Thought it was adamatium poisoning.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
In the movies Wolverine was suffering from adamantium poisoning, that inhibited his healing factor.
There's a scene in the movie where Logan sees a bunch of reports on Adamantium, and one of them is about cancer. My impression was that after decades it had reached a point where even his healing factor couldn't compensate for the stuff in his body constantly causing it.
I just googled though and it seems I was wrong. Online it just says "adamantium poisoning"
There's a scene in the movie where Logan sees a bunch of reports on Adamantium, and one of them is about cancer. My impression was that after decades it had reached a point where even his healing factor couldn't compensate for the stuff in his body constantly causing it.
I just googled though and it seems I was wrong. Online it just says "adamantium poisoning"
Well, in the movie, it is noted a couple times that the metal is poisoning him (like the scene where Caliban finds his adamatium bullet). Don't recall anything about cancer.
Except... if adamantium is indestructible, then how can any of its particles dissolve or leach into his tissues to poison him?
Does it have to? Maybe simply having the metal inside his body is toxic enough.
By acting as a catalyst for another agent ?
I felt bringing it up added something and that it could easily be done, so it was worth doing. Kirsten agreed, as did the others behind the scenes.
Oh, sure. As a reader, I appreciated that.
I've kind of figured this is possibly (in part) a reaction to the whole Eugenics Wars. The Federation has a severe fear of too much meddling with the natural progression of like. They seem to have drawn the line at surgical and pharmaceutical remdies for the most part, and the occasional mechanical heart (Picard) or prosthetic leg (Nog). The 23rd century also seems to have abandoned robotics for the most part for some reason.
It's totally implausible that they'd be so paranoid about something that happened 400 years earlier. That's not how it ever works. If there are initial problems or abuses from a new technology, then there may be initial fear of it, but eventually reforms and improvements and safeguards are put into place and it becomes accepted, if not by the original generation, then by one after it that grew up without such fears.
The problem is that the fictional universe has only been part of our existence for 50-odd years, so TOS isn't that far in the past from the perspective of the people writing the new shows. So they don't really think about how much more remote the 20th or 21st century would be to people living in the 23rd or 24th.
Not according to Discovery season 2, which showed Starfleet using drone fighters and also showed that Discovery has shipboard maintenance robots for both interior and exterior use. Which makes sense for me, since it's always kind of been implied that the ships' basic maintenance and cleaning are largely automated. I figure the maintenance drones usually only come out when nobody's around, which is why we never saw them before. (The scene where they appeared was late night in the mess hall with only one straggler still there.)
Yeah? Tell that to Julian Bashir.
Bashir is an imaginary creation of the real-life writers. What I'm saying is that the writers' decision to postulate that genetic engineering was outlawed in the 24th century because of the Eugenics Wars in the 20th was completely implausible and a bad idea to begin with. (It also contradicted earlier canon, because TNG: "Unnatural Selection" had shown a Federation science research project in human genetic engineering, and though some ethical questions were raised about it, it was clearly perfectly legal.)
Seem to recall the DSC Desperate Hours novel suggesting misuse of drones or similar technologies lead to restrictions in the future. There was also Daystrom and the M5. On the other hand, we never saw the full scope of sci-fi tech in the TOS era (even discounting retconned DSC drones from the TV show and the Enterprise War novel); no reason that they couldn't have had stuff off-camera. Heck, I'm more interested in what happened to the perfect polygraph computer from "Wolf in the Fold"; that thing would change the legal system from the bottom up, yet, it never comes up in relevant stories, like "Court Martial" (TOS) or "A Matter of Perspective" (TOS).
Was it the "only" reason, though? There also was the Augment crises from "Borderland," "Cold Station 12," and "The Augments" (ENT), where a gang of half-grown Augments nearly started the first Earth/Klingon war (and only two of them were shown to have any shreds of human decency). In the aftermath, Klingon scientists nearly wiped themselves out experimenting with Augment DNA to create their own supermen in "Affliction"/"Divergence" (ENT). Khan's own career as seen in both the prime and Kelvin timelines speaks for itself.
The genetically engineered people in "Unnatural Selection" (TNG) were shown to be required to live in isolation their entire lives due to the nature of their enhancements. "The Masterpiece Society" (TNG) showed the darker side of demanding genetic perfection in how babies were killed if they were not deemed to be up to code (as well as how people's lives were limited by the societal structure). "The Hunted" (DS9) showed enhanced soldiers from a non-Federation world who were unable to readjust to civilian life because of the experiments done on them. In DS9, we learn that Bashir is the anomaly and that most genetically resequenced people are not mentally well and unable to live on their own. Heck, even Cyrano Jones' effort to get genetically-engineered tribbles to sell caused huge problems beyond the scope of his intents in "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (TAS).
It may be be realistic for one instance to set a law, but with multiple instances over generations (many of then leading to battles, and loss of life), that would seem to be good reason to institute a ban on something that's repeatedly proving to not work and harm the test subjects.
Early installment weirdness? Beyond how it's unclear how that story fits with the bans we later saw in DS9 and ENT, the antipathy (to put it kindly) Picard showed for genetic engineering in "The Masterpiece Society" isn't seen.
In his recent Literary Treks interview, Greg Cox called that one out specifically as another never-again-seen TOS technology he'd like to take for a walk in a novel, though even in the discussion, the fact that it'd make crime/mystery plots impossible was brought up as the perfectly good reason it was never-again-seen. On the other hand, that just suggests there's a potential plot in whatever terrible flaw arose to eliminate the psychotricorder from use.
Didn't the episode establish that it only worked over the last 24 hours? If so, then any mystery plots should be fine, as long as the suspect wasn't apprehended within the first day of the crime.
In one of my early novels, I alluded to android assassins being used in WWIII and prompting a subsequent ban on android development (such as Project Questor from The Questor Tapes, which I still choose to believe took place in the Trek universe). Also, the Ware narrative in Rise of the Federation Books 3-4 addresses why we don't see more robotic/AI technology in the UFP, since (as I mentioned before) I realized it was implausible that such restrictions would last centuries after the events that provoked them, at least without some kind of reinforcing events in the interim.
I actually allude to that briefly in the upcoming The Higher Frontier.
Yes, I choose to believe that's why the ban still exists, because of such reinforcing incidents.
But again, rationalizing something in-universe is a separate conversation from critiquing the original real-world decision to include it in the story. Obviously fans and later writers can rationalize any bad idea, but we wouldn't have to if the writers hadn't used that bad idea in the first place.
Beside the point. The point is that the episode treated it as legal at the time, and it was well after Julian Bashir's birth. So DS9's claim that it's been consistently illegal for 400 years is a contradiction.
Not a Federation planet, so the Federation's laws don't apply. Besides, it's possible to modify a fetus's genes in utero, so it's hardly necessary to terminate an "undesirable" one; that was just a straw man the episode threw in to paint their approach as bad, and it would be absurd to claim that it's the only way anyone could ever do it. That's why you can't treat works of fiction designed to stack the deck against something as objective evidence regarding its worth.
Not the same thing as germline genetic engineering, so not relevant to the conversation.
Besides, you can always cherrypick the bad examples to argue against something (especially in fiction, which tends to focus disproportionately on bad examples to generate plots), but that doesn't mean there aren't positive benefits too. You could cite all the times fires have burned down houses and killed people to argue that fire should be outlawed, but that would be ignoring all the good stuff fire does, like cooking and smelting metals and making civilization possible in the first place.
This is why DS9's idea that the Federation would outlaw genetic engineering is so stupid and contrary to Trek's general optimism about progress and innovation. It's grossly irresponsible to outlaw a technology altogether because of a few abuses or mistakes, because that's rejecting the good it can do along with the bad. In real life, new technologies don't get banned forever because of early misuse, they get improved and regulated so that society can benefit from the good and minimize the harm.
I figure the reason DS9 belatedly invented the idea of such a ban was to rationalize why the Trek universe was still stuck in a 1960s assumption that humans in the future would be no different from humans in the present, while science fiction as a whole was embracing transhumanism and the idea that humans would inevitably enhance ourselves with genetics, bionics, etc. They had to come up with an excuse for why their version of the future was so backward about transhumanism compared to the rest of the SF field. But it wasn't a very convincing excuse.
I figured that it was illegal on Earth (United Earth), but not in the Federation at large or on other Federation planets (Denobula, Arcturus). Richard Bashir, Stamets, and the Jack Pack all appear to be Earth citizens, and Bashir isn't even punished for the crime his father committed (or, oddly, concealing it for many years).
The problem wasn't that he would be 'punished' per se. But that he wouldn't have been allowed to serve in Starfleet as an officer if they knew he was genetically engineered. That was why he had to conceal it.
There are tonnes of cultural attitudes and laws arising from them in the present day which are based on outdated morals and/or events from centuries (if not millennia) ago. I find the idea of those (over)reactions continuing into the future to be extremely believable, and such a quirk in Federation law makes that society feel more plausible to me.