Science goes to the movies

While reminiscing about his childhood version of Spider-Man, Russ Swan asks what type of spider would modern-day Peter Parker be bitten by

You know you’re getting old when a favourite fictional character from your youth reappears in a new movie franchise, superseding the earlier movies that you still think of as novel. I’ve lost track of the number of Superman and Batman reboots that have taken place in the last few years, but notice with alarm that my own childhood favourite Spider-Man is now on his second generation of big-screen outings.

Spidey should be of special relevance to all of us in the laboratory, because he is of course the product of mad science.  What is especially interesting is that the nature of that mad science has – to a degree – evolved with him.

In my youth (indulge an old man for a few moments), the thing that scared the living bejeezuz out of us was the Cold War and the constant threat of global thermonuclear apocalypse. In that era, the young Peter Parker was messing about in the laboratory when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and consequently developed his unnatural but very cool spider-like capabilities.

Fast-forward to the first reboot of the comic-book superhero, just ten years ago, and consider the single most significant change to the basic plotline. In the early 21st century, post-Iron Curtain, post-Chernobyl, but pre-Fukushima, people were no longer so worried about radioactivity and had instead turned to newer areas of science to be afraid of. This time, our teenage hero was bitten by a genetically-modified spider.

I think social scientists of the future will look back on this change as a major indicator of the way we adapt our bogeymen to suit our circumstances.

So I’m disappointed to see that the latest reboot of the franchise has not continued the trend. In the newest movie (which I haven’t yet seen but am reliably informed by a knowledgeable six year-old includes not enough action and too much kissing), the beast that delivers the crucial bite remains a GM spider. Not to be confused with a GM Spyder, which is a sort of car.

Had the film makers been keeping their eye on the development of mad science bogeymen, they would of course have made the accident take place in a nanotechnology laboratory. Perhaps, instead of a spider bite, Parker could have been injected with nanospiders which multiply in his bloodstream to turn him into a kind of nano-human-cyborg hybrid.

I like to think of these nanospiders as ‘spider-mites’, but perhaps that term has been saved for any offspring our webhead hero eventually spawns with Mary-Jane.

Would the web-spinner develop new powers as a result of his infusion of nanotechnology? How about the ability to turn targets of his spinnerets into the infamous grey goo, especially if those targets just happened to be identifiable as anti-science bigots? Peter Parker was, after all, the nerdy schoolkid who suffered at the hands of bullies and spent his free time in the lab – and which of us hasn’t been there?

That’s what should have happened with this version of the story, but it’s too late to worry about it now. Given that the life-cycle of Hollywood genres is getting shorter and shorter, it’s probably time to think about the next iteration, and maybe even the one after that.

Now, unless you’re working on something in your own laboratory that none of us know about and which has even more bogeyman potential (do write in and let us know), it seems to me that the next candidate for scary movie stardom is synthetic biology.

Although not yet ingrained in the public consciousness as the Next Great Thing To Be Scared Of, that status can surely only be an outspoken but ill-informed comment from an archbishop and a Daily Mail headline away. Synthetic biology has it all: its genetic modification taken to the level of whole organisms, it’s the unholy progeny of nanotech and biotech, and it even has the potential to incorporate radioactive stem cells. From Mars.

Should anybody from the Hollywood studios be watching, my services as a script consultant are available at reasonable rates.

One final thought. If the original comic book character existed in real time, he and MJ would be parents and quite possibly grandparents by now. Given that spiders have their babies in batches of a few hundred at a time, we then have the makings of whole new franchise: Plague of the Spider-People (or, perhaps, of the Synthe-Spider-People). And that would take us right back to where we started, with mid-20th century Cold War paranoia and the imagined threats of things that we simply didn’t understand.