Ah, the crisp, crunchy, colorful feel of fall. The time of year when zombies can tilt their rotting faces towards the sky and sniff that delicious smell of damp, slightly decomposing leaves and living human flesh.
The idea of zombies has been around for centuries; the first mention of the undead in literature comes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story written in the 18th century B.C.E (1). Zombies have been mentioned in many sources of literature since then, including Lovecraft, Poe and Wells. Now, we have films and televisions dedicated to the living dead.
There are two kinds of zombies: those that are actually dead people who have been reanimated, and those that are governed by some kind of virus and made to be “brain dead” but still living flesh. From a scientist’s perspective, zombies that have been reanimated from death are an impossibility based on what we know about what causes something to be “alive”. The physiology of animals seems to cause electrical stimulation to mimic life after death, but it’s never enough to make something able to move on its own outside of actually being alive (2). Already, we can reject the idea that a dead person can be resurrected as a zombie without magic (Hey, this is a science column. Magic in this column doesn’t exist).
There are two kinds of zombies: those that are actually dead people who have been reanimated, and those that are governed by some kind of virus and made to be “brain dead” but still living flesh. From a scientist’s perspective, zombies that have been reanimated from death are an impossibility based on what we know about what causes something to be “alive”. The physiology of animals seems to cause electrical stimulation to mimic life after death, but it’s never enough to make something able to move on its own outside of actually being alive. Already, we can reject the idea that a dead person can be resurrected as a zombie without magic (Hey, this is a science column. Magic in this column doesn’t exist.).
What does this mean for zombie movies? It means I get fidgety and can’t focus on the movie itself if they do non-accurate archetypes of zombies. The only movie I’ve seen that comes close to being a PROPER zombie is 28 Days Later (The Walking Dead has some credibility, too). World War Z? RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW. It’s terrible. It made me want to yell at the producers and director to find a good consultant.
This led me to make a recipe for a zombie apocalypse at the most basic level.
Several requirements must be fulfilled in order to have a scientifically accurate zombie:
A proper zombie.
The infection process usually won’t be completely instant; it needs time to circulate and infest the brain tissue in order to control it. Realistically, the fastest incubation would likely be less than a day, but longer than a few hours. Think about it this way:
You’re introducing a small amount of a pathogen into the bloodstream. It needs time to replicate and disrupt normal functioning in a (comparatively) large host. The fastest time for one round of replication for one of the fastest replicating bacteria we know is about 12 minutes (3). Unless the original dose of infectant is a huge amount, it’s going to take a while to get enough stuff into your system to actually do damage.
Onset of symptoms from point of infection is a function of dose of infectant and the susceptibility of the host (i.e. if you have a compromised immune system it won’t take as long to turn you into a zombie, or if you have some drug in your system that combats the pathogen directly it would take longer).
END NOTE:
There are, in addition to this recipe, other things to consider. Are people naturally impervious to it? Does it affect certain types of people more? What does it change in the brain? How is it transmitted? What environmental factors make it easier to infect people? Does it affect animals in the same way? Designing a zombie pathogen is very difficult.
CITATIONS:
1. George, A.R. (1999) Trans. & edit. “The Epic of Gilgamesh”. Penguin Books.
2. Weisstein, E.W. (2002). “Galvani, Luigi (1737–1798)”. Eric Weisstein’s World of Scientific Biography. Wolfram Research.
3. Todar, K. (2008). “Growth of Bacterial Populations”. (Available at: http://textbookofbacteriology.net/growth_3.html.) Accessed October 27, 2013.
