Popular Mechanics talks – “Same Old Story”
Fringe - 102 Same Old Story | Posted by ScullyPopular Mechanics talks about the science of Episode 2…by S.E. Kramer
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Fringe Gets Fast Aging and Frozen Optics Wrong in Episode 2: Reality Check
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Last week after Fringe’s pilot episode, we debunked the show’s forays into junk science, from the idea that a toxin injected in one person could kill the entire population of an airplane in a matter of minutes, to the show’s insistence that it’s possible to interrogate dead people (within 6 hours after death, of course). This week, the show continued to perplex our experts with its creative explanations of neuroscience and superfast aging.
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Old baby
Can you turn from embryo to old man in a matter of hours?
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This week’s fringe science centered around a mysterious baby who had grown from a fertilized egg to an infant in less than an hour, and then from infant to old man to deceased in 4 hours. According to Dr. Walter Bishop, the show’s resident mad scientist, “Advanced rapid aging, like the disease called progeria, can be induced artificially by manipulating the pituitary gland.”
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Progeria, the disease to which Bishop refers, is real, but its timeline is nothing like the one posited in the show. Early-onset progeria is a rare genetic disease known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Children are born without symptoms (after the normal nine months of pregnancy) and are usually diagnosed at around 18 to 24 months, according to the Progeria Research Foundation. The children die at an average age of 13 years, usually from a stroke or heart attack caused by premature, progressive heart disease.
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Werner’s syndrome is sometimes called “adult-onset progeria.” With Werner’s, parents don’t notice anything wrong with the children until they become teenagers, according to Dr. George Martin, a professor of pathology and adjunct professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Though sufferers of Werner’s syndrome appear to “age” more quickly than normal adults, in fact, they have a “whole panorama of disorders that are similar to what happens with aging, but not identical,” Martin told PM yesterday. They tend to look old by the time they’re in their 30s and die in their 40s or 50s.
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In both cases, a mutated gene, not a manipulated pituitary gland, causes the disease. Werner’s syndrome is an inherited recessive trait, but Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome is not passed down in families. Instead, researchers believe that it’s caused by a chance mutation that occurs in a sperm or egg just before conception, according to the Mayo Clinic.
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Either way, Martin reassured us, “It’s not going to happen overnight.”
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Can you recover the last image a murder victim saw?
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A murder victim on the show is killed with an overdose of anesthetic. According to the show’s experts, because she was given a muscle relaxant, “The drug would have frozen her neural pathways at the moment of death and the last images she saw would be there.” With this in mind, the scientists borrow an “electronic pulse camera” from possibly evil corporation Massive Dynamics. The camera shines at the victim’s eyeball, which has been extracted from her but is still attached via the optic nerve. The special “laser-optic” hardware translates the frozen image—a bridge in Stoughton, Mass.—and projects it so that our detectives can find the killer.
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Dr. Mark Milstein, a neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at a major New York City hospital, finds this scenario laughable. “They seem awfully dependent on the use of anesthetics to explain their medical science,” he noted, remembering Fringe’s use of anesthetics last week (combined with LSD) for brain-wave sharing. Milstein explains, “the minute [an image] hits your retina it is no longer an image anymore. It becomes electrical information because that’s the language of the nerve. At that point there would be no way to retrieve it no matter how conscious or unconscious the patient was.”
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It would be great if we could understand how the brain transmits and stores images so we could read them, Milstein says, but right now it’s just not possible.