I realize that the science behind shrinking people doesn't work out, but what I'm wondering is if they got anything wrong when it comes to the human body? Or if anything has changed in what we know about the human body since this movie came out?
shareNo. Our anatomy remains unchanged from the last century.
shareOur physiology remains unchanged too. Someone wrote in the trivia section that parts of this movie were used as teaching tools on medical schools as late as the 1980's. I doubt that, we had models, detailed illustrations and videotapes. I started med school in 1976 and our library was stocked with VCR's and tapes.
shareThe depiction of antibodies appears to be not remotely like true antibodies, not in how they are produced or how they react against antigens. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist, but the sequence looked suspicious based on what I do not. A Google search quickly led me to a youtube presentation that explained antibody vs. antigen behavior and the voice over included a reminder of how antibodies are made. As well as I can remember, at least some of this knowledge of antibodies goes back to before 1966. Also, the sub's crew members were said to be about the size of a bacterium. Bacteria are much larger than antigens and would be attacked by lymphocytes rather than antibodies.
I am sure that isn't the only medical inaccuracy, but it is one that I recognized with a very minimal knowledge human biology.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
I would think that a journey from the bloodstream to a tear-duct exit would be impossible.
shareIn the way blood arteries are represented : not enough red.
shareHow much time had elapsed between the important scientist's stroke and the time the miniaturized vessel managed to destroy the blood clot in his brain with lasers? And did the lasers poke holes in the wall of the blood vessel as they destroyed the clot, which would cause an intracranial hemorrhage and more brain damage?
Now that we have "clot buster" drugs that destroy exactly the sort of clot as is shown in the movie, the timing of these things is very well understood. The sooner the clot is destroyed the more brain cells in the affected area can be saved, the film made it look like [clot = death] and [clotbusting = everything being okay], but in fact that if the scientist lived he'd probably lose certain brain functions. Who knows if those functions were the ones that the US government wanted, but that wasn't important to the filmmakers, it was all about the adventure of going in!
And speaking of going in... why was it light inside the body, particularly inside the skull? It's got to be pitch dark in there, but I suppose that having all the floating blood cells lit by the ship's floodlights was beyond the power of the special effects department.
It's been ages since I've seen the film, but didn't they slow his physiology waaaaaay down with some sci-fi medical stuff so that his heart beat wouldn't collapse the Proteus? Wasn't that also to buy time for the clot? Or is it conceivable that it could be?
shareIt's been a while, but I thought they only slowed down the heart for a few seconds, or maybe a minute or two. Wasn't it pumping away like normal for most of the time they were in there?
But really, I don't that anyone on Earth understood the whole "time is brain" equation then, not even top neuroscientists, and nobody understood how that knowledge would affect the actions of the mini sub crew. Nothing could be done about strokes in the 1960s, but if they ever remake the movie...
Ah, you're right; they just slowed him down while they entered a specific area. Thanks for the memory-jog!
We can always assume that if they had miniaturization tech, they might have had a way to slow down (though obviously not stop) the guy's deterioration.
You might want to check out the book sometime. They gave Isaac Asimov the script and asked him to write the novelization. He corrected the scientific mistakes he found.
shareWell, I'm sure he corrected some of them. I've pointed out some of the medical mistakes, but what about the violations of the laws of physics? Sure a white blood cell eats the ship, but that doesn't mean that all its mass has somehow ceased to exist. When the timer ran out, the digested ship was still inside the guy's skull, and it should have expanded, exploding the guy's skull, and any killed human within a radius the size of a submarine.
It's been several decades since I read that book, but I don't recall any discussion of that little point.
It's been years since I read the book also. Asimov took the project on the condition that he could "fix" the science. I honestly don't remember everything he did with it. But he did address that particular point. Grant attacked the corpuscle with the sub in it so it would come after him. Therefore they were able to get the ship out as well as the divers.
shareGood for Isaac!
Because yeah, that point has bothered me for decades.
There are a few parts they got wrong in the film, but it doesn't really take away from the experience.
-For one thing, the inside of an alveolus does not look like a big, pink, jungle like room. From what I've seen of medical artwork, it should have resembled the inside of a balloon. I also don't think the wind of breathing would sound exactly like what we heard in the movie. It sounded like a very high-pitched, stock sound of hurricane wind someone got out of a sound library. The problem is, we have no real-world reference to go by, so there's nothing to compare it to.
- For another, they didn't really show the differential pressure problems of cutting into the outer walls of the alveolar sac like the characters had in the book.
- When Cora was knocked away by the sound waves in the inner ear, she didn't actually get tangled in the ear fibers in the book. Instead, she went splat upside down into one of them, and Grant had to pull her out.
- They made the antibodies look much bigger on a microscopic level than they actually are. Antibodies are so tiny, that even on a microscopic level they are considered almost invisible. In fact, in the movie, they made them resemble platelets more so than what they actually were. Asimov was more accurate in his book in describing them as "like fruit flies," tiny little particles that latched onto outside invaders and strangled them to death. They were accurate, however, in the antibodies' behavior.
- Some microbiologist did point out that scaling was a problem throughout the story, but frankly, it would be very difficult to do it right, even on paper, never mind a film. They suggested that trying to swim along the optic nerve at a microscopic level would be like trying to swim thousands of miles across the ocean, and the main characters didn't have time to do that because they were growing back to normal size again.
There is more, but I think we've covered the major areas.
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