Question: is it possible to have mutants like x-men???

Claire Shooter answered on 16 Jun 2014:

You’re talking about a lot of different mutants there – I’m going to have to break it down a bit (p.s. I love X-Men)…

Mutants can’t break the laws of physics:
This means no telekenisis
No Optic Blasts (inter-dimensional aperture or regular)
No controlling the weather
No Shapeshifting

Small mutations by themselves aren’t likely to have a huge effect on you. The most you can really hope for from nature is one gene working slightly better than it did before – the sort of thing that the X – Men have is usually too complex to come from random variations. HOWEVER if you wanted to add new genes that you had engineered yourself into your body there are some things that are within the realm of possibility. Scientists have recently made some headway with getting gene therapy to work safely and reliably. In gene therapy, people who have a disease caused by a genetic mutation are infected with a virus which, rather than containing nasty viral genes, actually contains replacement DNA for the genes they have which are missing or defective. You could use the same technology to make your own modifications if you wanted to, in a manner similar to that in the game BioShock (if you’ve played it), but they still can’t break the laws of physics!

X-Men powers you could theoretically acquire through gene therapy with enough time and pet scientists:
-Increased hairiness (clinical cases have been reported that may be caused by the activation of the gene SOX3)
-Blueness (adding a fluorescent protein into your skin cells)
-Increased intelligence (e.g. by increasing neuron density in your brain)
-Improved healing (e.g. by increasing stem cell division rates)
-Telepathy (ok, I’m getting a bit theoretical here, but if you could give yourself the same electrodetection capabilities as a shark and focus it enough perhaps you would be able to detect activity in other people’s brains! It might not be much better than fMRI, but who knows)
-Flight (ok, gliding…all you would need is flaps of skin extending from your wrists to your ankles like sugar gliders – I think that’s easy enough)
-Sonic scream
-Super hearing

The problem with gene therapy at the moment – which is why we aren’t using it more in medicine – is that we don’t have much control over where in the genome the new DNA is inserted: this means your new gene can end up bang in the middle of another really essential one and break it up: issues from this include cell death, genotoxicity and increased chance of developing cancer. Scientists are currently improving upon all these problems, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a spandex uniform just yet!