What would it take to build a spiderman? Lets first start with the super strength, agility, and endurance. Genetic engineering has already made leaps and bounds in this department. Ostarine and other substances that increase the effectiveness of natural steroids are already in advance studies. This is a safe way to build lean muscle faster and increase energy and endurance.
Spiders have hairs that branch off hairs on their feet to create Van der Waals Bonds that hold them to surfaces. We could extract this gene from spiders and implant it in humans to grow these microscopic hairs upon hairs all over our hands. Humans would not be able to scale smooth vertical walls but climbing abilities would drastically improve.
Spiderman's spider sense could be nothing more than sensitive hearing. To accomplish this the sensitivity of the cilia, the tiny hairs in the ear that sway with vibrations, would need to be increased. Sensitivity would increase with more and finer cilia present in the ear. This would also help fine tune balance in an individual since the cilia in the ear acts as gyroscope for the body. So this would again not give as good of results as the comic book Spiderman received when he was bit, but it would help to hear enemies sneaking up on you.
Finally, Spiderman's go to power, the web shooting. Even Stan Lee did not see this a possibility which is why Spiderman has mechanical pressurized canisters that shoot his man made webbing. Spiders spinnerets would need to be absolutely massive to create enough silk to hold a humans weight. Not only that but the muscles needed to shoot the webbing out would just add to the size. So I am with Stan Lee this part of Spiderman would be more easily man made.
This is an awesome post, it's really cool to think about spider man in terms of just a couple of genetic modifications. But how far should research actually be done into genetic modifications? Countless media have long predicted our demise with genetic modifications (among my favorite being Bioshock have you played it?), what do you think about it?
ReplyDeleteI plan to do a few posts on the ethics of genetic and bioengineering along with some potential downfalls like the Bioshock scenario.I personally think it is a little far fetched but when you start messing with things as complex and unknown as our genome you never know what could happen.
ReplyDeleteI agree--a great post. I really like your references to popular culture in this post and the D&G one. I'd encourage you to try to link to actual studies/research that is happening so that we can in some way evaluate how close/realistic it is to pull some of this off. I think most people would be surprised with how much progress bioeng. is actually making, but at the same time, it's really difficult to predict how these technologies will evolve in the future. So connect us to the larger discussions/debates that are happening in other publications/journals as well.
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