How Long Could Wolverine Live?

Oct 14

In the 2017 film Logan, Hugh Jackman’s James “Logan Wolverine no-longer-an-X-Men” Howlett was slowly dying throughout the film due to his diminished healing factor and his adamantium skeleton poisoning him.

Now I remember watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine and recall that this bone claw man fought in multiple wars and yet in 2029, he seems to be aging at a much quicker rate, which led me to the question no one asked me: How long would Logan have lived without the adamantium skeleton?

Who is Wolverine/Logan

Before we delve into the science I need to set one ground rule: We’ll only be looking at the film version of Wolverine since comic Wolverine has a healing factor that has been shown to have drastically different healing rates since his comic inception in 1974.

With that out of the way, for those of you who don’t know Wolverine, he is a marvel hero, more of an anti-hero known for his metal claws. But one of his abilities is a healing factor that helps him regenerate injuries at a much faster rate compared to any regular person, and I do mean almost instantaneously. It has also contributed to slowing down his aging significantly.

By the time Wolverine pops up in Logan, his healing rate has slowed dramatically and it appears his slowed aging has taken a hit as well. There are essentially three different scientific reasons for all of this to be happening.

Ageing Wolverine

First is aging, in prior films after being shot, within seconds, Wolverine’s genetic mutation has reacted to the injury and he’s healed. In Logan, we see that as he’s gotten older, the speed at which he heals declines, just like all of us.

But why does this happen? To answer that we have to look at why we age at all.

As we grow our cells divide until at a certain point where it begins to slow, this is called cellular senescence. First observed by Professor of Anatomy Leonard Hayflick in 1961.

Interestingly when he first observed this at a cellular level he believed it was a contamination error. At the time it was believed there was a possibility that cells could replicate with no end if controlled in a tissue culture. If that could be replicated in a normal person, it would basically be immortality.

The reason for this belief was French biologist Alexis Carrel’s claim of keeping cells from a chicken heart growing for at least 30 years in a tissue culture as opposed to its actual limit of 5 to 10 years. Turns out he might have been fudging the experiment a bit although he never admitted to it.

As Hayflick kept experimenting he discovered a correlation between the slowing of our cells replicating and what’s called telomeres at the end of each of our chromosomes. Basically when our cells replicate a tiny piece of telomere is lost, once a limit is reached our cells enter senescence.

Think of telomeres like water in a large thin pot. Every time you boil the water you lose a bit of it as it evaporates. Boil it enough times and all the water evaporates leaving you with just the thin pot. If you keep heating that empty pot up it will eventually damage it.

That empty pot being heated is like our cells replicating without telomeres, that’s where we stop growing and start getting old. That limit eventually became known as Hayflick’s Limit.

With Wolverine’s genetic mutation we can assume he has a much higher Hayflick’s limit for his cells than the average person. It also explains why in his earlier films he doesn’t scar since every wound is healed by our cells dividing into imperfect replicants but with his mutation, they divide into perfect replicants.

At the start of Logan, Wolverine is 197 years old. Having been born in 1832 and Logan taking place in 2029 it makes sense that he’s entered the getting old stage of his cells. But there are two other things at play here.

Poisoning Wolverine

I mentioned earlier Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton is poisoning him. This could be an actual real-world condition called metallosis. When a person has metal implants in their body that are constantly rubbing against each other, small particles of that metal might shed off and enter the bloodstream.

This is sometimes seen in hip implants causing extreme pain, death of bone and tissue, and damage to the nervous system. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Wolverine’s skeleton becomes fully covered in adamantium in 1979.

And yea, I know that in Days of Future Past he goes back to 1973 and in the end ends up with Stryker who canonically gives him the metal but that's shown to be Mystique in disguise and it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to have him injected with adamantium.

Since the next time we see him is in X-Men Apocalypse in 1983, we can make the reasonable assumption that the real Stryker, still somehow convinces Logan to get the adamantium in 1979 and then keeps him as a weapon till 1983.

Plus the difference in years won’t really affect the math we’re going to do later.

At the start of Logan, the metal-claw boy has been rubbing his adamantium skeleton for 50 years. This means his regeneration has been working overtime and when his cells reached senescence that’s double overtime with no union.

Feeding Wolverine

Now the last thing affecting his regeneration is the main villain’s plan in Logan. Not the clone but his papa, Doctor Zander Rice. Towards the end of the film, Rice does what villains do and monologues his plan. He doesn’t go into too much detail but he does reveal the corporation he leads, called Transigen, were able to prevent the birth of new mutants by distributing gene therapy through food.

Earlier in the film, it’s also revealed Transigen owns the corn, and guess what you can make with corn? High fructose corn syrup and that stuff is in everything.

Through genetically modifying all the food, Transigen was able to control the mutant population before they were even born, making them extinct. And since I’m pretty sure Logan has to eat at some point, it’s completely possible that the genetically modified corn syrup is suppressing, at least in part, his genetic mutation.

Side note if anyone has ever seen Supernatural, Transigen’s plan here is surprisingly similar to the Leviathan's plan in season 7. Just a lot less dick jokes.

So Logan is being affected by these 3 things, his age, his metallosis poisoning, and genetically modified food. In order to find an accurate representation of how long he would have lived, without his adamantium skeleton, we’re going to pretend Transigen didn’t modify food.

Calculating Wolverine’s Age

Logan was born in 1832 but his mutation didn’t trigger till 1845 when he was 13 as shown in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. So from 1845 to 1979, he had no adamantium skeleton, that's 134 years living with his mutation.

Now we need to find the ratio of how many years would have to go by for the rest of us before he biologically ages one year. Since an equivalent biological age is never stated for him we’ll have to use Hugh Jackman’s age from Wolverine’s first appearance in the movie X-Men when he was 32 years old.

I know chronologically speaking X-Men Origin: Wolverine happens first but that was released in 2009 and it doesn’t make sense to use Huge Jacked-Man’s age from that movie as he would be older than he was in X-Men. His regeneration is good but it’s not “reversing my age” good.

Okay from 13 to 32 Wolverine had his mutation, that’s 19 years. We can now take 134 years and divide it by 19 to get the ratio of how many years would have to pass before he biologically ages 1 year. And we get 7.05 rounded. Essentially Wolverine ages like the opposite of a dog, which weirdly makes sense.

By the way, if you do the same math between 1979 and when Logan takes place in 2029 (50 years), then divide it by the difference between Hugh Jackman’s age from his first appearance in X:Men and his last appearance in Logan (17 years). You get 2.94 years.

This means taking those 3 variables we mentioned earlier into account, age, metallosis, and genetically modified food, Wolverine now biologically ages 1 year over 3 years for us. His regeneration rate was cut by more than half!

But since we’re looking at how old he would live without the adamantium and without the genetically modified food we can ignore all that.

So, we know every 7 years for us is like 1 year for Wolverine, biologically speaking. All we have to do is multiply 7.05 by the average life expectancy of a Canadian male since he is canonically Canadian.

It’s pretty difficult to get an average life expectancy for a man who regenerates, so we’ll use the higher end of the data and say 79.3 years. We have to remember to subtract 13 years from that because it took that long for his mutation to first kick in.

That leaves us with 64.3 X 7.05, which gives us 453.32 years of mutation life plus add back the original 13 years.

Wolverine’s max-age would be 466.32 years. Meaning having been born in 1832, in a perfect world without Transigen and the Adamantium skeleton, Wolverine would have lived to the year 2298 at the age of 466.

That’s a long time, so much more longer than any of us.

Really puts our smaller life timeline in perspective. The same life where I spent 3 unpaid days researching and figuring out an answer to a question no one asked that someone will probably just point out an error to invalidate it all.

And I re-watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine.