Folks,

Is there someplace in canon that tells us Clark's blood, DNA and so forth, are visibly different from a Human's?

I'm not talking fanfic or what seems "reasonable" to whoever I mean does the show ever come right out and say so?

I would expect Lois & Clark to worry about it but do we have someone like Dr. Klein on record somewhere?

Thanks

Patrick

In Chip Off The Old Clark, when Klein is taking DNA's samples from Superman for a paternity test, we get:

In Shadow of a Doubt, we get:

and

Now, the script we have for SoaD seems to have several versions of that scene, so I'm not sure which is the one that actually aired. But I am fairly sure that some comment was made along these lines in that particular episode.

Running out of computer time here, but I'd also suggest checking out the scripts/episodes of Voice From The Past and The Family Hour - which will probably have similar dialogue.

LabRat

In a couple of different episodes we see Superman bleed from injuries and the blood always looks like ours so visibly different no.

Well, there's also the concept that Klein could well have been working off of some of his own assumptions for Clark's biology being vastly different in some of his early statements.

In Voice from the Past, Klein says the results of his initial tests on Superman's possible fertility looked promising - which would indicate very human-like DNA

Although the events of The Family Hour would overtake those of VftP and would seem to suggest that Klein's optimism on that score was premature.

LabRat

I assume you mean the events at the beginning of the ep, LabRat, when Klein tells them they are incompatible... because at the *end* of the ep, they receive a baby wrapped in a Superman blanket with a note that says he is "theirs". Now of course we have NO CONFIRMATION for SURE where this baby came from (H.G. Wells? The Future? What? Ahhhh, makes for fun fanfic <g>) but it seems to allude to the fact that they can have children and are compatible (as does the fact that Wells told them in Tempus Fugitive that Superman's decendents founded Utopia.) <g>

-- DJ <who loves speculation>

But Klein's earlier pessimism (in CotOC) may also have been premature. There he was going on about how 'obviously' Superman's DNA was more complex than a human's.

So I would say the field is completely open as so exactly how 'human' Clark is. His blood is red.

And somewhere in ''Family Hour'' Sam Lane says, while he's looking through Dr. Klein's files, that something wasn't right. So Clark probably wasn't so different. And as DJ and H.G Wells said, Utopia was founded by Superman's decendents

-camy

At one LAFF, Tim Minear came by and talked to us during the banquet. He mentioned, among a lot of other things, that the baby was supposed to be a super powered descendent of Lois and Clark's. Since that was about as straight from the horse's mouth as you can get, I think you can make whatever assumptions you like about Superman's DNA. I suspect that Dr. Lane's remark in The Family Hour -- "This can't be right" -- might have been an initial laying of the ground work for that.

In any case, they were never clear about what Dr. Klein actually found. He suspected -- without seeing, apparently -- that Superman's DNA was a lot more complex than a human's, but later he said that the results looked promising. They would probably have had some kind of explanation for the negative results in the next season if there had been one -- tampering by Tempus, maybe. I'd think that, if you wanted to, you could say that Superman's DNA was pretty human with only a few minor differences that apparently give him the ability to absorb sunlight and thereby produce the super powers. That's something they tell you in writing science fiction these days -- don't explain too much. Nobody is really interested in how some piece of advanced technology works. All they really want is to know that it *does* work. I think you could say the same about Superman's DNA. Is it compatible with a human's? Well, Tim Minear inferred it was, so it couldn't be *too* different from ours.

Nan