Someone ask for a blood or tissue sample?
One of his friends even is a biologist, it should at least occur to him that the only way to prove the outlandish tale is through scientific examination of John and his tissues which should at the least show abnormal telemeres in his cells.
This bugged me, because John should himself have become curious and started investigations with the advent of biotechnology.
Arrgh damn short edit timeout.
When the one teacher professes love to John he tells her that her and any children they might have will age and die and he will still be there.
How does he know this? About the children I mean, has he actually fathered children?(seems hard to believe he didn’t) And hell jerk off in a cup John and leave it with the biologist, yea gross but shut up!
What frustrated me about this “sci-fi” is how little science was present.
Kinda missing the point of the movie, which was a theoretical exploration and so it had to maintain some mystery (until the end, anyway). He was leaving and wouldn’t give them one if they asked, anyway.
Another complaint I’ve seen is why didn’t they ask him to speak ancient languages. How would they verify it? And a lot of mental faculties are use it or lose it. Would he remember anything but the most basic words after not speaking it for hundreds of years?
I would ask him lots of little details about daily life just out of sheer curiosity, but that probably wouldn’t be too entertaining for general audiences. It’s understandable why they stuck to the big concepts.
John refuses to go himself to a lab and become a lab rat, but blood or semen seem fair game. Hell come his former residence for some hair or dead skin etc.
John rattles off the diseases he can remember having and he recovered from all of them, would the antibodies not be in his blood? I mean that would itself go a long way to legitimizing his story, not impossible but improbable for a 35 year old US resident teacher to have all those antibodies(smallpox especially).
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How does he know this? About the children I mean, has he actually fathered children?
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Just using Wikipedia to confirm what i thought: John mentions some of the punning pseudonyms he gave himself over the years, such as… [a] pseudonym, used over sixty years ago while he was a chemistry professor at Harvard: John Thomas Partee (as in John T. Party of Boston). Will is startled, since this was his father’s name. Shocked and over-excited by the realization that the ageless man with him is actually his own father, Will suffers a heart attack and dies. After Will’s body has been taken away, Sandy notes that John seems especially moved by this death. John promises to return in order to attend his son’s funeral. Sandy realizes that this is the first time John has seen one of his grown children die."
Does he actually say that this is why he is immortal? If not then why assume they would exist? He heals all macroscopic damage flawlessly, so why not assume that he is likewise unchanging at a microscopic level?
Firstly antibodies don’t last forever eve in normal people. That’s why it’s often recommended for people over 40 working with people with measles and other contagious diseases to get a booster vaccine. If your body isn’t regularly infected with the real disease, the antibodies fade after a few decades.
Secondly, anybody vaccinated for a disease will carry the antibodies. So all that the antibodies for smallpox will prove is that he was vaccinated (or contracted cowpox).
And finally, he’s a superman. He may not have a normal immune system.
Asking him to read cuneiform, for example, would be something that could be readily confirmed. While a character in the movie says that this could be just something that he learned from books, there are numerous “mysteries” in ancient languages that a native speaker could solve and the answer could be confirmed. As an analogy, if someone from today were asked in 1, 000 years to explain what “LOL” meant because nobody can work it out, the answer would be easy to give, and easily confirmed from context. Ancient languages are just as full of odd constructions that are not answered n books, and that could be easily proved.
It’s impossible to say, but he demonstrably remembers details of life from millennia ago with the same clarity that I remember detail from 20 years ago. So while asking him to translate languages may not work, asking him to explain intricate details daily life would be trivial.
Nobody who is just “widely read” would be able to accurately answer questions like:
“When did cloth shoelaces become commonplace in England”
“What was a typical breakfast for a Brahmin in Calcutta in July, 1550, and was it the same as a typical breakfast in 1750 and if not how?”
“How often did Sumerian craftsmen pay their taxes and to whom”
“What device was used for producing three dimensional molecular models in 1935, when did it become obsolete, and why was its use discontinued”.
Those are all the sorts of questions that he should be able to answer effortlessly based on the knowledge he claims in his tales, people with PHD level expertise in those fields would be able to come up with them offhand, but even the most elaborate hoaxer wouldn’t be able to research and memorise enough to be able to answer those sorts of questions about multiple time periods and cultures. This also neatly sidesteps his excuse that he can only synthesise knowledge in modern form after he gains modern knowledge. He doesn’t need modern context to simply remember how he tied his shoes at certain points in his life.
This was, to me, the weakest part of the plot. His audience included half a dozen PhDs, and he claimed to have expert knowledge in all their fields. But no hoaxer could actually *have *the knowledge of 6 PhDs in diverse fields, or even a fraction of it. I could come up with dozens of questions of the top of my head that anyone who actually lived here 10, 000 years would have to know the answer to, but that nobody without a PhD in my field would have any real chance of knowing. If 5 other people with PhDs in arts, history, chemistry and so forth all did the same thing then it would prove that he really did have that depth of knowledge. While it wouldn’t prove his story, it would prove that he was a superhuman genius and not a common prankster.
Ok I totally misunderstood that scene, I thought he realized John was his teacher and that was why he had the heart attack and John was going to go to the funeral of his student! In my defense I have a kid and I intently watched the beginning of the film where twice the subject of kids comes up and both times John gives a vague answer.
I’m not a biologist and the first place I’d start investigating John’s cells is his telomeres which limit cell division. I can’t recall if the movie stated it but when John says he does not scar did he mean he heals at a normal rate?
No one ever asked him directly either whether he ever had an unsurvivable by normal human injury.