CHAPTER 3
Kat Williams gave Kevin the day off and spent the rest of the morning encrypting her notes on the new serum in the computer. She wanted no one to be able to discover the changes she had made in the serum that had led to such spectacular results. She admitted to herself that she didn’t really know why she was being so cautious, but instinctively she felt it was the right thing to do.
Just before lunch, Captain Sohenshine stopped by Kat’s lab unannounced. Kat looked up from her computer, at first annoyed at the interruption, and then terrified when she saw who it was striding through the door as if the lab belonged to him.
Captain “Sunshine,” as the researchers called him, was in charge of coordinating the government grants that paid for the scientists’ work, and the man was a martinet who took his self-proclaimed role of protector of the taxpayers’ money very seriously indeed. Though he was no longer in the military, he insisted on being addressed as “Captain.” He was short and squatty, had a pronounced beer belly, halitosis, and washed-out-looking dingy brown hair with a serious case of dandruff.
“Ah, Dr. Williams. We missed you at the monthly conference yesterday.”
Kat could feel herself start to blush, and sweat began to trickle from her armpits. She had never been good at lying, always feeling that people could immediately tell when she was speaking anything less than the full truth.
“Uh, hello, Captain Sun . . . er, Sohenshine.”
Angus, sensing Kat’s discomfort, growled softly from his bed next to her desk, baring his teeth at the intruder.
The captain started at the warning and edged sideways past Angus’s bed, watching the dog carefully. Once safely past the dog, he eased up to Kat’s desk and leaned over and began to read the computer screen over Kat’s shoulder, unconcerned about the rudeness of the gesture. Kat grimaced as she breathed through her mouth to try to avoid the rancid smell of Sohenshine’s breath wafting into her face. Kat mustered her courage and stood, putting herself between the captain and the screen. “Just what is it you needed, Captain?”
Sohenshine turned and began to walk around the lab, absentmindedly picking up various pieces of equipment and looking at them for a moment before putting them down and picking something else up. “Well, some of the other scientists on the progress committee were wondering how you were coming along on your ‘neuron glue’ experiments, and since you weren’t there at the meeting to tell us, I thought I’d drop by and see for myself.”
Kat blushed again at the implied insult, but restrained her anger, telling herself that now was not the time to fly off the handle. She had to be calm and think through everything she said if she was going to keep her results secret. “Well, ah . . . I’ve had some small successes and a few disappointments, but on the whole I think I’m making good progress.”
Sohenshine frowned, his usual expression when dealing with the scientists. He felt most of them were charlatans trying to waste taxpayers’ money on unproven experiments of dubious value. “Well,” he said as he puffed out his chest in self-importance, “see if you can’t spare the time to come to the next meeting and let the committee in on some of your successes. It is, after all, our job to monitor the use of government funds.”
It took all of Kat’s self-control not to laugh in the pompous ass’s face. Instead, she placed her hand on the captain’s back and gently led him toward the door. “Yes, sir, I’ll certainly be there.”
“See that you are,” Sohenshine barked as he marched out the door, dusting his hands together as if to brush off any contamination from her lab as he waddled off down the hall.
Kat took a deep breath as she leaned back against the closed laboratory door, mentally calculating that she had less than a month to show some significant results before the committee would judge whether or not to shut her down.
* * *
The next day, Kevin again ran the rats through the maze, and the injected rats’ average time came down to six minutes, with some as low and five and a half. Kat could barely contain herself. The rats seemed to be getting smarter. They weren’t making the same wrong turns in the maze. It was almost as if they remembered which paths were the blind alleys and which led to the chocolate, something she had never encountered in all her years of research with rats.
When Kevin began to get really excited about the results, Kat cautioned him against undue optimism. “Hold on, Kev. Don’t blow your circuits just yet. Let’s wait and see if the times remain this good over time.”
On the morning of the third day, the injected rats negotiated the maze in three and a half minutes and ran the route with the assurance of previous knowledge. Kat was astounded, and more than a little baffled. She’d never seen anything like this before. It was as if the rats were getting more and more intelligent every day.
“Kevin, I can’t wait any longer. I’ve got to sacrifice one of the rats and see what’s going on in its brain.”
Kevin took one of the injected rats and put it in a small jar. He saturated a cotton ball with ether and dropped it into the jar and put the lid on. After a few moments, the rat staggered a couple of steps and fell over, fast asleep.
Kat took the unconscious rat and quickly, knowing the rat would feel no pain, cut its head off. She opened the skull and removed the brain and used a microtome to slice the tissue into ultrathin slices.
Kevin used tiny tweezers to pick up the slices and place them on slides. After arranging the slides on the countertop in the order of her slices, he took the first one and put it on the microscope.
Kat bent over her microscope and twirled the knob to bring the slide into focus. She gasped and looked up blinking, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. Looking again, she found to her profound amazement that new nerve cells were actually being produced, and not only being produced and dividing, but binding with the old cells.
She sat back dumbfounded. She was looking at brain cells, central nervous tissue, actually being created by artificial methods. To the best of her knowledge, it was the first time in the history of science that such had happened with a mature organism. She looked again and saw a lens full of healthy, tightly packed nerve cells with the cell bodies sharply defined and the neurons intertwined and interacting with the older cells.
At that moment her heart almost exploded. Gone was the thought of curing traumatic spinal injuries—that was now child’s play. Suddenly she could see cures for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, strokes, brain damage, brain tumors—the list was endless. She had never been a person who, either by nature or training, had tended to overexcitement; however, in that moment, her heart raced and her head whirled as it never had before. Diseases that had previously been untouchable could now be treated!
It took a while for her brain to quiet itself, for her emotions to come back under the rigid control she had been trained to maintain.
Then she set seriously to work to explore and define the extent of her discovery. The first breathtaking result of the NeurActivase appeared to be in the intelligence impact produced by the superloading of the brain cells. The maze results implied that the NeurActivase made the injected rats two or three times as smart as the control group, which had received nothing. The lowering of the times in which they completed in the maze meant that not only did the serum produce an effect, but that it was progressive and additive over time.
That afternoon she sacrificed both a test rat and a control rat. Both animals were genetically identical, the only difference being the injection of the serum.
She again prepared microscope slides from microtome sections of the brain tissue from both rats. She was amazed and awed to see how densely packed the brain cells were in the tissue section of her test rat versus that of the control animal. She could even see and identify the new neural cells by their more clearly defined myelin sheaths and nuclei. The older brain cells in the test rat, what she thought of as the original cells, appeared less distinct, almost fuzzy, as if they were not as healthy.
To her it was a magnificent sight because it meant that her serum was a catalyst that started the fissioning process of the neural cells and that new cells would be produced as fast as the older ones decayed and died. It was a miraculous breakthrough, because in every living organism that had a central nervous system, the aging process was accompanied by the death of brain cells that were unable to be replaced.
Kat straightened and glanced at Kevin, who was watching her with wide eyes. “Well, Kev, it looks like now we’ll be able to teach old dogs new tricks.”
It turned out to be her last joke and her last great thrill of excitement.