be easier and less risky.

Everything was going for this episode, and I was going to move the clock back again, but then they started talking about stroke and tPA and lost all benefits. The clock stays in place this week.

A surprisingly enjoyable episode this week. The science mumbo-jumbo was kept to a minimum and storyline kept moving quickly along.

The Plot: A mother is pushing her daughter in a stroller through Grand Central Station singing a song about a circus elephant. As they wait by the tracks for the next subway, Olivia suddenly appears and pushes the mother in front of the oncoming train, killing her. Olivia suddenly wakes from her sleep with a start, realizing she had dreamed the whole thing — until she sees the report of the suicide on the morning news.

Olivia and her team go to New York to investigate the death, but the evidence — including a surveillance tape — point to suicide. Her husband, however, pleads to Olivia that his wife would not have committed suicide. Walter suggests that possibly Olivia somehow compelled the woman to jump.

Olivia decides not to go back to sleep. She takes caffeine pills and drinks cup of coffee after cup of coffee. She finds herself in a restaurant full of happy couples. Suddenly, one of the wives starts accusing her husband of philandering and stabs him repeatedly with a steak knife. Olivia is beside her, helping her drive the knife in. Again, Olivia wakes up with a start — she has dreamed of another death. Investigating at the restaurant where the stabbing took place, the owner tells her a blond man with a scar was sitting in the booth she had dreamed herself sitting in. Reviewing the tape of the New York suicide, a blond man with a scar was there as well.

A search of governmental databases reveals that the man in question is named Nick Lane and was once a resident of St Jude’s Mental Hospital, until he came into a sudden inheritance and checked himself out. He also seems to have been familiar with the mysterious ZFT manifesto. The staff psychiatrist describes him as “hyper-emotive” — someone whose mood influences those about him. Looking through the patient’s chart, Olivia discovers that he was treated with the experimental drug Cortexiphan — the same drug she was once treated with. Walter reveals that during the Cortexiphan experiments, children were paired to reduce their anxiety. He suggests that Olivia must have been paired with Nick and a mental bond developed that allows her to dream what he is seeing. Thanks to the Cortexiphan and his unstable mental state, Nick is broadcasting his emotions to those around him. When he felt suicidal, the mother picked up his emotions and committed suicide. When he felt abandoned, the wife picked up his feelings and stabbed her husband.

Walter places Olivia under hypnosis in an attempt to locate Nick. They are able to find Nick’s apartment, but not before he has lured a stripper there and caused her to commit suicide. By the time the team reaches his apartment, Nick is already gone. Exploring his place, they find an entire wall dedicated to the Pattern. About this time, news reaches them that Nick has been spotted. He has gone to the roof of a tall building nearby and is prepared to jump to his death. He’s not alone though, his emotions are spilling so much that there are about twenty other people on the roof with him, also ready to jump. Walter tells Olivia that because she was also treated with Cortexiphan, she will be immune to Nick’s powers. She climbs to the roof and confronts him. He remembers her from the experiment, but she doesn’t remember him. He hands her a gun and asks her to kill him. She shoots him in the knees instead — he collapses and it releases his hold on the others. He tells her regretfully that someday soon, she’ll wish she had killed him. As the episode ends, Walter is watching an old videotape of the Cortexiphan experiments — a tape featuring a very young Olivia.

Not too much science to dish on in tonight’s episode, so I’m just going to go stream of consciousness here.

1. Circus Circus
According to Wikipedia, Nellie the Elephant is a perfect song to sing in order to time CPR correctly.

2. The Count
For something that was supposedly not detecting any radiation, the Geiger counter was certainly clicking a fair amount.

3. Showtime
Walter wants to see Pippin, a musical about Charlemagne’s deformed son, Pippin the Hunchback. The song he is quoting is Corner of the Sky.

4. Stripper or Not
Continuity error: When the stripper is first shown looking in the mirror in Nick’s apartment, she is topless. When the scene flashes back to her, she’s suddenly wearing a bra (what can I say, I’m a guy — I notice these things.)

5. Torre! Torre! Torre!
Just for the record: Walter mentions Nick was using the Torre attack when playing chess. Who was he playing?

6. Clues?
Thanks to some recent articles on the clues in Fringe, I’m looking for them everywhere now. I saw the light pattern in the windows in Walter’s hotel, but now I’m wondering about the 7 of clubs shown prominently on Nick’s table.

7. Continuity
Nice to see the some of the threads begin to tie together — particularly the Cortexiphan and the ZFT manifesto (both from Episode 14)

8. The Wall
I would have loved to have time to study the Pattern wall in Nick’s apartment.

An enoyable episode this week, that restores some of my faith in the show. The Doomsday clock goes back to 11:56

This episode seemed to have potential — strange creature from lab released by animal rights activists that proceeds to terrorize the countryside. But then the bad science and awkward storyline kicked in.

The Plot: A group of animal activists break into a research lab and frees all the animals from their cages. They also release a particularly nasty creature hidden in the back of the lab. The monster shows its gratitude by promptly killing one of the activists and a scientist who tried to stop them. It then hunts down and kills the other activists as they are fleeing in an SUV.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in the next morning when the wrecked car and shredded bodies are found. One of the dead bodies is moved back to the lab where Walter performs and autopsy and finds a stinger of some sort buried in the body. He also finds hundreds of larval worms in the body, apparently implanted by the creature. Unfortunately, by this time Charlie has encountered the monster and been attacked. He survived, but has become implanted with the larvae as well.

Walter has deduced that the monster is a transgenic animal — composed of the genes and attributes of multiple species. He is worried that it may be based on his work because he experimented with transgenics years before. For once, the “science” turns out to be unrelated to his research.

Walter theorizes that the only way to kill the larvae inside of Charlie is to transfuse him with some of the monster’s blood so that the larvae will get confused and stop feeding on him. The team traps the monster in the sewers and kills it, but they collect enough blood to transfuse Charlie and save his life.

1. Worry Wart
After all the other episodes where the plot was based on Walter’s research, why is he suddenly worried about the morality of it. Plenty of people have died because of his work already this season.

2. Blue Genes
Transgenic animals have been used in research for years. They are animals that express genes from other sources, or express specially modified genes. Walter seemed to be talking about transgenics taken to a whole new level — plus he was confusing it with xenografting (transplanting parts from different animals) with his talk about rejection.

“Accelerated Darwinism”
A nonsense phrase and a particularly stupid one at that. The theory of evolution applies to natural selection, and the selection here was man-made, pretty much the opposite of natural..

3. Keep the Needle Away From Me
Astrid is told to draw 25cc of blood from Charlie and she sticks the needle in the belly? She might get some peritoneal fluid, but the big blood vessels are deep in the abdomen. Why not just draw blood from the arm like a normal person?

4. Lucky Shot
Where was the incendiary part of the incendiary 50 caliber rounds? And wouldn’t incendiary rounds have made it that much more difficult to get blood from it.

5. Ultra-Special
That was impressive resolution on that out of date ultrasound machine. Even more impressive was how the picture stayed perfectly still despite Walter waving the wand all over Charlie’s chest. (That last sentence should get some interesting Google searches)

6. The Belly of the Beast
So the idea was that by giving Charlie some of Mama Monster’s blood, the baby monsters would get confused (in that “can’t tell self versus non-self” way), and thus miraculously die off (cause of death? Confusion.) So how did the proteins on Mama’s blood cells get into Charlie’s peritoneal fluid so fast, if at all? Why not just inject an anti-parasitic into the peritoneal fluid, thus bypassing most of the side effects Charlie would suffer.

7. Random Thoughts
Apparently the monster has either blue curaçao or Windex for blood.
Johnathan Swift?
Clearly Walter missed Aliens when he was in the asylum or he would have known to look up.

There were two interlocking stories on tonight’s episode of Fringe. One of which contained a serial killer, and one of which contained Fringe science (if by “fringe” you mean “in no way connected to the actual laws of science”).

The Plot:A demolition crew is ready to implode an old building when one of them gets a strange feeling and runs back inside. He and his co-workers find a hidden basement that appears to have been sealed off for years, and in it, huddled in the corner, they find a naked, pale, bald ten year-old child.

Meanwhile, the serial killer known as “The Artist” has reappeared after a three year absence and sent a taunting note to the FBI.

Olivia and her team interview the strange child (hereafter called “Lex Jr”) in the hospital. He is having some shortness of breath and the doctor wants to put him on supplemental oxygen. Walter stops her and lets her know that Lex Jr is from a low oxygen environment and needs less oxygen, not more. Sure enough, Walter’s right and Lex Jr starts to breathe better. He seems to form an emotional bond with Olivia. He grabs her pen and writes a name upside down — and it turns out to be the name of the serial killer’s latest victim.

Olivia visits Lex Jr again, hoping for more clues about the killer. This time, he writes an address down for her. She goes to the address, but can’t find anything. It isn’t Lex’s fault though, it was Olivia’s: the murderer’s van was parked at that address and she missed it. While in the hospital, she meets a social worker who remarks that Lex Jr will likely be leaving the hospital soon.

Walter thinks he can provide a way for Lex Jr to talk. Olivia brings him to the lab where Walter hooks him up to the neural stimulator (remember that from episode five?). About this time, the social worker appears in the lab, only he’s not a social worker — he’s a CIA agent and wants the boy. He agrees to give Olivia and team one day to find the killer before he returns for Lex. With Lex’s help, and an assist by Peter, Olivia manages to track down and capture, if not kill outright, the Aritist. In the end, Olivia finds she can’t hand Lex over to the CIA and has the friendly doctor from the hospital set him up in a good foster home instead.

1. When is More Less?
The “Lex lived in a low-oxygen environment” concept bugged me. For one thing, if the hidden basement was that oxygen poor, the demolition crew would not have been able to breathe down there.
And later, when Walter tells the doctor to put Lex on 5% oxygen, what was the other 95%? Hospitals don’t keep tanks of less than 100% oxygen sitting around. If a little oxygen is needed, the flow setting is low. If more is needed, a higher flow (and fancier masks) are used. Remember, room air has 21% oxygen and if the team wants to go less than that, they’d need an air-tight room and would somehow have to remove the oxygen from it. You can’t just use a near-empty oxygen tank because all you’ll get from that are a few minutes of extra oxygen and then back to room air.

2. If a Bone Shatters, and No One is Around ti Hear It, Does It Still Hurt?
If he lived his entire life in the dark, he would not just be low in Vitamin D, he’d have rickets, a bone disease caused by long term Vitamin D deficiency.

3. Oxygen or Cautery
The machine they made a show of turning on before placing Lex on his “low oxygen” nasal canula had nothing at all to do with oxygen or air flow. It was the control panel for a electrocautery machine — which uses an electrical current to cut through tissue and/or cauterize wounds. It is a common piece of surgical equipment. You’ll notice the buttons were labeled monopolar, bipolar, and coagulate.

4. The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
For someone with an extreme sensitivity to light, he was sure kept in a brightly lit room. How about some sunglasses at least.

5. Call the Amazing Randi
Let me get this straight: Lex can not only read the mind of the serial killer — oh sorry “empathize” with him — but he can miraculously express it in English, a language he cannot speak and isn’t even sure which way is up when he writes it (but he fixes that one fast). I could almost accept it if he drew a vague picture of what the killer was seeing, but for him to give a specific name or address when it’s likely the killer wasn’t even aware of them…

6. When Being Cheap Costs
The meat packing company sold used bloody drop cloths? And they didn’t find this strange? And The Artist didn’t have the common sense to spend a few bucks extra to buy clean ones?

7. Code
Ars Technica has a couple of nice articles (especially the second one) on “The Fringe Code.”

As the Sunlight Rising storyline begins, Doc Savage decides to use his science (Science!) skills to resurrect his dead wife. Here, two of his companions discuss the plans.

Unfortunately for Doc, he’s basing his resurrection plans on an untruth. It’s a myth that the hair and fingernails grow after you die. While they may appear to grow, what is really happening that the skin next to them is dehydrating and shrinking, giving the illusion of growth.

Doc proceeds with his planned resurrection, but his equipment is stolen by the villains who use it to resurrect his more-or-less archenemy, John Sunlight.

Recently, I’ve been reading through DC’s Doc Savage comic book series from the late ’80s. It features the titular hero brought forward into modern times and having his usual world-spanning adventures. As to be expected from a character who got his start in the pulp magazines of the ’30s and ’40s, the stories are chock full of improbable — if not downright impossible — science (or should that be Science!). Since I’m a fan of the old pulps, I’m willing to accept these in the spirit of the times.

Sometimes, though, I run across a scene where the science is just a little too mad…

So…the “magnetic ray” exerts a force on the iron in the blood (I can buy that), but this somehow causes the pulse to race, the blood pressure to skyrocket, and then the heart to explode. I’d be interested to know how the hemoglobin in the red blood cells has that powerful an affect on the heart, since normally it exerts exactly zero influence on it. I can’t even conceive of a mechanism how this would work. A racing heart could certainly raise the blood pressure, but other severe problems would occur (severe sudden heart failure, a fatal arrhythmia, a stroke, or a heart attack) long before the heart exploded. This is another example of trying to explain things too much — they should have just left it at “magnetic ray.”

Of course, I do appreciate the fact that I get to add another entry to my “Things Which Cause Nose Bleeds in Comic Books” list.

Another week, another episode of Fringe with painfully bad medicine — only this time with bad computer science as well!

The Plot: A teen age boy is on the computer when he open an anonymously sent program. Strange images begin flickering on the computer screen and he stares, transfixed. His parent find him later, dead, his brain liquefied and oozing from his ears and nose.

Agent Dunham and her team arrive on the scene. They interview parents and friends, but can find nothing incriminating. The grab his computer and take it back to the lab. Astrid tries to look at the hard drive — after all, she has a minor in “computer science” — but announces that she cannot because its platters are fused.

A second body is found, just like the first. This time, it’s a car salesman across town. The computer hard drive shows the same damage, but this time Astrid is able to determine that he had downloaded a shortly before he died. Peter takes both computer hard drives to one of his friends who is not able to track down the sender of the file, but is able to discover that it has been sent to a new location — Agent Dunham’s home. Dunham and Peter rush to her apartment and find her young niece transfixed by the screen. They are able to bring her out of the trance and she appears fine. Dunham does notice that the webcam light is on, suggesting that someone has been watching her.

Another victim is found, this time a day trader in Evanston, Illinois. The killer has gotten sloppy and there is enough information for even Agent Dunham to discover a pattern to the killings. This victim was the new husband of the mother of Luke Dempsey. Luke was the first victim’s best friend. Dunham discovers that Luke’s father is something of an incredible computer genius. She suspects he is the one behind the murders. She brings Luke in, but he won’t tell her where his father is. She lets him go, and follows him to his father’s hideout. She confronts the killer, but in the end he takes his own life.

1. Brain Fondue
Dr. Bishop: A complex combination of visual and subsonic aural stimuli, ingeniously designed to amplify the electrical impulses of the brain, trapping it in an endless loop.
That sure sounds like Dr. Bishop is describing a seizure, or actually a type of potentially fatal seizure known as “status epilepticus“.
People can die from status epilepticus, but their brain doesn’t liquefy.
Speaking of that, how exactly did this seizure-like activity cause the brain to liquefy? Was it supposed to raise the temperature so much the brain melted? That’s really too stupid for words.
And even if the brain did liquefy, why would it leak out the nose and ears? The brain is essentially in a tightly sealed container; it won’t leak out unless the container is broken (a skull fracture, for instance).
Flashing lights can certainly cause seizures in certain people; it’s called a photosensitive seizure and was the reason that one episode of Pokemon was never shown on television in the U.S. But it doesn’t cause seizures in people who aren’t already susceptible.

2. The Brown Note
My speakers can barely play real sounds, let alone “subsonic aural stimuli.”

3. Damn Viruses
Astrid: A computer virus that infects people.
I thought this idea was ridiculous when I first ran across it several years ago in the Cable/Deadpool comic book. Plus, I don’t think this was an actual computer virus. It was malware, certainly, but it didn’t have the self propagating characterstic of true computer viruses.
Yet another reason not to click on spam pop-ups.

4. The American Medical Association
There is no such thing as the “AMA Database.” The AMA is essentially a lobbying organization, it has little to do with the actual practice of medicine.

5. It Didn’t Even Start Well
That is an absolutely horrible episode title.

6. All Your Base Are Belong To Us
I know just enough about computers to realize that most of the “computer science” on this week’s episode was on par with the medicine. I leave it up to all you computer experts to do the critiquing here.

I’m afraid Fringe is rapidly reaching the point where it has gotten so ridiculous that it’s not worth an hour of my time to watch, let alone write about afterward. To this end, I have created the Fringe Doomsday Clock, patterned after the famous nuclear doomsday clock.

When the clock reaches midnight, my patience will be up and I will stop watching Fringe. After the last two episodes, the clock has been moved ahead to 11:57.

This episode of Fringe introduced a new antagonist as well as new protagonist/hostage, and also features some spectacularly bad medical science

The Plot: Agent Dunham had been kidnapped at the end of the previous episode. As this episode begins, she is strapped down to a gurney by her captors and ends up on the receiving end of a spinal tap. We manage to catch a glimpse of one of her abductors: Agent Loeb (from episode 7). Dunham manages to escape, and in the process steals some suspicious looking test tubes.

Dunham calls in reinforcements, but the FBI agents who show up subdue and tranquilize her. It turns out that there is an internal affairs investigation into the FBI “Fringe” office, and it is being headed up by an investigator who bears a grudge against Agent Dunham. Tranquilizing her was his way of letting her know who is boss.

Meanwhile, a world-famous immunologist is lecturing at Boston College when he suddenly starts choking and collapses. A giant slug-like beastie emerges from his mouth and escapes into the auditorium. Agent Dunham and her team are called in to investigate. She determines that the late immunologist was asked to head a secret CDC task force concerning epidemics. Another local doctor has also been asked to serve on the committee, and he is brought in to protective custody by Dunham. It’s all for naught though, as Agent Loeb kills him by dosing his water with giant slug eggs.

About the same time, Walter discovers that it is not actually a giant slug, but a gargantuan cold virus. The samples Dunham stole from her captors are some of the (for lack of a better term) slug eggs.

Dr. Bishop: It’s viral — nasopharyngitis — albeit a gargantuan specimen

Thanks to his poor shoe-related hygiene, Agent Dunham has now realized that Loeb is a turncoat. She heads to his house to see if she can find anything incriminating, and she does find some suspicious documents, but she also finds his wife. A catfight breaks out that ends with Olivia shooting and killing Loeb’s wife. Meanwhile Charlie asks Peter’s help in setting up a tap on Loeb’s phone. They finish just in time to hear Loeb tell his wife to kill Agent Dunham. Peter calls Dunham to warn her and that’s what sets off the catfight.

In the end, Agent Loeb is captured and when informed his wife has been killed, admits that he murdered the two scientists. When asked about abducting Dunham, he replies that he wasn’t trying to kidnap her, but instead to save her.

There wasn’t all that much science in this one, but what there was hemorrhoid-inducing bad.

1. No Virus I Ever Met
A gargantuan cold virus? Nonsense. It is physically impossible for viruses to grow that large. There are many reasons for this; for starters, here’s the square cube law.
Furthermore, they kept confusing a virus and a cell, which are two entirely different things. A virus is much smaller than a cell — it just consists of some nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and a handful of proteins. Because it is not a cell, comparing it to giant cells means nothing.
Nasopharyngitis is not the name of a virus, it is the name of a condition: a runny nose and a sore throat, i.e. a cold. Cold viruses are typically rhinoviruses or adenoviruses.
How could it have grown so big so fast?
There are certain parasites that protect themselves in hard-walled cysts that breakdown when exposed to stomach acid, allowing the parasite to become active — so that part is not too far fetched.
Decongestants treat the symptoms of the cold (or more accurately the symptoms caused by the body’s reaction to the cold virus). They wouldn’t have any effect on the virus itself.

2. Cover Up the Slide’s Title Next Time
Simian Hemorrhagic Fever is a real disease, but it (like most hemorrhagic fevers) is a viral disease. The slide Walter was looking at was clearly labeled leptospira, a bacteria that causes (wait for it) leptospirosis. The “intricate web” he was talking about was just a bunch of the leptospira bacteria. Look at the picture on Wikipidia, it’s pretty much identical.

It’s that time again: time to look back on the absolutely worst examples of comic book medicine, both real and imaginary, over the past year.

Worst Depiction of Medicine:
While there was a bunch of mediocre and questionable medicine, there was nothing horrible — at least until the Emergency Room scene on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #200 was reprinted in the Batman: Going Sane trade paperback. link #1 link #2

Worst Doctor:
She’s not technically a doctor, but she was acting as one in X-Men Legacy #209, so that counts. The worst doctor of the year was the Omega Prime Sentinel for her plan to revive Professor Xavier from his coma. Far from “jump starting” his brain, her plan would have instead caused him to suffer a massive seizure. And did I mention that she confused volts and amps? Not a good idea when you’re a cyborg. link

Worst Single Medical or Scientific Concept:
The complete mess made of the concept of the genome — confusing the term with both individual genes and genealogy — in Ultimate Origins #1. The idea can be done right (see Warren Ellis), but this was painfully bad. link

Worst Imaginary Medicine or Treatment:
Superman using his heat vision to keep Lois’s heart beating (and then the fact that he kept looking away from her) in Final Crisis and Superman Beyond. No, Don’t ask, I can’t explain it either. link #1 link #2

Dishonorable Mentions:
Hulk’s retina scan.
The continuing mistaken belief that the speed of thought is faster than the speed of light.
Peter Parker being unconscious, yet “alert”.

In what may be a surprise, Catwoman’s missing heart didn’t make the list. There were certainly some problems with the medicine in the storyline — mostly nit-picking and logistical — but ultimately I was willing to accept the fact that Mr. Freeze’s science allowed Hush to pull it off.

Later today, the “Best Comic Book Medicine of 2008″.

Previous “Worst of the Year”: The Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2007 The Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2006 The Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2005 The Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2004

Another psychic nosebleed from the early WildStorm era. In this scene from Backlash #2, the Daemonite Lord S’Ryn takes over the command of the villainous organization The Cabal from the soon-to-be-late H’Tarh.

All previous Psychic Nosebleed Zen posts

Tags: comics medicine nosebleed backlash daemonite

In his super-hero work with Wildstorm and Marvel, Warren Ellis has repeatedly returned to the concept that extra chromosomes can lead to super-powers. Sure, it’s mostly comic book science-fiction, but there is some real science behind it — science that Ellis mostly gets right.

DV8 #8
The team stumbles across a forgotten Soviet town populated entirely by children. Of course, these aren’t normal children, but children who were experimented on and are now genetically — and in many cases, mechanically — enhanced.

Sublime talks to one of the girls who recognizes DV8 as kindred spirits. The girl tells Sublime that they both have “three-strings” which Sublime realizes means that they are triploid — they have three sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two.

It is not clear if the Soviet children were born with three sets of chromosomes or theirs were altered later. The story suggests that either may be true. DV8, however, were born with their “Gen-Factor” and so if we are to believe the little girl, were born triploid.

Triploidy has been known to occur in humans, but always results in severe birth defects with the unfortunate child usually dying within a few hours after birth. In fact, the defects in triploid fetuses are so severe that the vast majority (50,000:1) are miscarried. While the idea that a third set of chromosomes grants the DV8 team and the Soviet children super-powers seems a clever concept, it is far from the unfortunate reality of triploidy in humans.

ULTIMATE HUMAN #1

In this series, Bruce Banner comes to Tony Stark looking for help in controlling his transformations into the Hulk. Looking at the data Bruce provided, Tony mentions

Is this polyploidy I’m looking at? More than two sets of chromosomes? It might account for increased cell size…

Polyploidy is an SAT-word for individuals or species that have more than 2 sets of chromosomes. If you want, you can get even more specific: three sets (triploidy), four sets (tetraploidy), five sets (pentaploidy), six sets (hexaploidy), and so on, but polyploidy is a good generic term.

Polypoloids are important in agriculture and a very common finding in plants. It is estimated that at least 70% of flowering plants are polyploid. Special techniques and chemicals are used by horticulturists to create polyploid plants. This tends to dramatically increase the size of these plants and their resultant fruits and vegetables.

On the other hand, polyploidy is rare in animals. It can be found in some of the lower species (flatworms, leeches) and even some amphibians; but requires reproduction through parthenogenesis. In higher animals, polyploidy is extremely rare – especially in mammals. There have been attempts to breed polyploid cattle, but they never worked out well. However, the animals did have greatly increased muscle mass over their normal ancestors.

In this case, I like the polyploid idea. It explains — as well as anything else — why the Hulk’s muscles are so ridiculously huge, and it has at least a little basis in reality. It opens up some other questions (such as, is the Hulk sterile?), but these are probably best left unanswered.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #25
The X-Men have discovered at least two people who apparently have mutant powers, but don’t register as a mutant on any of their scans. After obtaining a tissue sample, the Beast is able to determine that the individuals in question have had a third set of artificial chromosomes added their genome. He tells Cyclops that “functional triploids do not occur in human nature” (which is true, but maybe somebody should tell DV8). He then goes on to explain that these new chromosomes with their misplaced x-gene is what is allowing them to remain undetected.

An artificial triploid is a clever concept, and not entirely in the realm of fiction. Yeast artificial chromosomes have been around since the early 80s, and bacterial artificial chromosomes were developed 10 years later. In 1997, artificial human chromosomes were developed. These are small mini-chromosomes – they can only hold a handful of genes — that are only stable for about six months. Far from what the Beast was describing, but still closer than most comic book genetics.

The Beast’s comments in this issue raise some interesting points:

How do you get that third set of chromosomes into every cell in the body? Or does it only have to be in certain cells — in which case the Beast got lucky with his tissue sample.

Beast mentions that the mutant gene sits on the 23rd chromosome. Interestingly enough, the 23rd chromosome is the sex-chromosome…so the x-gene must be on the X-chromosome, but is it also on the Y? Are female mutants more powerful?

No longer just limited to comic books, genre movies, and science fiction television, the psychic nosebleed now appears on half-hour situation comedies.

In this scene from the upcoming season premiere of Scrubs, Dr. Cox tries in vain to resist the infectious smile of the hospital’s new chief of staff Dr. Maddox, played by Courtney Cox Arquette.

All previous Psychic Nosebleed Zen posts

Tags: comics medicine television nosebleed scrubs

This somewhat misleadingly titled article is actually about Richard Adams Locke and his role in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

It’s a fascinating subject, and this article only gives a small taste of the sensation the “moon discoveries” caused.

For more information, check out:
The Museum of Hoaxes: The Great Moon Hoax
History Buff: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835
Wikipedia: The Great Moon Hoax

The plot threads of various recent episodes begin to pull together, but it seems like an incredible amount of work for a relatively modest pay off. Plus the bad and imaginary science we’ve come to expect.

The Plot:In the middle of the night at a bank in Philadelphia, and mysterious gang of bank robbers disable the security system. They set up the frequency machine seen at the end of Episode Eight (”The Equation”) and use it to turn one of the walls of the bank vault permeable. A trio of robbers enter the vault, steal the contents of a safety deposit box, and exit back through the wall — all except one robber who gets stuck in the wall when it turns solid again. His compatriots shoot him and leave him behind.

Agent Dunham and team are called to the scene. She recognizes the robber as someone who used to be in her unit in the Marines. Dunham talks to the robber’s estranged wife and realizes that she never knew him, Agent Scott did, and his memories are mixing with hers. Peter Bishop recognizes that the numbers of the stolen safety deposit boxes are related to something Walter says every night as he falls asleep. Walter recognizes the numbers as a Fibonacci sequence, and then realizes the boxes being stolen are his — he just doesn’t remember what he hid there. Peter is able to prey lose a memory and it seems that Walter invented a machine that can reach back in time and pluck someone from anywhere, anywhen. He never used it himself, but recognized it could be dangerous, so hid it away.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Mr. Jones (from Episode Seven) is meeting with his lawyer. Jones clearly is up to something, and he seems to be coordinating the bank robberies back in the U.S.

The FBI traces the robbers to their final bank, but just misses their theft. They are able to track down the thieves immediately afterward and capture one. He doesn’t divulge any information until Peter scares him with the fact that he has gotten radiation poisoning from frequency machine used during the thefts. He tells them about an upcoming meeting at a field in Westford. Looking at the map, Dunham recognizes the name Little Hill (from Episode Seven, again) and realizes that the meeting must be occurring at Little Hill Field. She and the FBI mount a raid on the field.

At the same time, the thieves set up the machinery stolen from Dr Bishop’s safety deposit boxes and use it to pluck Mr. Jones from prison in Germany. He arrives safely at Little Hill Field. They also kidnap agent Dunham because Jones has something in mind for her.

1. Lot of Hassle
It seems the thieves are going through an incredible amount of hassle to break one man out of prison in Germany. Certainly with all their money and technology, there would be an easier way. Their plan is something Rube Goldberg would come up with if you gave him an iPhone and a loud radio.

2. Shaking Hands
Tremor is a rare symptom of radiation poisoning, and generally only shows up as a late symptom during the secondary phase of high dose and lethal radiation poisoning. The robbers would be a great deal sicker by that point.

3. It’s A Secret
Patient Confidentiality doesn’t quite work the way the doctor thinks it does. It applies to what the doctor has learned and deduced through patient interview, examination, and testing. It also applies to what the doctor is told in confidence. I can’t imagine that who the patient hangs out with and talks in the hospital qualifies, especially when any random orderly can tell you.
For the record, according to Washington DC statutes, patient confidentiality can be broken when they are outweighed by “interests of public justice.”

4. Big Bird
Hepea is a made up disease. For one thing, Bird Flu did not become important (and was not known to be transmissible to humans) until the ’90s, well after the time when Walter was locked away in the asylum — so how did he learn of it? And how did Peter catch it? Even more, why would a doctor in the 1930s be a key expert when it was 60 years before there were any human cases.

5. The Eyes Have It
Once again, we hit the last thing seen by the eyes before death cliché (last seen in Episode Two), only this time with color printing.

To qualify for this list you need to be female sword-slinger whose adventures have appeared primarily as short stories, novellas, and novels. In addition, I’m looking for characters with staying power: there are a number of good female characters who have appeared in a single story, but I want to focus on those who have appeared in a number of books or stories.

My top three are pretty much written in stone. They may not be everyone’s top three, but they better be in everyone’s list of five. If not, well, you’re wrong and you should come back after you’ve thought things over and admitted your mistake.

Numbers four and five are certainly open for debate, though.

Honorary mentions:
Jame (P.C. Hodgell), Kerowyn (Mercedes Lackey), and I’m sure there’s a swordwoman somewhere among Bradley’s Darkover novels.

A clever initial premise spoiled by Dunham’s botching of the investigation. The medicine/science was hit or miss.

The Story: Mark Young has just finished delivering a successful presentation at Massive Dynamic and is relaxing in the conference room. He sees a butterfly, but when he tries to get a closer look, it cuts him with its razor-sharp wings. He smashes it, but another appears, and another, and then an entire swarm, all slicing his skin with their wings. Trying to escape from the swarm, Young runs wildly and breaks through the window of the conference room, plunging to his death on the street far below.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in to exam the body. Dr. Bishop notes compound fractures and internal bleeding – consistent with the fall — but also many deep cuts, with many of them under Young’s clothes, so broken glass couldn’t have caused them. Bishop has Young’s body shipped back to his lab for an autopsy, and that’s when he notices that the cuts all seemed to be made from the inside out.

Agent Dunham receives a mysterious e-mail from the late Agent Scott, her former partner and lover. It directs her to a basement room in an abandoned building filled with boxes of toads. Bishop recognizes the toads Bufo alvarius, which are known for secreting a hallucinogen. He identifies a concentrated form of this toxin in Young’s body and deduces that he essentially died of fright (well, that and a thirty-story fall) and the cuts were all psychophysiological (i.e. psychosomatic — caused by his own mind).

Dunham decides she needs to access Agent Scott’s memories since he seems to have had a connection to Young. She goes back into the sensory deprivation tank from the first episode and discovers a memory of Scott meeting with Young and two other people. It seems that Young was selling secrets from Massive Dynamic. Young goes off with one man while Scott stabs the other. Agent Dunham is now determined to track down this remaining fourth man. Using some not-so-subtle clues from Young’s date book, she discovers he is George Morales, an infamous smuggler. The team goes on one of their SWAT-lite raids and successfully apprehends Morales. He offers tell Dunham everything he knows in return for protection from Massive Dynamic. He claims that they are behind “The Pattern” and are using it as a cover for their illegal activities. Dunham goes to confront Nina at Massive Dynamic, but while she is there, Morales dies mysteriously, his throat cutting itself open — apparently he was given the same drug as Young and imagined Agent Scott cutting his throat.

1. Psychosomaticism
Assuming that I accepted a psychosomatic cause for Young’s cuts (and I don’t — there’s simply no process by which it could work), why would the cuts be from the inside out? It makes no sense. If he were mentally replicating the wounds he was imagining, they would be external, not the other way around.

2. Toad Lickers
The toad Bufo alvarius is found in the southwestern United States. It secretes two hallucinogenic drugs, bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT, that are effective if inhaled, injected, or ingested. Bufotenin is the more potent of the two. Reports from users indicate it is not a particularly pleasant drug. In terms of fear, high doses have been known to cause extreme anxiety and a sense of impending death. Of course, the higher doses also tend to turn the face of the user a dusky purple color from vascular congestion.

3. Why?
Unrelated, except that the ad was shown during the show. Why in the world are they remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the true classics of science fiction cinema — and with Keanu Reeves, no less?

4. Micromanaging
All the strange equipment and requisitions for Bishop’s lab, and the only thing her supervisors ever questions is an aquarium and food for toads? What about the cow? The grand piano?

5. Can’t Find Her Way Out of a Paper Bag
I’m losing more respect for Dunham’s supposed keen investigative skills every episode. The clues and answers are all spoon-fed to her. And then, when she finally is on the verge of learning something truly important, she abandons her source and runs over and accuses Massive Dynamic before actually getting the evidence. So not only is the source killed before actually divulging the important information, but she telegraphed everything to Massive Dynamic. Great job, Olivia.

Seventh grade science class was the first time I got to play with microscopes. They were your old beat-up standard issue school microscopes with three lenses (but you could never use the highest power one because it was an oil immersion lens and what school could afford the oil?). We used the microscopes to view a variety of microscopic creatures such as volvox and paramecium. That was all fine and dandy, but I wanted something more — I wanted to see blood. Luckily, I had just had two teeth pulled (thank you, orthodontist), and figured I could get some blood from one of the sockets. Our teacher said I could give it a try, so I took a drop of blood, placed it on a microscope slide, put a cover slip on, slid it under a microscope, took a look — and I saw nothing. No cells, no platelets, nothing. I learned the hard way that looking at blood under a microscope simply isn’t that easy.

The slide needs to be specially prepared first. A blood smear is the easiest way to do this. A smear spreads out the blood in a very thin — nearly two-dimensional layer — so that each individual cell can be seen. Without the smear, there is just a thick pool of blood cells stacked on top of one another that’s all but impossible to interpret.

Once the blood smear is dry, it can be viewed under the microscope. This will give the basic idea of what’s going on, and most cells can be seen, but for a better view — the one we’re used to seeing in movies and television shows — the blood smear needs to be stained. This allows the various blood cells to stand out. Unfortunately, it’s also a labor intensive and time consuming process.

Why do I bring this up? Because of scenes like this, that routinely pop up in comics*:

If only it were that easy. I would’ve been a very happy seventh grader.

*And it’s not just comic books, it shows up in television shows and B-movies all the time as well. This issue of Ultimate Spider-Man (#125, Bendis and Immonen) was just the most recent example I ran across.

A surprisingly watchable episode of Fringe, probably the best yet. There were enough strange coincidences and evil psychiatrists to (almost) make me forget the whole nonsense of “The Pattern.”

The Story: Ben Stockton, a ten year old musical prodigy, is kidnapped by a mysterious woman after his father is put in a trance by red and green flashing lights. After Agent Dunham picks up the case, Broyles tells her that there have been four previous kidnappings, all experts in one field or another, all by the same mysterious woman, and all four of the victims ended up insane. Dr. Bishop recalls hearing of the red and green lights before, and eventually remembers that it was from another inmate at the asylum where he used to reside. It seems there was a fifth kidnapping that even the FBI was unaware of, and the victim ended up admitted to an asylum for the criminally insane. Walter recalls that the patient was fixated with an equation he couldn’t solve. Peter realizes that when that equation is expressed in musical notation, it is the same mysterious composition Ben had recently become obsessed with.

Agent Dunham figures the best approach is to interview the patient, but the director of the asylum won’t let the patient be interviewed by anyone except Walter Bishop. Reluctantly, Walter agrees to return to the asylum to conduct the interview, but while there he is sedated and held by the guards and director, who then informs Agent Dunham and Peter Bishop that he is retaining custody of Walter for his own safety. The next day, Dunham is able to procure a court order to release Walter, but it is clear the asylum director is up to something. Walter was unable to get much from the other patient except for some mumblings about a red castle. This is enough for Dunham to locate the villain’s lair and rescue Ben, but the mysterious woman is able to escape (though she ultimately meets her demise at the hands of a turncoat accomplice).

1. Nothing To See Here
The hypnotism scenes are pure science fiction, but I have no significant medical or scientific complaints other than that. A first for the show.
Does the red/green flashing cause a hypnogagic trance, or make the patient susceptible to suggestion? The show suggested both.
Agent Dunham should have stormed the castle with a team of red/green color blind agents. That would have caught Ostler unprepared.

2. Music
Walter Bishop transcribed the equation into “9 bars” of music, but it sure seemed like Peter played for longer than that.

3. Psychiatrists
This episode is another good example of Scott’s Third Law of Comic Book Physicians — when a character is introduced as “psychiatrist”, it is shorthand for “they are up to no good.”

An international thriller, with little thrills, along with bad science, atrocious medicine, and plot holes you could drive a truck through. It must be another episode of Fringe!

1. The Heart of the Matter
The emergency department doctors defibrillate Mr. Loeb when he is in asystole. Asystole is the medical term for flatline, and as we all know, you don’t shock a flatline.
Later, when Loeb is in ventricular fibrillation, one shock is tried (along with a dose of epinephrine a few minutes before). When that doesn’t work, the doctor decides to crack Loeb’s chest open and perform open heart massage. That procedure, though dramatic — and it did reveal the parasite — is rarely called for, and certainly not this early in the resuscitation (and not for ventricular fibrillation). The doctor took his own sweet time opening the chest too; it would have been nice if someone had done some chest compressions in the meantime.

2. There’s an Intestinal Parasite in His Chest?
It’s a huge jump from a simple parasite like Giardia to a giant-centipede-looking-plant-like parasite wrapped around the heart, but I guess that’s just Dr. Bishop’s way of thinking.

3. Relax, part 1
When the parasite starts squeezing harder, Peter injects Loeb with some cyclobenzaprine. Cyclobenzaprine is better known as Flexeril and is a skeletal muscle relaxant used for muscle spasms such as whiplash injuries. It doesn’t have an effect on the heart, so I’m assuming Peter was giving it to Loeb assuming it would be absorbed by the parasite and cause it to relax its grip on the heart. That’s quite a jump in logic: that a moderately strong (at best) mammalian muscle relaxant would affect a giant-centipede-looking-plant-like parasite.

4. Relax, Part 2
If I were Peter, I would definitely want a sedative. He recovered remarkably quickly, though.

5. Needle in the Heart
Sticking a syringe full of adrenalin blindly into the heart is a very bad idea because of the risk of injuring a cardiac artery, but I guess that’s just Dr. Bishop’s way of thinking. Or maybe he watched Pulp Fiction too many times at the asylum.

6. The Treatment
Mebendazole — known in the U.S. as Vermox — is an antiparasitic used to treat a variety of worm infestations. A hydrolase is an enzyme catalyst involved in the hydrolysis of a chemical bond. A thermophilic hydrolase is one that is active at high temperatures (such as those found in hot springs). Which seems to have no bearing on this case.

I thought the flow of the action was better on this episode of Fringe, but the medicine and science (and science-fiction clichés) were laughable.

The Plot: At night, an unmarked van pulls into a deserted street and people in some sort of containment suits drop off a confused woman named Emily. The woman wanders into a nearby diner and a friendly waiter and cop strike up a conversation with her. She is partially amnestic and claims she was given red and blue medications. Suddenly, everyone in the diner starts screaming in pain and they start bleeding out of their eyes. The young woman tries to escape, but her head explodes.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in to the diner. They discover that Emily had a rare autoimmune disease Bellini’s Lymphocemia and she had been missing for 2 weeks. The FBI also gets information that Claire, another young woman with Bellini’s Lymphocemia, has also gone missing. The team is able to discover that both Emily and Claire were receiving experimental treatment for their disease with capsules of Strontium-90, a radioactive isotope. Walter realized that in Emily, for some reason, all the capsules detonated at once, releasing an incredible microwave beam and essentially cooking everyone in the diner alive.

Agent Dunham discovers that Intrepus, an unethical pharmaceutical company (cliché plot device #37) is involved. Peter Bishop is able to discover the location of their secret lab. The FBI goes in guns blazing with a heavily armed SWAT team (except Agent Dunham, who apparently thinks it’s casual day at the raid) and rescues Clair, just in time, and did I mention that Walter was able to synthesize an antidote?

1. Autoimmune Insanity
Bellini Lymphocemia is a fictitious autoimmune disease. First off, lymphocemia is not even a real word, or a medical term, for that matter. It is said to be incurable — but then the vast majority (if not all) autoimmune diseases are — but for some reason, Bellini’s goes into remission with radiation treatment.
Strontium-90 does have various medical uses, including the treatment of some cancers (though it can cause cancers as well).

2. Needs Protection
When doing the autopsy, Walter should be wearing some form of containment suit. As far as he knows at that point, there are high levels of radiation as well as the possibility of an infectious disease.

3. Radiation versus Microwaves
Why would a radioactive isotope release high levels of microwaves? They are at opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And conversely, why would a microwave exposure leave residual radiation?

4. Smells Like Cloves
Methyleugenol is not blue, it’s pale yellow. It is one of the main chemicals involved in the hyacinth scent, but it’s found in many other plants as well. It always smelled like a milder sweeter clove-scent to me.

5. My Eyes Have Seen the Glory
How does exposing people to high levels of microwaves (or high levels of radiation) cause them to bleed out of their eyes? I would expect burns, or if the all the water in their body suddenly boiled, I would expect ruptured eyes or other organs, not just bleeding
None of this explains why Emily’s head exploded though.

6. Self-Contradicting Statement of the Week
“Subcutaneous injection marks: she was being given medicine intravenously.”
Emphasis mine. Subcutaneous and intravenous are two different ways of giving medication.

Black Jack is a famous manga character written by Osamu Tezuka. He is a supremely skilled surgeon, though an unlicensed one. Often he is the only surgeon skilled enough — or even willing to — perform a particular lifesaving operation. He will operate on the rich and the poor alike, and lives by his own code of ethics.

Tezuka was a medical school graduate and did his best to add medical accuracy to his stories, though he never let that stand in the way of a good plot — you’ll notice that many of the stories contain implausible fantasy or science-fiction elements. The stories were published over a ten-year period, from 1973-1983, so it’s also important to remember that they were written 20-30 years ago and medicine has come a long way in that period of time. There is sometimes a difference in the approach to certain patients and conditions between Western and Eastern medicine, and that occasionally shows up in the stories as well.

Vertical has recently started releasing a very nice collection of Black Jack stories. These volumes present the stories chronologically as they occur in Black Jack’s life. (This is different than the order in which the stories were originally published). My copy of Black Jack: Volume 1 is the limited edition hardbound and the pages references below match that edition. Hopefully, the pages numbers are the same in the softcover edition as well.

In my annotations below, I’ve added the year the story was first published. Consider this a strong Spoiler Warning as well. Click “Read More” to read the rest of the post.

A step backwards for Fringe this week with bad science and a cliched storyline familiar to anyone who reads comics (plot #124: character has electrical powers and unwittingly fries nearby electrical equipment).

The Plot: Joseph Meegar has been the unwitting victim of an experiment by an evil scientist that has turned him into an electrical generator. It’s not a power he can control — electronic equipment breaks when he his near, especially when he is upset. When he accidentally causes an elevator accident that kills 8 people, then mangles his boss, and then kills his mother, he decides to go on the run. Unfortunately, the evil scientist has caught up with him and kidnaps him. Luckily, Dr. Bishop is on the case and trains some carrier pigeons to track Joseph’s unique electromagnetic signature so that Olivia and the rest of the team can rescue him and arrest the evil scientist.

Electrical power and electricity are not areas I know a tremendous deal about, but even I could tell the science was fishy.

1. I Have the Power
That’s a rather selective power Joseph has. It fries the clock on his bed stand, but not the digital thermometer next to it? It fries his scanner and electronic pad at work, yet his Walkman continues to work?
Is Joe generating DC or AC? It would affect how his power would kill people and affect his mother’s pacemaker.

2. Tape It
I’m a child of the ’80s, and the original Walkman generation, and I can confidently tell you that a magnetic field does not permanently alter a cassette tape. The neat thing is you can record over things.

On to more biology and physics concerns:

3. What is the Source?
What is the biological source of his electricity? Generating enough electricity to levitate (let alone start parked cars and trucks) takes an incredibly amount of juice that needs to come from somewhere. And unless the efficiency is near perfect, he’s going to be generating a lot of heat as well.

4. A Weighty Problem
How can sensors determine the weight of the people aboard an elevator when it’’s in free fall?
Joe may have been “electrodynamically levitating”, but if so, he was just levitiating in relation to the frame of the elevator, not the outside world (or he would have hit his head against the ceiling). So even if he were levitating, he still would have borne the brunt of the crash.

5. Stop Motion
I liked the way the Astrid and the GPS said the birds had stopped, yet they were clearly still flying.
Are those poor birds going to be flying in circles for the rest of their life, or did Dr. Bishop reset their beaks?
I’ll grant you that Tesla coils look impressive, but I wouldn’t think they’re particularly good at imparting magnetic charges.

6. Matters of the Heart
Assuming the heart hadn’t already started to break down and decompose (with that “thermoelectric trauma” — a term that doesn’t show up in any medical literature search), how would a “residual electrical charge” cause it to beat normally when removed from the body? The heart’s electrical system doesn’t work like that; it requires specifically directed electrical stimulation, not an unexplained uniform “charge.”

Eleventh Hour is yet another science/action/mystery show. This one is about the overly brilliant Dr. Jason Hood, biophysicist and “Special Science Advisor” to the FBI, along with Rachel, the attractive yet hard-as-nails FBI agent who accompanies him. Cloning is the subject of the first episode, as Jacob and Rachel hunt the mysterious Gepetto, a scientist who is trying to clone humans using innocent women as surrogate mothers.

The science is definitely better than Fringe, though the characters aren’t as interesting. The plot was compelling, despite a few plot holes (such as…how stupid is the surrogate mother not to realize something isn’t kosher? Or does she really think it is normal to have an obstetrical examination in an abandoned warehouse?)

1. Cloning
As Science not Fiction points out in their review, the science is reasonable, and the explanation of cloning given is fairly straight-forward and easy to understand. It’s easily the best depiction of cloning in a television show that I can recall.
For the record, the worst I can remember are the clone storylines in The Flash (Episode 18: Twin Streaks) and the live action The Amazing Spider-Man from the ’70s (Episode 5: Night of the Clones).
Why are the police running a DNA lab in a tent in the forest? It’s a delicate procedure and that’s just asking for contamination. (”The DNA appears to be half human and half oak. So let’s get the team out there looking for an Ent!”)

2. Placenta Previa
When the placenta covers the internal os (the opening between the uterus and birth canal), it is known as placenta previa. The condition is graded by how much of the os is covered. In Grade III placenta previa (mentioned on the show) — which is also known as partial placenta previa — the os is partially covered by the placenta. As you can imagine, this makes it a challenge to give birth vaginally. C-sections are the recommended delivery method in this situation*.

The classic symptom of placenta previa is painless vaginal bleeding during pregnancy, which is not what was shown on the show. Painful vaginal bleeding is more indicative of a placental abruption (when the placenta pulls away from the wall of the uterus), a much more dangerous condition**.

3. CPR
While I applaud the show for resisting the temptation to defibrillate a flatline, that has to be one of the worst examples of Hollywood CPR ever.

Television and movie CPR is almost always done incorrectly, with bent elbows instead of straight arms — but there’s a good reason for this because you don’t want to injure the actor portraying the victim. This scene was worse than that, with nearly everything done wrong, such as — in addition to the bent elbows — improperly placed hands, a patient who was up too high for good CPR, and too rapid a pace. In the end, to show he was really trying hard, Dr. Hood increased the speed of his compressions even more — but this is the worst thing he could have done. You have to give the heart time to fill with blood between compressions; faster compression means the heart doesn’t have time to fill, and the resulting CPR is worse, not better***.

Notes:
*Bear in mind that a placenta previa is fairly common in early pregnancy, and will usually shift away from the os as the uterus grows during pregnancy. So, delivery-wise, placenta previa is only a concern when it occurs late in pregnancy.

**Admittedly, placenta previa can sometimes stimulate premature contractions, which can be quite painful, but that doesn’t seem to be what was shown here.

***Though they saved the patient in this situation, it would not have worked like this in real life. She had flatlined because she had hemorrhaged and lost a tremendous amount of blood. Until that blood loss is corrected, it’s going to be impossible to get her heart restarted (especially with bad CPR).
Speaking of blood, why would there still be blood in a closed-down clinic?

A strongly mediocre episode of Fringe. At least the science and medicine wasn’t too bad this time around.

And Peter’s whining is really starting to get on my nerves.

The Plot: An explosion at a construction site occurs in Manhattan. The public is told that it was a gas main explosion, but that’s only part of the story. A 2 foot long metal egg-shaped cylinder was found in the rubble and it had apparently tunneled up to the surface from underground at high speeds and hit a gas main, causing the explosion.

Dunham and her team are called in. The object is moved to a warehouse command center, but Walter has it moved to his lab at Harvard. This turns out to be a good thing, because a thug wielding a futuristic weapon attacks the warehouse looking for the egg. Back at his lab, Walter wonders if the egg might be related to Project Thor, a plan he once worked on that featured an underground torpedo. When he and Peter hear about the warehouse attack, Walter decides to hide the egg. He sends Peter off on an errand, then sedates Astrid. He grabs the egg and flees.

Walter is eventually found hours later and tells Agent Dunham that he hid the egg, but doesn’t remember well. Meanwhile, the thug is still trying to find the egg. He abducts one of Dunham’s contacts and uses a through-the-nose mind reading machine on him. Later, he abducts Peter Bishop, uses the same machine on him, and discovers the location of the egg’s hiding place — even though Peter isn’t aware that he knows it. Dunham tracks Peter and the thug to the graveyard where the egg was hidden and guns down the thug during a chase. The egg burrows into the ground and disappears. Peter confronts a strange bald man who seems to be linked to the Pattern and has been observing events for years. He ends up on the losing side of this fight as well.

Not much to comment on science- and medicine-wise (except for the obviously ridiculous mind reading and “learning by osmosis” ideas). The rest is just nit-picks:

1. The Arrival
Sadly not related to the Charlie Sheen B-movie sci-fi flick The Arrival.
Which incidentally stars Ron Silver — who I have been reliably informed is actually a deadly assassin working for NASA. I expect this fact to show up in Fringe sooner or later.

2. Project Thor
Was the egg part of Project Thor or not?

3. Iridium
Iridium is a logical choice for a torpedo that travels through the earth as it is one of the most heat resistant metals known.
Solid Iridium is a yellowish-platinum color though, not indigo.
Astrid should have seen what was coming. Iridium is the second densest element, how was a tiny syringe going to penetrate it?

4. Mind Reading, take two
Enough with the mind-reading already — although the thug’s model appears to be an upgrade as it conveniently converts thoughts into sounds (though only mono). And uses an oscilloscope.

5. Osmosis Jones
Learning through osmosis and proximity? Nonesense. If that actually worked I would have aced every test in college and med school, and though it pains me to reveal this, I did not.
Reminds me a little too much of the discredited Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon.

6. The Observer
A bald guy who observes. Where have I seen that before?

A fairly ho hum episode of House, with far too many red herrings and not enough real medicine.

Brandon is, at best, a mildly successful artist. At the beginning of the episode, he is painting a portrait of a woman, but when the woman and her husband take a look at the finished product, they are shocked because the subject in the painting is horribly distorted. Even stranger is the fact that Brandon cannot tell that anything is wrong; the portrait looks completely normal to him.

Brandon is admitted to the hospital for evaluation of his acute onset visual agnosia. The initial differential diagnosis include stroke, brain tumor, drugs, or environmental toxins. An initial MRI was negative, but House wants an MRI with contrast. He also sends Taub and Kutner to search Brandon’s apartment for toxins. The search turns up nothing suspicious and the MRI is negative.

Toxins and drugs remain on the differential diagnosis, but a cavernous angioma of the brain (large, abnormally dilated blood vessels in the brain) has been added as well. When Brandon shows little emotion when told he requires a risky surgical biopsy, House deduces that he is hiding something. It turns out that he has had to make ends meet by enrolling in clinical trials of new drugs. He is currently a participant in three separate drug trials. House assures him that his symptoms were due to the experimental drugs, and since they should be out of his system by now, he’ll be discharged in the morning.

As usual, being discharged from Princeton Plainsboro is a sign of problems to come, and Brandon has a sudden seizure. By now, the team has discovered what drugs Brandon was being given: an anticoagulant, an autoimmune drug, and a statin (a cholesterol medication). They suspect the interaction of all three drugs is causing his symptoms and House elects to give him dialysis to clean all the drugs out of his system. It seems to work at first, but then Brandon develops massive swelling of the tissues of the head and neck occluding his airway. Foreman performs an emergency tracheotomy and Brandon is started on steroids. The differential now includes a thrombosis, Chagas disease (both of which would block the venous drainage, causing swelling), infection, or cytokine storm, with the team favoring the latter. House and the team are unsure whether the cytokine storm is a withdrawal symptom from the experimental drugs, or a new symptom entirely. To solve the puzzle, House elects to put Brandon back on all three drugs, and then wean them off slower this time.

Once again, withdrawing the drugs seems to work at first, but then it becomes obvious that Brandon’s libido has been put in overdrive. A punch to the nose from Dr. Thirteen solves that problem, at least temporarily, but it is a new symptom to consider. Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (a condition caused by damage to both temporal lobes of the brain) is suspected, and an MR Angiogram is obtained to get a closer look at the blood vessels. It shows some narrowing of the vessels of the Circle of Willis (the main arteries supplying the brain). That should not be enough to cause symptoms, but Taub suspects there may an underlying cardiac arrhythmia that worsens them. An EP study (electrophysiology study — it looks for abnormal conduction in the heart) is ordered, and is decidedly positive. During the test, Brandon goes into ventricular tachycardia and needs to be defibrillated. At this point, House notices that Brandon’s hair is turning red around the temples.

Kluver-Bucy is abandoned and Waardenburg Syndrome is suggested, but when Kutner notices a prolonged QT on the EKG (a potentially dangerous heart rhythm), the suspicion shifts to Romano-Ward Syndrome (a common inherited form of Long QT Syndrome). A cardiac sympathectomy (a surgery that reduces the effect of the sympathetic nervous system on the heart) is ordered. When Brandon once again develops visual agnosia, Taub begins suspects the symptoms may be due to lingering toxins, and seeks out Brandon’s old paintings. The paintings show the same distortion every other month — the same time he was on all three experimental medications together. It turns out that in a previous research project, Brandon had been on an experimental antacid which allowed the formation of a bezoar in his stomach. This bezoar trapped many of the experimental pills and has slowly been releasing them, causing Brandon’s symptoms even though he has not been taking any new medications (which means the team had it right halfway through, it was the combination of the experimental drugs, and the last half of the episode was spent chasing one red herring after another. After all, who can argue against the symptoms of “experimental drug reaction”?) The bezoar is removed surgically and Brandon should be good as new.

Major complaints are in red, minor in blue, nit-picking in green:

Romano-Ward is NOT caused by five separate gene mutations. It is caused by a mutation in any ONE of five (actually six) particular genes.

That’s a weird type of agnosia Brandon is experiencing, if it’s agnosia at all. He seems to recognize people and things (at least initially), but can’t paint them – which makes it more of an expressive aphasia than an agnosia. Later on in the show, it shifts entirely and he now can’t recognize people he should, which is a type of agnosia.

None of the neurological syndromes or conditions the team mentioned fit the pattern, but again, why have a logical pattern when it can all be explained away with “experimental drug reactions.”

The standard treatment for prolonged QT interval (including Romano-Ward) are beta-blockers or an ICD, treatments that Brandon can’t have, with no good explanation given as to why.
A sympathectomy is a legitimate treatment for prolonged QT syndrome if the beta-blockers and ICD fail

Why is Taub, a plastic surgeon, running an EP study? It requires not just a cardiologist, but a specially trained cardiologist.
But he’s better than Kutner. Shocking v-tach at 60 and then 120? Wrong.

Most phytobezoars can be non-surgically removed (91% by a recent study).

With swelling of the mouth and pharynx, a standard intubation is difficult, so a tracheotomy makes more sense this week. The procedure was surprisingly smooth for a patient that swollen (no landmarks) and for a doctor who doesn’t do them regularly.

Once again, no eye protection during surgery.

The medical mystery was moderately interesting, though annoyingly inconsistent, so earns a B-. The bezoar was clever, but the final solution relied too much on mysterious experimental drugs and their interactions rather than actual potentially-interesting medicine, so only earns a C-. Most of the medicine was flawed, and the rest “experimental”, but it was still better than last week so earns a D+. The soap opera was better. The Taub part was good, House’s names for the experimental medications were fun, but I didn-t buy any of the Cuddy/PI/House interactions. I give the soap opera a C+.

Last week’s House review
A list of all prior House reviews

This episode of Fringe, at least from the science and medicine point of view, was an improvement over the first two. Sure, it was still rubbish, but the cringe factor was less.

The Plot: A man boards a bus in Washington D.C. and makes eye contact with another passenger. When she puts the backpack she was carrying down on the ground, the man dons a gas mask and opens a capsule of mysterious gas. In the resulting confusion, he grabs the backpack and escapes the bus. After he leaves, the gas on the bus becomes a solid gel, completely filling the bus, suffocating and trapping everyone inside. Called to the scene, Dr. Bishop identifies the gel as a aerosolized silicon base that polymerized with the nitrogen in the air, and is able to recreate it in the lab.

Meanwhile, a mild mannered office worker named Roy McComb has been having Pattern-related visions for the better part of the past year. Dr. Bishop suspects that Roy is psychic. He ties it all in to an old project of his, the Ghost Network, which uses wavelengths “lying outside the range those already discovered” to transmit secret information. It turns out that Roy was one of Bishop’s experimental subjects twenty years before when he was trying to use “iridium-based organometallic compounds” to create a living receiver for the Ghost Network. Somehow, in the intervening years, those metallic compounds have multiplied and collected in Roy’s visual cortex (the part of the brain that translates visual input). Thus, when someone uses the Ghost Network, it gives him visions. Bishop wants to move the metallic compounds from the visual cortex to the auditory cortex so Roy can hear what is being said on the Network rather than see it in visions. Agent Dunham uses the information obtained through Roy’s abilities to capture (or at least attempt to capture) the people responsible for the bus attack. In the scuffle, she is able to recover the strange object they were after.

1. The Jell-O Bus
Is that small an amount of silicon gas really going to fill the entire bus up with gel? No, not even if it combines with nitrogen. Sure, nitrogen makes up 75% of the air on the bus, but those molecules are spread out because it’s in gaseous form. If they did condense into solid form, the nitrogen molecules would take up dramatically less space because solids are much more condensed than gases. Even if you throw in the amount of silicon gas in that canister, there still wouldn’t be enough mass to fill the entire bus with gel.

2. Dr. Bishop, Pharmacist
Dr. Bishop takes his own homemade concoction of dextromethorphan, Klonopin, and fluoxetine.
Dextromethrophan is synthetic narcotic used as an over the counter cough suppressant (it is the “DM” in Robitussin DM), and can be hallucinogenic at high doses.
Klonopin (clonazepam) is an anti-anxiety agent and sedative. IT is a benzodiazepine, the same class as Valium.
Fluoxetine is the generic name for Prozac, an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication.
None of these are psychotics (or even anti-psychotics) as Peter suggests.

3. Ghosts or Visions
For the sake of argument, let’s say the iridium compounds in Roy’s brain did react to the Ghost Network. That still doesn’t explain why his brain would interpret the signals as exact visions or the exact words. It would more likely result in random auditory or visual hallucinations, or possibly a seizure.

4. Magnets
Wouldn’t the MRI, an extremely powerful magnet, already have shifted the metallic elements out of Roy’s visual cortex.? If Dr. Bishop’s little homemade magnetic machine can, then certainly the much stronger MRI would have.

5. Cleanliness is next to Godliness
If a mad scientist ever drills in my brain, I would hope that — unlike Dr Bishop — he (or she) would at least use sterile technique.

Truly one of the most bizarre comic book transfusion stories ever, this one comes from The Brave and the Bold #141, “Pay or Die!”

Two Gotham City businessmen mysteriously explode, and the Batman is quickly on the case. He determines that both businessmen had defaulted on loans from a new loan shark in town, the mysterious Mr. Longreen. Using his famed detective skills, and the help of a seamstress with poor English,Batman realizes that the reclusive Longreen is none other than his arch enemy, the Joker.

Despite his vaunted investigative skills, the Batman has no clue where the Joker’s hideout is, so he enlists Alfred, his faithful butler. Alfred puts the word out on the street that he is badly in need of a loan and soon Mr. Longreen comes calling. He brings Alfred to his lair in an abandoned funeral home and provides him with the cash he needs — Alfred will just have to repay the load whenever asked, plus interest. The two of them drink a toast of wine to their business arrangement.

Upon Alfred’s return to Wayne Manor, Batman performs an extensive physical, but can find no evidence of explosives. Things start to go sour the very next day, when the Joker calls Alfred, demanding the payment of interest on his loan. Then he calls again, demanding payment of interest on the interest.

Finally, Batman is able to deduce the full nature of the Joker’s plot: he has adulterated the wine with specially timed chemical explosives so that whoever he drinks a toast with will explode a day or two later. The Joker remains safe because he took an antidote before he drank the tainted wine.

Just as the Joker and his henchmen are chortling about the butler’s impending demise, Alfred crashes in through the window and grabs the Joker, proclaiming that if he explodes, he’ll take the Joker with him. But wait! It’s only the Batman pretending to be Alfred, and now that he has the Joker in custody, he forces him to give Alfred a transfusion so that the antidote will protect Alfred as well. No more loans, no more explosions, and the Joker is off to Arkham (and as far as I know, Alfred never repaid the money, so he still has $50,000 of the Joker’s loot).

I know this story exists in the anything-can-happen world of Earth-B (a place where continuity — and often the laws of science –are ignored), but it seems to me there are some serious flaws in both the Joker’s and Batman’s plans:

1. How did the Joker know how to time his explosives? How did he know when — and if — his clients were going to default? The story tells us that one of the businessmen had been paying off the loan for six months before he finally defaulted. Did he have explosives in his blood the whole time? Or maybe he received a gift bottle of wine in the mail (except that the story states that the Joker always drank with his victim)? I’d think it was done by remote detonation if it weren’t for the Joker looking totally panicked when he sees Alfred in his lair, knowing that Alfred is going to explode in just a few minutes.

2. Transfusing the Joker’s “chemically tainted blood” into innocent Alfred seems cruel and unusual punishment for years of loyal — if at time sarcastic — service. Better hope the Joker is the same, or nearly the same, blood type as Alfred. And better hope the antidote is still in the Joker’s blood stream and still functions after the transfusion. Why not just get the Joker to reveal where the antidote is, and give that to Alfred?

Other Comic Book Transfusions

What will probably become my standard Fringe disclaimer: I am perfectly willing to accept “fiction” as part of my science fiction, but I do have a problem when the science [sic] violates many of the basic tenets of biology, chemistry, and physics without any explanation — not even any good technobabble. And Spoiler Warning.

I found the first episode more enjoyable — this one struck me as overly clichéd with the cold case serial killer and the all too common science fiction plots (the rapid aging, the quick pregnancy, the victim’s last vision).

The Plot: A woman is dropped off at a hospital, clearly in an advanced state of pregnancy, yet she claims she’s not pregnant. From what the viewer has seen, she apparently proceeded through nine months of pregnancy is a matter of minutes. She dies during labor and an emergency c-section is performed to save the child. The child lives for only a matter of hours, rapidly aging, and dies a withered old man.

Agent Dunham is able to tie this case into one of her older cold cases, a serial killer who removed the pituitary glands of his female victims. It also seems to tie into some of Dr. Bishop previous research, where he was trying to develop a perfect soldier — someone who aged from birth to 21 years in just three actual years. He casually mentions that stopping the accelerated aging was the problem. Bishop hypothesizes that the killer is one of these experiments, and uses the pituitary glands of his victims to stave off his rapid aging. Another victim is found, and Dr Bishop is able to use a fancy machine from Massive Dynamics to recreate some of the last visions she saw. Using these clues, Dunham and Peter Bishop are able to stop the serial killer — who dies of old age before Dunham’s eyes — and rescue his final victim

Given that Fringe is science fiction, (and thus far, not particularly original science fiction) I am willing to accept that — due to genetic manipulation — the killer rapidly ages. For the sake of argument, I will also accept that quaffing a handful of pituitary glands (of comely young women of questionable morals) every couple of years will stop this rapid aging.

But even accepting those, several items caught my eye:

1. The Pregnancy, Birth, and Child
Pregnancy is a joint relationship between mother and fetus — just because the fetal aspect has accelerated growth doesn’t mean the maternal aspect will be able to keep up. A miscarriage would seem to be the most likely outcome.
What type of c-section was that? Emergency c-sections are performed vertically along the abdomen as it’s the fastest way and scarring (and uterine rupture in subsequent pregnancies) is not an issue.
There has to be some conservation of mass. Where did the child get all the protein and other building blocks necessary to grow that fast? He would have to have been eating a tremendous amount from the minute he was born.
Funny how his entire body seemed to age — except the umbilical cord.

2. Neuromuscular blockade
Neuromuscular blocking agents paralyze skeletal muscles. Higher doses may paralyze the diaphragm and lead to respiratory paralysis and side effects are known to occur. These drugs have no effect on cranial nerves and would not in any way “freeze” the victim’s optic nerve. This woman has been dead for hours; there’s no electrical activity in those nerves left to speak of.
Apparently her eyes have no extraocular muscles.
Why the bridge? It wasn’t the last thing she saw — that would be the killer and his “father” — nor was it the last thing she saw when she was injected with the medication — that would be the killer.

3. Defibrillation
You don’t shock a flatline. It doesn’t work, and may make things worse.
In a situation like this: 1) stop the anesthetic — it’s short acting, that’s why it has to continually run during the procedure. 2) provide CPR until the drug wears off.

I’ve had several people ask me what I thought of FOX’s new show Fringe.
I liked it. It was an enjoyable action procedure with some potentially interesting characters. The science was questionable — fringe at best, pseudoscience at worst — but that’s pretty much as advertised.
I’ll certainly keep watching for few more weeks, at least long enough to see if they give Pacey Peter Bishop any actual personality.

The Plot:FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is part of a team evaluating a fatal outbreak of an unknown disease aboard a plane bound for Logan International Airport. While following up a seemingly minor lead, Dunham and her partner/lover Agent Scott manage to stumble upon the prime suspect and his secret lab. They give chase, but the suspect triggers an explosion that knocks Dunham unconscious and exposes her partner to mysterious chemicals which affect him in a similar way to the mysterious plane contagion. Doctors are at a loss and Agent Scott is placed in a medically induced coma.

Searching the internet for answers, Dunham discovers the work of a Dr. Walter Bishop, a schizotypal genius scientist who has been confined to an insane asylum for the past 17 years. She tricks his equally genius (but much more sociable) son Peter into helping her get Dr Bishop released from the asylum and working to find a cure for Agent Scott. Through a combination of legwork, questionable science, and chutzpah the team succeeds and is able to cure Agent Scott — but even more questions are uncovered.

Thoughts, good and bad, about the science/medicine:

1. The Contagion
The writers are quite vague — intentionally, I’m sure — about the nature of the “contagion” aboard the plane. It is strongly suggested that it is an infectious agent. If so, that was an incredibly fast spread of the disease. From one person infected to an entire planeload in just a handful of minutes. So the agent not only has to infect and affect a person in mere minutes, but is able to get far enough along in it’s life cycle to allow that person to become virulently contagious in the same period of time. That’s unnaturally — and I’d wager impossibly — fast.
Later, it’s suggested by Dr Bishop that it may be a “leprotic contagion.” (i.e. leprosy based). I guess (shrug). Leprosy really looks nothing like that, is a very slow infection, and is not particularly contagious.

2. The Cow
Why use a cow as a test subject? Peter Bishop says, “genetically, humans and cows are only separated by a couple lines of DNA.” That’s certainly true, but following that logic, why not choose something with even an closer DNA match to humans, like primates (monkeys and apes)? In fact, cows are rarely used for medical testing. Monkeys are used frequently, but so are mice and rats, which have an immune system and pharmacokinetics surprisingly similar to humans.
Not to mention you’ll need more than one test subject.

3. Synaptic Transfer
The whole concept of Synaptic Transfer is just plain silly. Brains do have an electrical field, but different parts of the brain have different electrical patterns – that’s why an EEG has more than one lead. Synchronizing the overall electrical pattern of two brains will not allow them to communicate or share thoughts. Medically, I’d be worried that the person who was having their brain waves “adjusted” to match the other person’s would suffer as seizure, as that’s what unwanted electrical activity in the brain tends to cause.

4. Drugs
Doctor Bishop wants to give Ketamine, Neurontin, and LSD to Dunham before placing her in the sensory deprivation tank. His choice of drugs makes a fair amount of sense.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic — it makes a user feel as if they are outside their own body. It is used primarily as a veterinary anesthetic, but is also infamous as a date rape drug.
Neurontin (gabapentin) is a drug that was originally developed as a medication to prevent seizures in epileptics. It has also proven to be useful for treating neuropathic (nerve) pain and chronic pain. Of note, it is a relatively recent drug and had not yet received FDA approval when Dr Bishop last conducted his experiments — though it had been known for some years before that.
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is a fairly well-known and infamous psychedelic hallucinogen.

5. Stored Blood
Color me skeptical that FBI agents keep blood stored in case they are wounded in the line of duty. Stored blood has a limited shelf life, so they’d have to keep donating more every few months. They would also need to donate multiple units of blood because serious injuries take more than just a single unit.

6. Technobabble
“The active toxin was a magnesium based ethylene glycol…with an organophosphate trig-”
“Calcium gluconate in a thiamine base”

Detective Comics #848 “Heart of Hush”
Paul Dini, writer
Dustin Nguyen, penciller

There are lots of spoilers here, so don’t read past the warning sign unless you’ve already read Detective Comics #848, don’t plan on reading it, or promise not to whine about the plot being spoiled.

The key portion of the plot, in Haiku:

First of all, let me state what is hopefully obvious. This is no way resembles realistic medicine. It is what can be best described as “classic comic book medicine” — the same kind of medical science that attaches a man’s head to a gorilla’s body or turns someone into a man/bat hybrid. That’s not to say it’s bad, per se, just horribly inaccurate.

Without knowing where Dini is going with this, it’s hard to speculate precisely what’s happened to Catwoman (Selina Kyle), so I’ll make some educated guesses (and probably some less educated guesses as well).

There’s so much to address in this issue, I’ll just hit the highlights. If there’s anything I gloss over or miss, just mention it in the comments and I’ll address it.

Let’s start by looking at the final scene, with Selina attached to every (steampunk looking) machine in the hospital, including — presumably — the machine that goes ping, after her heart has been removed by the villain Hush.

Selina’s heart is missing, so she’s hooked up to either some sort of artificial heart or heart-lung bypass machine. Given the art, it’s hard to tell which. Selina has tubes bringing blood to and from the heart, and we can see blood in the various pumps, so that suggests a heart-lung machine. But on the other hand, why all the wires — especially that huge 220V cable — leading into the chest cavity unless there’s something in there requiring electrical power (and even so, that’s a hell of a lot of wires). I suspect the artist thinks that a heart-lung machine actually involves an artificial heart placed in the chest and doesn’t realize that all the pumping is performed externally.

How did Selina get hooked up to this monstrosity of a machine? According to Oracle, she was dropped off anonymously at Gotham General in an abandoned ambulance. Was she hooked up to any machines then, or just propped up — her heart missing? All that equipment couldn’t possibly fit in the back of an ambulance, so much — if not all of it — had to have been attached once she arrived at the hospital. Is this really the best equipment the hospital has? And why are a keg, a muffler, and R2-D2 (the same one from Werewolf by Night, apparently) as part of the machine?

Finally, a few thoughts on the de-heartification surgery scene earlier in the issue:

• Removing a heart — presuming one wants to put it, or another one, back — is an operation that takes more than one surgeon, even if they are the Best Neurosurgeon in the World* (and this is cardiothoracic surgery, not brain surgery).
• It’s nice of Hush to wear surgical gloves and a mask over his bandages (though he’s still missing eye protection and has too much exposed skin for him to be considered in surgical garb).
• Speaking of skin exposure, if Selina is “prepped and ready” for heart surgery, why is her gown still on?

*The phrase “The Best Neurosurgeon in the World” is ™ and © Polite Dissent.

Superman Beyond #1
Grant Morrison, writer
Doug Mahnke, penciler

This comic issues a clarification, of sorts, from Clark’s previous statement:

I’m not sure the clarification actually makes things any clearer. How does one massage the heart with heat vision? (I have this vision of Lois in a towel, the lights down low, Barry White on the stereo, and Clark whispering, “Let me massage that for you Lois, with my heat vision…”) Is Clark suggesting he’s been using his heat vision on Lois ever since surgery? And can infrared light even penetrate to the heart without damaging the tissues above it?

I suspect that Grant Morrison is referring in his own oblique way to photobiomodulation, the use of specific light wavelengths to help the body with healing, but at this point it’s an emerging science and has no known cardiac uses. Plus, as I mentioned above, the heart is well inside the chest cavity, how can the infrared affect it without cooking everything else around it?

An important announcement from the Brother Voodoo campaign headquarters:

After gaining infamy for its lurid horror comics, EC Comics tried to rehabilitate its image by releasing its “New Direction” of wholesome comics. These included titles such as Valor, Aces High, and Impact as well as the medical comics M.D. and Psychoanalysis. As the name suggests, in Psychoanalysis the reader follows an unnamed pipe-smoking psychiatrist as he attempts to analyze and cure his patients.

Previous “analysis” of Psychoanalysis issues one, two, and three

For his first appointment, the psychiatrist sees Freddy Carter. Freddy is a fifteen year old who was initially brought for counseling after being caught stealing. The doctor deduced that the theft, along with Freddy’s asthma and poor grades, are really just desperate cries for attention. His parents are constantly sparring with each other — figuratively at least — with Freddy as the battleground.

The subject of this particular session is Freddy’s recent report card. Freddy is failing math and science — the classes important to his father — but doing well in English and history — classes important to his mother. In retaliation, Freddy’s father has grounded him and cut off his allowance. In addition, he has stopped giving any money to his wife other than for groceries, and he fired the maid. After talking with Freddy for several minutes, the doctor goes out to talk to Freddy’s parents who are upset that Freddy isn’t cured yet. The doctor points out that as long as the two of them are fighting, Freddy will never be cured because they each desire a different outcome. The doctor convinces the two of them that they each need psychiatric counseling for the good of their marriage and for Freddy’s sake. They both agree, and the doctor trades a single paying patient for two.

The last portion of the comic shows two sessions with Mark Stone, an unhappy screen writer. Mark has many difficulties, including problems with women, resentment towards his own success, and longstanding issues with his parents. This time, he is angry the psychiatrist because feels that he has become overly dependent on him. The doctor is able to get Mark to calm down, and then has him describe a recent dream. After hearing the dream, the doctor tells Mark that he is not mad at him, the psychiatrist, per se, but instead angry at authority figures in general — which goes back to his anger towards his father. The doctor is also able to deduce that Mark has a deep-seated fear of being abandoned, which brings out his feelings towards his mother. This has come to the surface because of the doctor’s upcoming vacation.

At a later session, Mark has once again started to experience the severe panic attacks and anxiety symptoms that brought him to the doctor in the first place. They started just a few days after Mark and the psychiatrist agreed that Mark had made remarkable progress and could cut back on his sessions. It doesn’t take a genius — or a board certified psychiatrist — to realize that this is nothing more than a subconscious reaction on Mark’s part. He is uncomfortable with the idea of cutting back on the counseling, so he recreates the symptoms that necessitated the visits in the first place. The psychiatrist is able to get Mark to realize the root of the problem, and once again Mark agrees that he doesn’t need many more sessions. This is probably a good thing as this was the final issue of Psychoanalysis.

Previous Flashback Weeks

Batman #677 “Batman R.I.P.: Batman in the Underworld”
Grant Morrison, writer
Tony Daniel, penciler

Arch-villain Doctor Hurt is explaining his plan to his villainous colleagues:

Librium (generic name: chlordiazepoxide) is a drug in the benzodiazepine class — in other words, it’s from the same class of medication as Valium, Xanax, and Halcion. Like all drugs in this class, it acts as a relaxant, a sedative, and an anti-anxiety medication. Librium is a fairly old drug and is not in common use today.

I find Librium to be an interesting choice of drug for Doctor Hurt to use. As previously mentioned, it is a fairly old drug (in this case, “old” means about fifty years) and it was the first benzodiazepine discovered. Librium is not nearly as potent as later benzodiazepines, and it requires a dose that is roughly 20-50 times higher. This is going to make a big difference when dosing someone by sword cut — an unreliable method at best. It’s got to be a lot easier to get 0.5 MG of Xanax into a wound compared to 25 MG of Librium.

Librium has a very long half life, with some of its metabolites taking over a week to be broken down by the body. This can make it dangerous to use as a daily medication because these metabolites build up quickly. However, Librium’s long effect after a single dose may be just what the doctor is looking for in this situation.

Benzodiazepines are primarily used as relaxants and anti-anxiety agents in anxious patients, and sleep aids in insomniacs. They can also be used as muscle relaxants, to stop seizures, and to ease alcohol withdrawal. I know of no benefit to hypnosis or trigger phase induction offered by these medications, by I’m willing to explain this aspect away as “comic book science.” Of note, all benzodiazepines are habit forming and can become addictive so I tend to prescribe them with caution. Librium isn’t used that much anymore, having been supplanted by newer and safer medications.

So why did Doctor Hurt choose Librium? Why not use a more modern medication that doesn’t require such a hefty dose?

Is it the benzodiazepine he is most familiar with? Or maybe the only one he is familiar with?
Librium was developed in the late 1950s, coincidentally (I’m sure) the same time Batman #113 (featuring “Batman: The Superman of Planet-X“) was published – a story which seems to be playing a large role in the Batman R.I.P. storyline (for instance, it introduced the planet Zurr-En-Arrh and the Bat-Radia). Diazepam (Valium), the second benzodiazepine, didn’t emerge until 1963.

Does the long half-life of Librium offer some advantage to his plan?

Or I may be reading too much into a throwaway line — it certainly wouldn’t be the first time — but Librium seems such a odd choice, and to refer to it by brand name, that it caught my eye.

Otorrhagia — bleeding from the ear canal — seems to be a recurrent theme in recent comics. It’s been showing up for at least twenty years, but it seems to have become more common lately.

Otorrhagia is not a very common symptom; I see maybe one or two cases a year (and most of those are self-inflicted Q-tip-related trauma). There are a variety of causes, including (in no particular order): basal skull fracture, trauma to the ear canal, tumors of the auditory canal, certain aneurysms, infections of the ear canal, and ruptured ear drums (especially from barotrauma – i.e. pressure).

Comic books add several more causes of otorrhagia:
1. Psychic attack
Not as common as the psychic nosebleed, which it usually accompanies. Here is a classic example of the psychic ear bleed, from the X-Men graphic novel God Loves Man Kills.

2. Sonic bombardment
Another common cause of comic book otorrhagia.
This example is from Cyborg #2

3. Extreme Vertigo.
Poor Invincible, not only does he have so dizzy he can’t think straight, but his ears are bleeding. It turns out the vertigo is caused by an implant in his ear, so that could be the cause of the bleeding (but if that’s the case then the surgeon who put it in should lose his license for sloppiness). Neither can explain the nosebleed he gets a few panels later though.

4. Possession/Reincarnation by a New God.
I’m not sure what the proper term is in this case, but whatever it is, Turpin’s ear is bleeding pretty heavily (from Final Crisis #2).

Scene from Ultimate Origins #1. Script by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Butch Guice

The scientist in this scene — and Bendis, by extension — have just enough knowledge of biology to get almost everything painfully wrong. Let me just hit the highlights — feel free to chime in with your own thoughts (the full scene can be found here).

1. Genomes and genes are two different things; they are not interchangeable terms. A genome is a set of an organism’s genetic material. A gene is a sequence of DNA that codes for a particular protein or product.

2. Genealogy is a different field of study.
3. There is no official “pure strain” human genome used as a standard — each person is a little different genetically from every other person** — who’s to say who is “normal” and who is a “mutant”?
4. He seems to be suggesting the there is a single mutant gene that has variable expression (this last point isn’t about an error in the scene, just an interesting observation).

In Nightwing, the Mother of Champions (a Chinese super-hero who gives birth to “litters” of super-powered children every few days) has been kidnapped by Talia Al Ghul so that she can raise her own super-powered army. To make the process even more efficient, one of Talia’s (mad) scientists explains the the plan.

Chemicals that induce labor? We have them now: Pitocin (oxytocin) — it’s commonly used by obstetricians for induction of labor. It induces labor by stimulating contractions, which brings me around to the point that you can’t have labor without having contractions.

How can a chemical “mimic” contractions? And even if it could, what good would it do? The muscular contractions of the uterus are what propels the baby along and through the birth canal. If you mimicked contractions there would be no real pushing (just “mimicking”), and thus no delivery. I’m pretty sure that this would actually slow the process down.

Of course, we’re talking about a woman who gives birth to dozens of children every few days, which means that any legitimate obstetrics and medicine is out the window. I really think that this is one of those concepts that was better left unexplained.

The good old days: when mad scientists could concoct evil drugs and schemes in their own basement labs. Nowadays, it seems to take at least a university lab — more commonly an entire industrial chemical research lab — just to create one marketable evil drug. Just ask Norman Osborne (especially the “Ultimate” version) — how many scientists did he have working for him?

In this scene from Detective Comics #61 (March 1942), an unnamed mad scientist has discovered a drug that makes people lazy. How lazy? So lazy that victims will be too tired to eat and will starve themselves to death. Like any good mad scientist, he has a scheme to make money off his drug (money which will be used for more mad science — that’s how the cycle works). He slips some of his drug to an important corporate leader, and then extorts money from his corporation or he won’t provide the antidote (and isn’t it nice how mad scientists always take the time to concoct an antidote?)