(thunder)
- Batman may be the vengeance in the night and all,
but maybe more importantly,
he's also the world's greatest detective
who knows that sometimes you have to use logic and science
in order to understand your enemies,
both inside and out.
So, what disease does the Joker have?
Let's get technical.
To the Kyle computer!
(upbeat music)
There have obviously been many iterations
of the clown prince of crime over the years,
so if we wanna be good detectives and answer this question,
we need to come up with a consistent symptomology
across all Jokers.
Alfred, access the database.
- [Alfred] Right away, Master Kyle.
- The Joker is obviously homicidal.
He is frequently overcome with uncontrollable
bouts of laughter, and he has little regard
for the wellbeing of other human beings.
These are consistent psychological symptoms
that must have some neurological underpinnings in his brain.
I was supposed to be g...
Now, most of the time on this program
we piece together pop culture and science
to try to come to an acceptable conclusion for each.
But in this particular case,
Batman being the great detective that he is,
has already done a lot of the work for us.
You were s...
Ah.
In one of the entries in the fantastic
Arkham series of video games,
more specifically Arkham Knight,
Batman is fighting to contain a transmissible pathogen
that turns people into Jokers,
a Joker disease if you will.
And in that game he identifies it
as a mutated form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
And he's not just making these words up either.
This is a very real disease that is no laughing matter.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD,
is a degenerative brain disease similar to Alzheimer's.
It is transmissible, incurable, and 100% fatal.
The malady affects about one in a million people
across the globe each year,
and the Arkham games must have done their research,
because when you look into CJD symptoms
it starts to kinda fit with Joker pathology.
The progression of the disease involves
changes in personality, changes in walking
or gate and movement, possible psychosis,
hallucinations, and paranoia.
It all starts to sound maybe plausible.
And CJD can cause such changes to personality and mind
because of what it does to the brain.
To the Kyle radiography lab!
That's not catchy!
CJD is one of less than 10 diseases affecting humans
that we term transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,
or TSE.
Transmissible because you can get them
from infected tissue or bodily fluids.
Encephalopathy because it affects your brain.
And spongiform because of what these diseases
physically do to the brain.
I'm about to show you some brain scans,
and they're not graphic, but just in case you
do not want to see any kind of medical anything,
these are just MRI shots, I am warning you right now.
Okay, so here are some brain scans.
The brain on the left is from a normal patient
and the brain on the right has CJD.
You can immediately tell that something is off.
So let's look closer into the tissue itself.
You can see normal tissue on the top in this scan now,
and on the bottom it looks like the brain tissue
has holes in it, and it does.
TSEs form holes in the brain, and holes in the brain,
giving it a sponge-like appearance, spongiform,
may start to explain Joker behavior.
Oh.
Oh, this flower probably smells lovely.
Ah!
I've been had!
But CJD isn't caused by falling into a vat of chemicals
or being Jared Leto.
It's not caused by any fungus, parasite, virus or bacteria.
No, Joker disease might be caused by prions.
The word prion is a portmanteau of protein and infection.
And what makes prions so unique
is that unlike bacteria, viruses, parasites,
things that you could consider alive,
prions are lifeless and almost indestructible.
Proteins like this squiggly boy here
are large molecules made out of amino acids,
according to the genetic instructions you hold
in every single one of your cells.
And proteins are involved in just about
everything your body does.
For example, this one is found on
the outside surface of your cells.
Now we don't know exactly why it happens yet,
but every so often a protein like this can misfold.
You can see that its three dimensional shape
will change rather significantly,
and this seems like it could be harmless,
but the really scary thing is is that
just this simple molecular mistake
can make this protein mimic a deadly infection.
Just like how the Joker can master others with his madness,
prions can cause other proteins to misfold
in exactly the same way when they interact.
We're not sure how every prion process happens,
but basically something like this happens.
A normal protein will come into contact with a prion,
and similarly misfold.
These misfolded proteins will then
tend to stick together as more and more
normal proteins come into contact with them.
Eventually you have a big clump of prion protein
that then somehow, we're now sure exactly
what causes it to do this,
it splits off into other infectious seeds
that go on to make more and more prions.
This exponentially increasing infection
can literally lead to large clumps
of prion protein called amyloids,
forming in and around a person's cells,
like these brain cells here,
which can cause cell damage and cell death.
And if all that wasn't bad enough,
these amyloids are extremely resistant
to destruction by regular means,
which makes prion diseases almost untreatable.
To the Kyle computer!
Going back to our brain scans from earlier,
we now know how a prion disease like
Creutzfeldt-Jakob can cause a spongiform encephalopathy.
Amyloid build ups in the brain
which can cause cell death and damage,
and because it's damaging the brain
it invariably causes changes to behavior and personality.
If there were a mutated Joker prion
that was blood transmissible,
Batman might be exactly right in his diagnosis.
However, I wonder if there isn't another prion disease
that fits the cowl a little better.
If we really wanted a real world analog
for what may be going on in Joker's mutated mind,
maybe we should look at the prion disease
known for his most famous symptom.
In 1951 an Australian patrol officer named Arthur Carey
published a report calling attention
to an apparently new disease ravaging
the Fore peoples of Papua New Guinea,
which was controlled by Australia at the time.
In his report, he called the disease Kuru,
coming from the Fore word for to shake.
In his report he noticed the uncontrollable tremors,
the shaking, the loss of mobility
and control in those affected,
but he also noted something very striking.
Uncontrollable bursts of laughter.
Kuru is also known as the laughing disease.
When scientists followed Carey and others reports
a few years later they found that Kuru was
spreading through the Fore people like an epidemic.
And to find out why, they had to do a little
detective work of their own.
In 1957 American scientist Carleton Gajdusek
started doing his own experiments.
He started doing experiments with chimps
to see if Kuru could be spread through
the ingestion of infected tissue,
more specifically brain tissue.
Now you may think, why were scientists concerned
with the ingestion of infected tissue?
Well in this case it was extremely important
because the Fore people traditionally practiced
what's called funerary cannibalism.
Upon their death, the people would eat
the bodies and brains of their loved ones,
in the hopes of freeing their souls
and their spirits from their bodies.
Gajdusek and his work had proved that eating brains
was what was spreading Kuru through the Fore people,
and disproportionately to the young women and girls
who were eating the brain tissue during these practices.
And we also now think that this all started
from a random case of CJD.
Gajdusek's work led the Australian administration
to ban this practice in 1960, and afterwards,
cases of Kuru started to drop,
and 20 years later, Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Bruce Wayne would be proud.
The discovery of Kuru was one of the first
big pieces of evidence that pointed towards prions
as a new infectious agent.
And you should know that since the 1960s
the Kuru situation in Papua New Guinea
has gotten a lot better.
Depending on the stance that you read,
there hasn't been a related death since 2005,
and recent studies actually suggest
that the Papua people are actually evolving
resistance to Kuru in real time.
Nature.
Given the possible changes in behavior,
the transmissivity, the psychosis,
the hallucinations, and the pathological laughter
that a prion disease might cause,
I think we have to say that Batman,
at least in the Arkham Knight,
might be exactly right.
A prion disease like CJD, like Kuru,
or a mutated form of Joker prion,
could produce Joker-like symptoms.
A contracted joker disease if you will.
Alfred, take us home.
- [Alfred] Back to the void it is, sir.
- So, what disease does the Joker really have?
Well based on video game and Batman law and real science,
I think we can say that Jokeritis is indeed
a transmissible prion disease
that causes enough damage and cell death
to make specific and specifically disturbing
changes to Joker's brain.
Not everything about the Joker's diagnosis
fits with real world Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease,
but it's close enough that I think
I'm comfortable with saying that
Batman's capabilities as the world's greatest detective
stands up to scrutiny.
Because science.
Ha ha, nailed it.
(upbeat music)
There's even more evidence that Joker disease,
Jokeritis, as he calls it in the game, is definitely a TSE
or transmissible spongiform encephalopathy,
in the game, it's an offhand comment,
but he calls it mad clown disease,
which is a play on mad cow disease,
which is one of the more famous TSEs,
which is just more evidence.
But, we should also note that when we
talk about Joker disease we're leaving out
a lot of the terrible symptoms.
Like I said, CJD is like Alzheimer's,
so you're also dealing with terrible memory loss,
the prognosis is less than two years that you have to live,
and it's a terrible, terrible disease to go through.
So obviously the Joker doesn't have any of those symptoms
but if we pick and choose a few of them,
say it's a mutated form, then it might start to fit,
but we must remember that these diseases
are definitely terrible things that
we need science to solve.
Thank you so much for watching, Gary.
If you like this video about Batman and the Joker
you might like some of other Because Science
Joker related videos,
like how deadly is the Joker's magic trick?
And what poison is on Poison Ivy's lips?
And you can also follow us here at these handles
to give us suggestions for future episodes
and leave us your nerdiest comments,
corrections and questions,
everywhere that you can see this video.
Thanks.