The third installment in the popular Iron Man film series is a perfect summer action flick that leaves you excited and chuckling. Unfortunately, although the movie takes place in 2013, we don’t currently have a Tony Stark to single-handedly innovate extraordinary new devices for our world. But our future doesn’t really need his movie magic. Warning: plot spoilers below.
One of the reasons that Iron Man is such a popular superhero is that, like Batman, Tony Stark is a normal man. He is flesh and blood. It is his intelligence that allows him to build his extremely advanced suit. This suit is the fictional sum of seemingly every piece of advanced exoskeleton technology that exists in reality.
The iron exoskeleton Stark uses is equipped with super-strength and super-speed. In our reality, a Japanese company, Cyberdyne, working with Tsukuba Unversity, has developed an exoskeleton called HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) to help the elderly or disabled walk and lift things. The HAL technology has been supplied to over 150 hospitals on lease for $1950 a month, but if the speed and strength of the exoskeleton can become superhuman, a non-fictional Iron Man could take shape. Just like the fictional suit, HAL is battery powered and can be charged constantly for the patient … or for the superhero.
In the flashback scene (circa 1999) that opens the new film, a plant, owned by a highly intelligent botanist, regenerates a broken branch. Over the course of 13 years, this bioengineering technology is developed and applied to humans with missing limbs, including the film’s villain, Dr. Aldrich Killian. If the subject’s body accepts the injection of the fluid, the missing limb will grow back as an ashy, fiery protrusion and then a real limb in a matter of seconds.
However, the heat involved in the film’s process renders the regrowth on the human body completely impossible in the real world. If the bio-technology was to be realistic, the law of conservation of mass would be obeyed. The process of re-growing limbs would more likely mirror the process of a lizard growing its tail back. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Germany studied the regeneration codes in the DNA of the red-spotted newt in an attempt to discover the “genetic switch” that would activate the ability to regrow lost limbs in humans. Some research on stem cells has a similar goal.
Of course, the issue of ethics will always arise. At what point does an improvement of the human body become superhuman? When should research be stopped? For now, maybe it is better to imitate the genius mechanic who uses old cell phones and batteries to create an extremely dangerous exoskeleton, rather than the pretty botanist trying to correct the “common mistakes” in DNA. Or, of course, leave it in the realm of Hollywood.
