Reed Richards Is Useless/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

I understand why you can't have Reed Richards cure cancer or AIDS or have any powerful superhero make peace in the Middle East and end world hunger in one big swoop. But why, oh why, don't we see more examples of authors taking advantage of a simple way around this problem - show the hero slowly chipping away at a huge problem that's often over-simplified, and the problem will still exist and the fictional world will still resemble the real world, but the hero appears less useless.

* Example: It's great to ask, "Why can't Reed Richards (or any other fictional Omnidisciplinary scientist) cure cancer?" But "cancer" is actually a very broad term for many, many different kinds of specific diseases that have different effects, vary in treatment and survival rates, and of course have all kinds of different causes. Even the term "breast cancer" can refer to several kinds of tumors, and the term "breast cancer" doesn't really tell you anything beyond the area of the body afflicted. Not to mention that no matter how much of a genius Reed is, any cure he comes up with has to go through clincial trials, FDA approval, and marketing before it does anyone any good. This trope could be averted by a scene where someone could sarcastically ask Reed this very question, only for him to cheerfully answer that his serum for treating (insert specific medical name for aggressive tumor here) has just hit the market and his cure for this kind of lymphoma and his treatment for this kind of brain tumor and cure for this kind of leukemia and a possible Hepatitis C vaccine are in varying stages of FDA trials, and the mocker would have egg on their face and Reed would look less, well, useless. Cancer would still exist, it would still be a big problem, and the fictional world would not be drastically different from the real world (other than, you know, all the superheroes running around) but it would look like someone was at least working on it.