If the answer is yes, science may be bringing you one step closer to realizing your long sought out dream. This past week, the highly anticipated trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released (eek, I am beyond excited). Throughout this whole frantic craze for superheroes, I have continuously wondered how realistic the reality of superheroes can be. Can anyone actually build Iron Man’s suit? What about genetically engineering a radioactive spider? And how about Captain America’s “super serum”? The answer, my superhero patriots, lies within science.
I was reading an interesting post on the science of superpowers. Through this article, I began to think about how the science realm can influence the realization of superpowers. Just last year, Dr. Ehab Abouheif and his team of scientists injected a hormonal treatment on regular ants to mimic the effects of a “supersoldier”mutation present in other species of ants. Within an ant colony, each ant has a caste/role to play. Some ants are provided enhanced traits to fulfill their specific castes. These traits are inherent, thus, scientists desired to inject the hormonal variety in ordinary ants. The hormonal injection was successfully injected into two “plain-Jane” ants to create supersoldiers.
Further development in these types of “super-injections” arises in Columbus, Ohio. Brian Kaspar, a biologist from the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital has realized the potential of turning a seemingly “scrawny” organism to transform into a buff, fighting machine. Maybe not so much the fighting machine part, nonetheless, Kaspar has developed an injection that would use a protein called follistatin. Follistatin eliminates myostatin, a gene that is responsible for hindering the growth of muscles. This would allow muscles in an organism to become larger by halting any opposing biological force. After six weeks of injecting the follistatin to stop the production of myostatin, muscles were found to be presumably greater. Dr. Kaspar hopes to hold trials for humans very soon.
With such technological breeches occurring, it may be in the imminent future that mankind sees “superserums” appearing steadfastly in the world. But the real question is, would you take this sort of serum? In the words of Steve Rogers, “Before I became Captain America…I was a civilian and I suppose there’s still a part of me that wants to enjoy the liberties I fight for in that same way…just like any other man.”