It's the little things.

[vakkotaur]

Ever read or watch a bit of fiction and it was all fine until a detail that could have been left out is put in and is wrong?

A while ago I was reading a story that involved cloning. The why it was needed was covered well enough. The results were covered well enough. That it worked was all a reader had to know. How it worked wasn't important - it would not have affected the plot one little bit to know how it worked.

The leap to workable cloning is fine. I can make that jump. It's not a big one anymore. The problem is that the explanation was wrong. Not wrong as in "I do cloning research and they missed *obscure thing* and instead used *wrong obscure thing.*" That I likely would not have even noticed. But when it was "...took the nucleus from a red blood cell from a blood sample..." *BZZZZT* The BS-flag gets set[1].

This isn't even high school biology. I am fairly certain I learned that red blood cells do not have nuclei in elementary school or at least during that time. "Red blood cells are so specialized that..."

That spoiled it. The author could have left it out and been fine. But instead the explanation screwed it up. I generally like explanations of how stuff works. I expect there to be leaps and omissions - if we knew exactly how to do it, it wouldn't be fiction - but I also expect the bits I could check up on to be right. Or at least be obscure enough that I wouldn't notice or would consider it an obscure mistake myself for the subjects of which I might have more detailed knowledge than average.

[1] Okkay, yes, technically red blood cells do have nuclei early in their existence. How likely would it be to find one intact in a simple blood sample? And would you want to use a nucleus that is known to go *poof*?

Comments

[jdm314.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I seem to recall that red blood cells have nuclei in reptiles... ;)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Okkay, I should have specified human cloning.

[jdm314.livejournal.com]

I guess most humans aren't reptiles.

Anyway, now you can see where all my Latin griping comes from. Fiction usually inserts Latin to show off anyway, so when they get it wrong it's just embarassing... and often they look like they aren't even trying to get it right.