CHAPTER 4
The next day, the fourth day after their initial injections, Kat put her blue group through their paces again, expecting them to exceed their previous best times through the maze. Instead, the times showed a marked decline. The average time rose a full forty-five seconds. It did not unduly alarm her at that point. A researcher was always prepared for early reverses. After all, she was treading absolutely virgin territory, and every deviation was an important footnote to be logged in to her encrypted computer files under NeurActivase, her code name for both the serum and the experiment.
But some concern entered her mind when, on the fifth day, the test rats’ performance continued to decline. The sixth day was worse, with the test rats now taking better than seven minutes to run the maze. With trembling nerves and fingers she sacrificed another test rat and took a specimen for examination. Under the microscope, the brain tissue was still as full of neural cells as ever, but to her dismay, there was clear indication of decay and deterioration in the cells.
The most noticeable destruction was in the myelin sheath component of the nerve cells, the protective outer husk. Instead of being sharply defined and distinct, the edges of the sheathes were fuzzy and ragged—a clear indication of dying cells. There were still some new cells being formed and dividing, but the clear majority of the cells appeared to be decaying and dying.
She was dumbstruck and frantic. She tried to think through what could have gone wrong. Healthy nerve cells didn’t just die in a matter of a few days for no reason. It wasn’t possible. They acted as if they were being slowly poisoned somehow.
In the end Kat decided to reinject her remaining test animals, hoping that adding more of the NeurActivase would solve the problem, or at least slow the decline in the rats’ intelligence.
After she finished with the injections, Kat sat staring at the rats as if she could see the NeurActivase chemicals coursing through their bloodstreams:
NeurActivase entered the rats’ bloodstream as a mixture of five distinct chemical entities. Almost immediately, the compounds separated and began to work their magic: The thyrotropin-releasing hormone sped straight to the pineal gland in the base of the brain. As the pineal gland absorbed the compound, the gland’s cells were kicked into high gear and began to manufacture thyrotropin in large amounts. The thyrotropin, in turn, sped to the thyroid gland and induced it to increase its production of thyroid hormone, which immediately sped up the rats’ metabolism and enhanced their abilities to heal and replace injured tissues.
The second ingredient, GM-1 Ganglioside, entered the rats’ brains, where it searched out and coated and entered damaged or aging neurons and began to repair them before they died. It was assisted in this by the third ingredient, calcium channel–blocking enzyme, which prevented the influx of calcium ions into the damaged neurons, one of the mechanisms by which neurons aged and by which injured neurons died.
The fourth ingredient, Imuran, went directly to the bone marrow, where it paralyzed the marrow’s production of antibodies to injured neurons and thereby prevented their destruction by the body’s own defense mechanisms.
The final and most important ingredient in the serum was a slurry made up of fetal rat brain tissue. The fetal rat brains were ground up and the proteins separated. This protein mixture entered the rats’ brains and activated a small nucleus of undeveloped, dormant neural cells. The protein interspersed among the cells in this small area, and, within minutes the cells began to pulsate and change. Their nuclei rippled and stretched, then began to divide. One cell became two, then the two cells became four, and soon these new cells were coursing throughout the rats’ brains, bonding and joining with the older cells, forming new, fresh networks of functioning brain cells.
* * *
Finally, Kat came out of her reverie and realized it would be hours before the rats showed any changes due to the injections, so she decided to go home and give Angus some quality time and perhaps even grab a few hours of shut-eye for herself.
“Come on, big boy,” she crooned as she hooked Angus’s leash onto his collar. “Let’s go home and get some cookies.”
Angus struggled to his feet and gave a hearty bark at the word cookies, one of his favorite treats.
* * *
Kat could barely contain herself to wait the twenty-four hours she deemed necessary. She rushed to her lab that morning having gotten precious little sleep the night before. For the sake of secrecy, she asked Kevin to take Angus for a walk in a nearby park, saying she hadn’t had time to exercise him this morning. Kevin, who loved Angus almost as much as Kat did, readily agreed.
After Kevin left, Kat put the first animal through the maze. The animal made the journey in a little less than six minutes, better than the seven minutes previously. The result was not as good as she had hoped for, but she could at least call it progress. Her remaining animals did just about as well, causing her to briefly hope the extra dose of NeurActivase had solved the problem.
She put the rats back in their cages, and when Kevin and Angus returned, they spent the rest of the day giving the lab a much-needed cleaning while Angus snored nearby.
And then it all began to go downhill very rapidly. The next day all of her test animals were noticeably less intelligent, fumbling through parts of the maze they had once raced through, and seeming completely baffled by other, more difficult parts.
When he saw the increased maze times and the rats’ confused behavior, Kevin shook his head. “What’s going on, Dr. Williams?”
She just shrugged, not able to meet his eyes.
Within two days all of the remaining blue group had reached the baseline times of the control group and were threatening to go even lower. The serum was no longer making them smarter; in fact, it seemed to be retarding what brain function they had started with.
Continuing examination of brain specimens just confirmed the maze results; the animals’ heads were full of dead and dying brain cells.
Kat was devastated, her disappointment crushing in its intensity. She almost wished she were a drinker so she could drown her sorrows in a bottle of bourbon.
She forced herself to approach the cage containing her test rats, hoping somehow what she had observed earlier would be different this time. She leaned over, anticipation causing a slight tremor in her fingers. Still the same, she thought. Her animals were dying, crawling in sawdust, some already gripped by death throes, all struggling to stay alive.
What had gone wrong? She wondered bitterly. Things had all seemed so positive yesterday. The rats she had injected with her serum, NeurActivase, had shown remarkable increases in intelligence and vitality, running her maze in record times.
Her initial enthusiasm was gone now, replaced by an overwhelming sense of defeat. After four days of stunning accomplishments, during which she had visions of showing the scientific community her discovery, doubtlessly receiving accolades for conquering some of the most devastating diseases known to man, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and senile dementia, she was back at square one.
She walked to her microscope and peered once again at the initial brain sections from her injected rats. The changes in their tissue mocked her with what might have been. The brain cells all showed amazing new growth, rejuvenation of aged neurons and nerve sheaths, indications her serum was actually growing new brain matter, a feat once thought impossible. How had it all changed so quickly, so drastically, that now her serum had made the rats smarter and more vigorous, and then killed them in a matter of days?
In a fit of rage, she swept the slides and tissue sections to the floor. She’d be damned if she’d let this setback stop her work, she thought. She took a deep breath. There was nothing left to do but to go back to the computer and start over with her calculations to try to discover where in the vast, complicated chemical formulae, the fault lay.
After two hours staring at chemical formulae crawling across her monitor screen like some weird hieroglyphics, Kat could find nothing in her serum that could possibly cause her rats to die, as they all were now, four days after receiving NeurActivase.
She glanced to the side of her desk at a recent study she pulled off the Internet. It reported a compound, dihydroepi-andosterone, or DHEA as it was known, that had shown promise as an antiaging chemical. The drug was a precursor in the body to the male hormone, testosterone, which many reputable scientists were taking themselves, claiming renewed energy and vitality.
What the hell? she thought. I’ll give it a try and add it to NeurActivase. After all, what have I got to lose?
A quick trip to the supply room got her a vial of DHEA. Another few moments in front of her computer calculating an approximate dose for rats, and she was ready. She added two milliliters of DHEA to the NeurActivase and shook the vial vigorously to mix the solutions together.
She went to the stack of wire cages lining a rear wall of her lab and took down the cage that contained her last supply of rats that had not been yet injected. She checked the tag affixed to the wire, making certain the rats were of the GR-4 strain, and then she readied them for injection.
After Kat injected her new, modified NeurActivase compound in each of the twelve rats, she glanced at her watch. It was already four thirty in the afternoon. She knew the Friday-afternoon Houston traffic would be fierce. She decided the hell with it, she’d just go to a nearby restaurant and have a leisurely dinner, and then come back and see how the newly injected rats were doing.
Afterward, she’d spend the night in the lab and get an early start the next morning.
She put the cage back on the stack of other cages, making a mental note to tell Kevin what she had done on Monday morning as soon as he arrived for work so he could mark the tag on the cage with the date and time of injection.
She made sure Angus was comfortable in his bed and that he had plenty of water nearby, grabbed her purse, and ran for the parking lot, hoping she could beat the rush-hour traffic jam and get to the restaurant before the early evening crowds gathered.
* * *
As before, the liquid NeurActivase entered a dozen rats’ bloodstreams, but it was now a mixture of six distinct chemical entities. Once again, the compounds separated and began their work: Thyrotropin-releasing hormone, GM-1 Ganglioside, Imuran, and the fetal rat brain slurry all worked exactly as before.
Then, the DHEA began converting cholesterol in fat cells into massive amounts of testosterone, an anabolic steroid that caused tissue cells to divide and grow and replace injured or dying cells more rapidly than before.
At first there was no visible change in the rats, but soon, literally within an hour, elderly rats began to stand straighter, move more rapidly, eat voraciously, and mate with adolescent abandon.
* * *
Kat returned from her supper and was exhilarated when she saw the rats she’d injected just a couple of hours before acting much more vigorous and youthful than the control rats. They were running around their cage, mating and playing like very young rats instead of the middle-aged ones they were.
She decided to go to the women’s dressing room, take a quick shower, change into the sweats she kept there, and settle down on the couch in her lab. Maybe now she could finally get some sleep, after she took Angus for his evening stroll, of course.
* * *
While Kat was in the dressing room showering and taking off her makeup, a slow but steady change began in her test rats. First they stopped mating and eating, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, their vigorous movements began to slow and they began to twitch and move spastically around the cage. It was like they had suddenly aged fifty rat years in the space of an hour.
When Kat arrived back in the lab, she took one look at the injected rats, and it felt as if she’d been punched in the gut.
The new injection with DHEA added had all been in vain. The test rats were already deteriorating past the baseline of the control rats and showed every sign of continued decline. With a sickening despair, she watched another dream slowly disappear. There seemed to be nothing more she could do.
Kat watched helplessly as first their mental, and then their motor skills continued to fail. Soon, one by one, they all died with symptoms very like those of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Her only consolation, albeit a small one, was that she had been secretive about her early success. She had even underplayed the importance of the rats’ new growth of brain cells and their ever-increasing facility in the maze from Kevin, though to be honest, she knew he suspected what a great achievement this had been.
And Kat had certainly made no mention of it to the progress committee, who, so far as she’d told them, still thought she was working on her “neuron glue” without much success.
That evening, as her last test animal died, lying in its own waste products, she cried in frustration. She stumbled to her car and put Angus in his bed in the backseat. Her mind was numb with the enormity of her defeat as she drove to the freeway and headed south, toward Memorial Park. Once there, she drove along the small stream that ran through the park in the gathering darkness, her thoughts a chaotic mixture of rage and self-pity.
Finally, she stopped at a small pullout in the deserted park, took off her shoes, and walked along the water’s edge, thinking melodramatically about wading out and disappearing beneath the moonlit surface. This made her chuckle at herself and improved her mood, as the stream was probably less than two feet deep. Instead, she lay back on the cool grass, hands behind her head, and looked up at the stars.
She thought how most men, and in her case women, truly did lead lives of quiet desperation, never rising to the full potential of their dreams or aspirations. She thought how ironic it was that she, Kaitlyn Williams, had been given not one, but two chances at the golden ring—and how she had fumbled both of them. She lay there on the grass, her eyes full of starlight, and her mind on her past.
* * *
After a while, Kat noticed the stars were blurred by the tears in her eyes. She sat up and angrily rubbed her eyes until they burned. Damn it, girl, you’re not going to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, she thought. She stood and made her way back to her car.
She opened the rear door and watched Angus dozing in his bed on the backseat. With a deep sigh, she reached over and took his face in her hands. She leaned into the car and nuzzled him, face-to-face. “We’re gonna get through this, big boy,” she whispered. “We just have to work harder, that’s all.”
Angus moaned in pleasure at her touch, as if agreeing with her.
On the drive back to her apartment, she resolved to work her way through her own maze and get the prize at the end. You discovered a miracle serum, she thought with determination. Now you just have to iron out a few bugs and make it work like it should.
With this new goal in mind, she finally slept like a baby for the first time since she’d discovered the rats’ new abilities.
* * *
Just after midnight, a key was inserted in the door to Kat’s lab. A shadowy figure moved silently over to the rats’ cages and began to examine the animals one by one. Finally, seeing that there were only unmarked control rats in the cages, the figure moved over to the medical waste bin.
The lid to the bin was removed, revealing a pile of dead rats, all with blue marks on their backs.
The figure sighed and slumped, replacing the top to the bin, and then left the room as silently as it had entered.