Medicine – How Science Fiction Failed Us

June 28, 2010 - By Phineas Delgado

As I was writing last week’s article and the one before it, I started thinking about all those future space men (and women) who would invariably end up injured in these epic battles. Most of the time, we only see the odd flying body and seemingly dead Stormtrooper or Borg Drone, but that many people don’t even die in modern combat.

In fact, even with today’s warfare, a combatant is far more likely to get injured than killed outright (although, sadly, injuries are often grave enough to cause death if not treated properly and immediately – something I know from experience). So what happens when you only get grazed, or if you get a case of the Interstellar Sniffles? We’ll explore that, and more, as we talk about – Medicine.

Most of us are familiar with the scene in Star Wars where Luke is floating in the Bacta Tank after his run in with the very hungry and ill-tempered Wampa. What is Bacta, you ask? Well… it’s the stuff that was in the tank in which Luke was floating in Empire. OK, poor answer I know, so I took the liberty of looking it up for you.

Apparently, Bacta is a combination of benevolent bacteria and a gel-like clear compound that tastes sickly-sweet. It promotes rapid cell regeneration without scarring, but can’t grow back limbs (unless it is part of your physiology to do so) and presumably can’t replace dead tissue (which is why Darth Vader was made into a machine and not dropped in a bacta tank… I guess). Forget Bayer, bacta is really the wonder drug that works wonders, to the point that the science and art of conventional medicine was practically lost to them. There are no doctors to speak of in the Star Wars Universe, with most medical needs being tended to by droids. It’s possible (and I would say likely), that Padme would have survived childbirth had she gone to Cincinnati Good Samaritan Hospital and not… well… wherever she was.

Star Trek takes things to the opposite level (again…) by taking our existing technologies and making some logical assumptions about what we can expect in the future (given their Utopia actually gets around to being made). The perfect example (for comparison to our medical technology) is the scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Chekov is in the Operating Room because he is suffering an epidural hematoma caused by a torn Meningeal Artery. The 1986 solution for this is to drill a hole in the patient’s head to relieve the pressure, and then examine the brain afterward. Needless to say, Bones thought this was barbaric and used a gadget from the 23^rd century to repair the damage and rescue Chekov.

The advancements in medicine seem to make sense, in Trek, in so far as the treatment methods are identifiable to us. Hypospray is clearly a step up from syringe injections (and as anybody who’s been through basic training can tell you, we already have similar technology in place today). And their real-time virtual monitoring of vital signs (meaning they don’t have to connect anything to you) isn’t far-fetched considering how far MRI and CT Scan technology has come in recent years.

So you’re probably wondering how I think Science Fiction failed us in regards to medicine. That’s a question best suited to my closest friend on this planet: @cmaaarr. As a doctor specializing in Infectious Diseases at one of the nation’s best teaching hospitals, he has for more information and access to information on the current state of medical technology. However, since he is busy and currently unavailable for comment, you’ll have to settle for my opinion.

If Sci-Fi has failed us it’s in that it only presents the extremes. As much as I love Star Trek I’ve never viewed it as being realistic, so it makes me a bit sad when it approached medicine in a far more realistic way than other franchises. In fact, most of the time, Sci-Fi chooses to make medicine, or more accurately, the medical profession, the cause of some horrific accident involving a super virus, or worse, the genetic manipulation of something or someone (which we’ve already covered previously). Medicine, or rather who has access to it, is a major point of contention for many people around the world, particularly those of us in the States. I won’t use this article as a platform for any party’s ideals, or even my own, but suffice it to say that I think money is holding us back.

If you look at some of the more popular Sci-Fi delvings into the world of medicine, we’ll find stories like the film adaptation of I am Legend in which the measles virus is mutated to cure cancer, but then further mutates into a people killing machine. A similar story is told in 28 Days Later where a man-made virus, called “Rage”, was accidentally spread to people after a botched attempt to free laboratory animals.

Even in our favorite future, the one populated by gunslinging Browncoats and the morally-challenged Alliance, there was medical manipulation. Joss Whedon once commented about his vision of the future, stating that nothing was different, the technology was more advanced, but the people suffered the same moral and ethical dilemas that we face today. So it’s easy to see why the only existing superpower would want passive colonists, and why they would cover up their failure (which resulted in the Reavers, the cannibalistic scourge of the outlying colonies). At least in Whedon’s ‘verse, there were doctors practicing legitimate medicine with limited tools and a failure rate likely similar to modern medicine (in Trek most maladies had a cure, even if it was difficult to get – and if a cure wasn’t available, a workaround usually was, like in the case of Picard’s Shalaft’s Syndrome).

I suppose what I want from my Science Fiction is less moral application and more development. What I mean is that invariably, any science that manipulates genes or viruses is presented as inherently wrong in most Sci-Fi, while the medical profession itself is often cast in a negative light, with a few notable exceptions who, conversely, are nearly legendary in their abilities or morals. There is nothing about Leonard McCoy that describes him as being anything but average (aside from his assignment to the Enterprise), but we will always view him in the same light we cast all our Trek heroes; one of heroic infallibility. In fact, the only chink we ever saw in that armor was presented in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Sybock, the rogue Vulcan, made Bones face his pain, which seemed to revolve around the death of Bones’ father. It seems the elder McCoy suffered from a malady that was, at the time, uncurable and caused great pain. Bones allowed his father to die only to learn that a cure was discovered a very short time later. The same could be applied to Beverly Crusher and Julian Bashir, as well. The fact is that most of the medical advancements made in Sci-Fi couldn’t have been achieved without mapping the genome and manipulating it, and I would wager that stem cells were involved at some point.

I suppose in the end the real question is this: If they could turn a banana clip into sight-giving apparatus for the blind, why the heck couldn’t they cure baldness? Seriously…