By Charly SHELTON

Throughout this issue of CV Weekly, we have covered topics related to healthy living. But my big question has been about all the promises I’ve been made in movies and TV – how do I get super strength, a robotic armor or telekinesis? Let’s take a look at the realities of some of these promises to see how far off they are.

Question: If I get shot to pieces in a really graphic shootout or if I am in a horrific spaceship crash coming back to Earth, can I be put back together with bionic parts and become a “Robocop” or “Six Million Dollar Man?” How realistic is bionic replacement? Will it make that cool sound when I run in slow-mo?

The short answer is a qualified yes … to everything but the cool sound effect. The work being done in prosthetic replacement right now is incredible. Facebook videos make the rounds every few months that show big stars like Robert Downey Jr. donating a prosthetic “Iron Man” arm to a boy born without a right arm. We’ve all seen it, and it’s very cute, but the really big news is that with 3D printers, prosthetics like these can be made quickly, easily and cheaply without skimping on the functionality. From Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius, who competed in the Olympics as a sprinter with two prosthetic “blade” legs to Antonina Zakharchenko, a blind woman in Russia who had a visual prosthesis installed on her retina that receives data from a small camera on her glasses and returned her sight after 13 years of darkness, prosthetics have come a long way in the last decade.

Here’s the bad news. There is a limit right now as to how much of one body can be replaced. It’s something the world’s science community is working on, but to replace five or six organs, an arm, eyesight and more would be too much for one immune system to cope with. That’s not to say it won’t work, it’s just with the emergence of more prosthesis technology, it takes time to get it all working well together and have some kind of immuno-prosthesis that can handle that much work.

Also, prosthetics won’t make an enhanced body that much better than a traditional body. Zakharchenko has limited and pixelated vision, though some is better than none. Pistorius trained for years to be an Olympic athlete, and the rest of his body is in incredible shape regardless of his legs. And, as of now, the prosthetic legs don’t make that cool sound from “Six Million Dollar Man” when used for running in slow-mo. So there is always room to grow.

Question: Can I transfer my mind into another body and not have to worry about keeping this one healthy? When will “Avatar” be a thing?

No. This isn’t a possibility by modern standards, and it will be a very long time before medical science can seriously attempt something like it. Consciousness is a very ethereal thing and it’s not like a lung or a pituitary gland that can be identified as “that’s exactly where it comes from.” Consciousness is a result overall of a living animal. Some call it a soul, some call it sentience, whatever you call it – it’s what makes someone a someone and not just a lump of living tissue. It’s not easy to define, and even harder to quantify, let alone to transplant into a new head.

There is one doctor, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who has been in the headlines a lot in the last couple of years for saying that he wants to do a head transplant from one body to another. This may be easier to do as it’s not moving the consciousness to a new brain, but attaching the brain and nervous system to a new body. It still is a Herculean task that modern medicine isn’t ready for. Despite the fact that he claims successful experiments with a monkey and a human corpse, he has yet to provide any real data to prove it. It seems a little too good to be true.

“Scientifically, what Canavero wants to do cannot yet be done. It may never be doable. To move a head onto someone else’s body requires the rewiring of the spinal cord. We don’t know how to do that. If we did, there would be far fewer paralyzed people who have spinal cord injuries. Nor, despite Canavero’s assertions to the contrary, is medicine anywhere close to knowing how to use stem cells or growth factors to make this happen,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, in an opinion column in Forbes. “And when you move a head to another body you need to pour huge amounts of immunosuppression into the recipient to fight rejection by the new body. This is a big problem for heart and liver transplants, with the drugs damaging the transplanted organs and other parts of the body. Cancer, infections and premature death are the result of the toxic nature of immunosuppressive drugs.”

In addition, Dr. Caplan said, the result would be severe mental disability or insanity and, for a doctor to attempt it, “one would have to be out of one’s mind.”

Question: Will dousing myself in chemicals and getting struck by lightning give me super speed like Flash? Will radioactive spiders give me spider powers like Spider-Man? Will gamma rays give me super strength like Hulk?

This one is easy. No to all of them. As sad as it is, we have to face the reality that you can’t get super powers that way. Barry Allen (The Flash) would either die immediately from a combination of reacting chemicals all over his skin and then a lightning strike to the face, or he would be incredibly lucky and live, only to be severely disabled and need years of skin grafts.

Peter Parker would probably be fine. The spider’s venom passed onto Peter is so small, the effects would be negligible, just suffering the same ill effects of a spider bite and pass any lingering radiation on in normal bodily excretions.

Bruce Banner (the Hulk) would probably die, if not of the extremely high dose of gamma rays ripping apart his DNA at the molecular level, then definitely of being within the blast zone of a nuclear bomb test.

So the best places to stretch one’s imagination is not necessarily the surgical theatre, but the comic book.

  Charly Shelton