Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  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.

  C
HAPTER 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 cou
ld 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.