We could think about, in the longer term, genetically modifying people so that they could sprint and were very active and very intelligent, but that would require us to make a lot of changes by genetic modification. So maybe Spiderman has just got the elite versions of many of these genes. We have people who are sprinters, or people who are very energetic, but Spider man pulls a lot of these characteristics together and at the moment human geneticists are identifying variations in our genes that lead to these differences. Helen - Spiderman had a lot of characteristics of a superhuman that he was hyperactive and an elite athlete: many characteristics that individuals have some of, but nobody has all these different characteristics. For this scenario, let's ignore the strict regulations in place to ensure these methods are used responsibly, and ask instead could we actually make a real life Spiderman? Hannah - So it is possible to mix the DNA of humans and spiders. And here we would introduce a gene into a specific tissue, for example muscle, and repair a mutation. This is very new technology and it's only just becoming licensed as a medical treatment. We can introduce genes into specific tissues or organs this is the basis of gene therapy. It would be relatively easy to introduce spider genes into humans by adapting the methods we used to make genetically modified mice, for example, and combining this with the techniques used in in vitro fertilization - IVF - that are used to make test tube babies. Helen - Hello my name is Helen Sang I work at the Roslin Institute which is part of the University of Edinburgh. If so we turn to a genetics professor working where Dolly the sheep was created. Hannah - So can you successfully mix spider and human DNA and what could you create.
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