Wolverine vs. Multiple Man: Comparing DNA repair and replication
Wolverine is a much-loved hero of the Marvel X-men universe.
The wolverine has his retractable claws and his adamantium-reinforced skeleton,
but as any true fan knows, it’s not really the adamantium that makes wolverine
so tough. It’s his ability to do repair. Punch him, stab him or put a bullet in
him, Wolverine has the magical ability to quickly and correctly repair himself.
This makes Wolverine essentially immortal. The latest Wolverine comic has the
hero dying, showing that he may have some weakness, but I predict he’ll come
back somehow. 
Multiple Man is a less well known bad guy from the same
universe. Multiple Man has the power to make copies or “dupes” or himself. It
takes as little energy as snapping his fingers to make a new dupe and the duplicates
are perfect copies. With this ability, he can multi-task like no other and can
even reabsorb a dupe and gain all of the knowledge and experiences that the
dupe acquired. However, each dupe is
mortal and can be killed. Nonetheless, with the ability to produce an army with
a snap of his fingers, Multiple Man is also quite powerful.
So if we imagine a battle between these two characters, with
one that can repair almost any damage and the other that can copy himself to
vast numbers we have an epic battle between replication and repair. I don’t
know if this stand off has actually happened in the comics, but given his
popularity, pretty much everyone predicts that Wolverine would win. However, if you ask biology students the
question “What’s more important for the cell, repair or replication?” They
will universally answer: Replication.
Without replication, they argue, an organism could never produce offspring. There would be no mitosis, no meiosis, no daughter cells of any kind. Without replication, extinction would be inevitable. Life without replication hardly seems like living at all. On the other hand, without repair you could still replicate. The only side effect, the argument continues, would be that evolution would happen faster if there was no repair.
Without replication, they argue, an organism could never produce offspring. There would be no mitosis, no meiosis, no daughter cells of any kind. Without replication, extinction would be inevitable. Life without replication hardly seems like living at all. On the other hand, without repair you could still replicate. The only side effect, the argument continues, would be that evolution would happen faster if there was no repair.
The reality of life is that without DNA repair, death would
come much faster than without DNA replication. Perhaps it’s the way that
biology is taught: Cell division, DNA
structure and Evolution (at least in most classrooms) are put right up front.
Repair isn’t really explained until college level courses. It’s easy to see why someone might think that
repair is trivial. That DNA must be perfectly stable in that pristine double
helix we always see. And that cancer, when it happens, is the result of one
unlucky exposure to a carcinogen. The following chart gives an estimate for the amount of DNA damage that each cell in the body must endure everyday. The numbers are staggering. Each cell must survive thousands upon thousands of damaging events each day. Radiation, carcinogens, even our own metabolisms cause damage and yet each cell has the magical ability to quickly and correctly repair itself. Each cell is a little Wolverine.
What I think, would be the deciding factor for this battle, depends mainly upon two things:
ReplyDelete1.) It is not stated (in the comics either I think) that Wolverine's repair ability is "intelligent" in the sense that if his immortal cells detect damage, they can not only repair the damage, but prevent it from happening again by developing a special ability to protect for that kind of specific damage. Although that does not seem to be Wolverine's case, living cells do take cues from the environment and develop preventative protection pathways against a specific type of damage (such as oxidative stress). DNA, although most of the time, cannot prevent the damage done to its base pairs, has evolved acute responses to deal with certain types of mismatches or altered base pairs. I believe if Wolverine were to develop this "intelligent" repair system he would become stronger and stronger.
2. Conversely, although Multiple Man(MM) has the ability to make infinite copies of himself, which begs the question that if the "parent" MM dies, does that mean that the drupes die as well. In cells, if a parent cell dies, this does not induce death in a daughter cell; however, when speaking about DNA, an altered parent strand will created a daughter strand that can receive a mutation and cause problems for that specific gene. It would be interesting to see if MM could use one of his drupes as a successor to himself if he is ever killed.
Therefore, I would believe that whether or not Wolverine has the ability of "intelligent repair", if he kills the original MM, then he will ultimately be the victor in the battle. What would be interesting to note; however, would be that if Wolverine did possess the ability to intelligently repair himself, when would he be considered an evolutionary advanced form of Wolverine? Would he still be considered the same person if he adapted better each time he was dealt damage? Interesting to think about...
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ReplyDeleteI had a question. I understand that repair is more important than replication, but don't certain organisms favor replication. Mutation would benefit bacteria and viruses and wouldn't replication help them invade their hosts quicker?
ReplyDeleteDespite the fictionality of the character, I have always questioned the nature of Wolverine’s ability to repair so well. Considering the amount of fighting he does, he works his muscles quite a bit– it is no wonder they portray him as one of the more ripped mutants. However, I think they undermine his muscle mass. If he was breaking down his muscles to such an extent as he does and rebuilds them so fast that he can continue fighting and working them out, would not his muscle hypertrophy be out of this world as well? Wouldn’t he build so much muscle that he would look something like those body builders who can barely move because their muscles are so big? Also, since his body is repairing so much, it is using a high amount of nutrients fed by a high metabolism, so wouldn’t he be hungry all the time and have to feast for every meal? Back to the muscle mass, if he was restricted from the immobility of his muscles, Multiple Man could clean him out with one lethal swoop. Similarly if a species spent all of its energy to get an extremely efficient repair system but had no replication, than the only organism in that species that existed could be exposed to something strong enough to wipe it out. Thus the end of it’s existence.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as you bought up the scenario of Wolverine vs Multiple Man, I thought of the lecture when we discussed repair and how much damage our cells endure every day. That day, I originally believed to have replication would be more important than to have repair because I thought our species could still exist without repair— We could still procreate and adapt through evolution. However, you brought up the argument of the sheer number of damage our cells get per day. You cannot simply avoid damaging UV rays to not require repair. Because our own proteins make mistakes all the time, all day long, we simply couldn’t survive the great amount of problems changing in our genome, especially since neutral/damaging changes are more frequent than neutral/beneficial changes.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know is why no one seems to have thought to exploit Wolverine for his capability to repair cells and stay in his prime. Everyone wants to make money in weapon development, but I think there is an untapped potential and money in anti-aging products. I’m sure there are plenty of super villains willing to shell out big money to become immortal, but everyone in Marvel lately just seems to be focusing on weaponry (and humans as weapons) like trying to recreate Captain America and Hulk effects.
Huma brings up a really good point. For viruses especially they purposefully do not have effective repair mechanisms because that would actually be detrimental for them. Viruses thrive on their ability to mutate and evolve quickly, without that ability they would not be able to survive in their environment. Especially viruses that effect humans, if they were to have good repair mechanisms then they would not mutate enough and would not be able to find resistance against antibiotics.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, Huma's question is completely valid and makes sense. However, that may have been the reason they made a hero that was more wolf/man (although likely not) rather than one that was man/virus. However, that could open up other doors, like a superhero that has the ability to withstand lethal injection... Or not.
Although repair is more important than replication, I believe it is not the only factor in deciding whether Wolverine or Multiple Man would win a battle to the death. The winner could also be determined by looking at what system has the most setbacks, instead of which one is more important or better. Although Multiple Man can replicate, he has only replicated 40 dupes at once, whereas Wolverine has been able to repair endlessly. If Multiple Man could replicate endlessly and have an army of thousands, then there would be no way Wolverine could defeat him. However, 40 is still a relatively small number of people for Wolverine to kill at once, thus he would win. Another way of looking at this battle could be in alternate ways of killing one another. With so many dupes of Multiple Man, it could be hard to single out the original copy and kill him. Wolverine on the other hand has only one copy and has to work harder to survive. Wolverine could be captured easier than Multiple Man and then drowned; a form of death that Wolverines repair cannot help him out with. With this, it is hard to determine who would be the sure winner. However, my vote goes to Wolverine because why would anyone want to kill off Hugh Jackman?
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