With A Last Name Like “Lazarus,” Of Course He Was Going To Be A Mad Scientist

Ah, Doctor Who. That bastion of dubious science. As if it wasn’t bad enough that one of your episodes featured gamma radiation from a solar flare in the form of green lightning hitting the dark side of the Earth conducting DNA through a lightning rod, you follow it up with an episode that’s only moderately better.

In fact, although the writing of the episode itself isn’t bad and has a few characterization bright spots, other aspects of it almost read like a checklist of Doctor Who cliches:

A mad scientist (check) conducts an experiment on himself that would make the FDA’s experimental regulations weep (check) while the Tenth Doctor stands by and monologues about how lonely he is (CHECK) until the mad scientist turns into a giant monster (check) in the course of searching for a way to recapture his youth (check), causing everyone to run through corridors in inappropriate shoes (check).

However, today’s post is about the penultimate cliche, and it’s not one that’s only found in Doctor Who: The excessively rapid transformation.

The explanation given for Lazarus (the titular mad scientist)’s transformation will be mentioned in this post once and exactly once, because there is nothing to critique in something as clearly made up as it is: Apparently “hypersonic sound waves” create a “state of resonance” which “destabilize cell structure” leading to a “metagenic program to manipulate the coding in the protein strands,” or, as the Doctor helpfully sums up, “he hacked his own genes and instructed them to rejuvenate.”

To which I can only say: Sound is not cells are not proteins are not DNA. While it is some prime Doctor Who technobabble, it’s also like saying that the sky is blue because the shoes in the closet mean that the bakers can’t use their tire irons to do the samba. It is biological word salad at its finest.

In the ever-so-slightly more plausible portions of the episode, Lazarus’s DNA is constantly mutating and unstable.¹ This causes Lazarus to repeatedly change back and forth between his own body and a giant scorpion-ish thing:

There are two important things to note here:

1. This is all due to changes to his DNA. It’s explicitly stated, and even shown onscreen, that these changes are happening because his DNA is mutating. (Did you know that DNA testing could be done realtime? That’s because it can’t, but nobody tell the Doctor Who writers.) As his DNA changes, so does he, going from human to giant-scorpion-thing and back. However, that’s just pretty much impossible.
2. Just because alterations have been made your DNA does not mean that the changes will show immediately. There is an entire process (explained in a previous blog post) by which the genetic information in DNA is expressed as actual physical changes to a body, and it is not instantaneous.

But that’s not all. The explanation given for Lazarus’s change into a giant scorpion monster isn’t that the random fluctuations in his DNA somehow are providing that phenotype², but rather that the changes are due to “dormant genes in Lazarus’s DNA […] some option that evolution rejected for all you millions of years ago. But the potential is still there, locked away in your genes.”

Which is wrong on so many levels.

First of all, the implication (and only possible explanation) is that these dormant genes are in what’s colloquially known as “junk DNA” – DNA that is present in the human genome that doesn’t appear to code for anything. We have a lot of it, it’s true, but there are a few reasons that it can’t represent evolutionary dead ends.

1. Evolution is not a consciousness, nor a force, but a process. Evolution references the fact that living creatures that have genetic traits that help them live longer end up having more children who may carry that trait, who in turn live longer to have more children and pass the trait on, et cetera. This means that that particular trait becomes more and more prevalent, just because the creatures that have it live longer and have more children, eventually interbreeding with so many creatures that don’t have the trait and having offspring that do have it that everyone ends up having the trait. So having evolution “reject” certain genes is impossible, since evolution does not have a consciousness and thus cannot make decisions.
2. Evolution only works if the trait that’s becoming more prevalent helps people survive longer. That step where whoever has the trait that evolution is propagating isn’t optional, it’s what makes the process work. If the trait didn’t do anything at all, why would it spread? There’s nothing that makes it advantageous, and without being advantageous, there’s nothing that gives it the edge to become more prevalent. The whole point of the genes being woken up in Lazarus is that they had previously been dormant, and if they were dormant and didn’t do anything, then why the heck did they propagate at all and then suddenly turn off?
3. Pincers, eight legs, and the ability to strip the flesh from bones are pretty evolutionary advantageous traits. If these traits had been involved in evolution at all, there’s pretty much no way that they wouldn’t have been selected for – meaning we should still have them. It would be like if this all-knowing force of “evolution” decided, “You know what? Those opposable thumb things probably aren’t all that helpful. We don’t need those.” (Hint: It’s unlikely.)

All in all, The Lazarus Experiment isn’t the worst episode of Doctor Who when it comes to biology…but it’s definitely pretty bad.

¹ I said it was only slightly more plausible than the biological word salad, not that it was actually plausible.

² A phenotype is the physical traits that result from a given combination of genes (called the genotype).