Super Genius DNA

Chapter 235: Rosaline (10)

“What...”

Song Ji-Hyun’s eyes widened.

“What are you doing!”

She rushed to the beagles, screaming.

“What are you injecting them with? ATP?”

It was best to avoid adding new variables to a failed experiment because it made it difficult to trace causality later.

“We were going to sacrifice those beagles. If we open its brain and find something unusual, we won’t know if it’s because of the original treatment or the massive injection of ATP...”

Song Ji-Hyun paused. It was because a very weak signal showed up on the electroencephalogram.

“Your strategy was almost right, Doctor Song,” Young-Joon said. “However, the stem cells need a lot of energy to divide in large enough numbers to repair the tissue as they differentiate into new tissue. ATP is a molecular energy source, a typical chemical used in cell biology. If we put glucose along with dopamine, they would have automatically and safely produced ATP through pyruvic acid. But the timing was late this time, so I injected ATP directly.”

“...”

“The method I used right now isn’t the best option because the residual ATP that is not absorbed into the cells may remain in the blood and tissue, creating an oxidative environment. Next time, we should add glucose at a concentration of one percent when injecting dopamine,” Young-Joon said.

“No way...”

The amplitude of the delta waves began to build up in cycles on the EEG monitor[1]. The pattern was similar to brain waves seen during deep sleep. The waves were still low in frequency and number, but they quickly stabilized.

“The reason it’s less than a normal delta wave is because of the rate of cell division. By tomorrow afternoon, we should be able to remove the life support from the beagle’s body. He’ll go into s PVS, and he’ll need a few follow-ups to restore cognitive function.”

“...”

Song Ji-Hyun had just witnessed the miracle of the dead beagle’s brain stem beginning to regenerate. But she was even more amazed at what Young-Joon had done.

‘How is this possible? How can this person see through everything with just one look?’

The amount of knowledge he had was incredible, but the speed at which he understood the problem was insane. He took one look at the beagle and listened to one explanation of the experimental method, which was enough for him to be so confident in the experiment that he stabbed a syringe into the back of the beagle’s head.

“... Doctor Ryu.”

Song Ji-Hyun could barely speak from the shock.

“You are incredible... How could you think of this...” she said.

“Well, I did a lot of research on cellular-level differentiation and stem cells in the Life Creation Department, too.”

Young-Joon smiled.

“... I was told that a scientist’s success doesn’t depend on being good at something but on tolerating something you’re bad at.”

“Because it’s like searching for the exit in a dark room,” Young-Joon said.

“Yeah... But sometimes, Doctor Ryu, you don’t seem to fit into the context of traditional science at all.”

She chuckled, but it felt dejected.

“To be honest, I feel inferior, and I’m jealous.”

“...”

Song Ji-Hyun shrugged.

“I’ve been studying and researching this for a long time, so I thought I’d be the one doing most of the problem-solving.”

—What are you going to do? You killed her spirit.

Rosaline sent him a message.

‘I didn’t know this would happen.’

Young-Joon scratched his head.

“Well, so what. It worked out in the end, and it’s okay if ordinary people who live in the same era as geniuses are disappointed,” said Song Ji-Hyun. “It would have taken me weeks to find the cause if I had done it myself. Thank you, Doctor Ryu.”

“N-No, you did all the work, Doctor Song.”

Song Ji-Hyun chuckled and playfully patted Young-Joon on the shoulder.

“I’m a little nervous,” Park Dong-Hyun said to Cheon Ji-Myung.

“He’ll do well.”

Cheon Ji-Myung pulled out a bag of potato chips from his bag.

“It’s instead of popcorn. You want some?”

“... Are you here for a show or something?”

“It’s kind of like the UFC.”

“Do you have some Coke?” Park Dong-Hyun asked.

Due to the nature of the issue, the hearing was organized as a debate among experts on the issues.

“We will now hear from the opposition,” the speaker said.

There were three experts on the opposing side of the debate: a neuroscientist and two ethicists who were concerned about the brain death recovery project.

Doctor Hong Jung-Ho, a scientist well-versed in neuroscience and a professor of cardiothoracic surgery, took the microphone.

“The loss of brainstem function is synonymous with death,” he said. “You say that someone appears to be alive if you put them on life support and maintain their cardiopulmonary function, but that’s not medically true. Even if you put them on life support, they die within two weeks in most cases. There were rare cases where you succeeded in keeping them alive for a long period of time, like in the case of Kim Hyun-Taek, the subject that A-GenBio chose, but none of them came back to life.”

Hong Jung-Ho glanced at Young-Joon, who was sitting across from him. He looked relaxed and not the least bit nervous or worried.

“Let’s talk about Giuliano Pinto, the man who did the first kick of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. He was completely paralyzed from the waist down, but how did he do the first kick?” Hong Jung-Ho asked. “He wore a brainwave detector on his head and an exoskeleton on his lower body that was connected to it, and he used his brainwaves to move his legs. Then, he received electrical impulses back to his brain that told him he kicked the ball, so he was able to recognize that.”

Hong Jung-Ho went on.

“But no one said that the motor nerves in his lower body had been recovered. The legs were still biologically paralyzed, and it was just a machine called an exoskeleton that moved them. This is exactly the same thing.

“A brain-dead person is biologically dead even though they are on life support. It’s just a machine that keeps their blood pumping, injecting glucose and sodium to maintain their osmolarity. They’re doing this to sort of embalm the patient so their cells don’t become damaged anymore.

“The stomach cannot digest food even if it is administered through a feeding tube, and they cannot breathe on their own. Over time, the cardiopulmonary function that is being maintained by the machine will eventually become paralyzed, and their body temperature will drop. That is painful to watch for both the doctors and the caregivers.

“That's why we don’t look at brain-dead individuals as requiring treatment or put them on life support. Unlike patients in a persistent vegetative state, brain-dead patients are clearly dead,” Hong Jung-Ho said.

“Attempting to revive someone who has passed is a clear violation of the Medical Service Act, and a deception of the dead. Additionally, granting exclusive permission to conduct this research to a certain individual for that purpose is a violation of the fairness of research. This special act should not be passed.”

Camera flashes went off one after another.

Yang Hye-Sook smiled softly, then nodded to Young-Joon.

Young-Joon picked up the microphone.

“First of all, this bill does not grant A-GenBio exclusive rights, but limits the clinical scope of A-GenBio’s original research on the restoration of brainstem function in brain-dead individuals to a specific period of time and person,” Young-Joon said.

“Thank you for your opinion, Doctor Hong. It was known in conventional medicine that brain death is death and there is no way to reverse it. But humanity has never defined death in absolute terms because it is the most mysterious event at the root of life. We believe that there is still life in the brain-dead, though it is very faint.”

“How can you prove that?” Hong Jung-Ho asked.

“Let’s start from a point where death is much more obvious,” Young-Joon said. “This experiment was conducted last year by a team led by Nenad Sestan, a brain scientist at Yale University. They isolated the brains of slaughtered pigs and then recovered some of their neurons.”

“Oh, that paper.”

Song Ji-Hyun, who was sitting among Cellijenner’s employees, was surprised. It was the paper she was reading the night of Young-Joon and her first successful beagle experiment.

“They took one hundred to three hundred brains from pigs that had been slaughtered at the slaughterhouse for less than four hours, and they used an amazing technology to keep the blood circulating in the brain to partially protect the cells from dying,” Young-Joon said.

The scientists used a system called BrainEx, which consisted of a looped tube, a pump, and a small reservoir of red liquid. The tube was connected to the pump, which then pumped blood into the freshly extracted pig brains at a computer-calculated speed and pressure that mimicked the rhythm of the heart.

“As a result, they found healthy neural activity in billions of individual cells,” Young-Joon said. “An additional mysterious phenomenon was discovered here: some cells that were already thought to be dead managed to recover. And the brain cells barely died for a long time afterward.”

“...”

“The brain dies much more slowly than we think, especially if we manage it with life support machines.”

Yang Hye-Sook’s secretary turned on the screen to present evidence.

“Now, I’m going to show you the preclinical results of A-Genbio and Cellijenner’s work on how to restore brainstem function.”

1. electroencephalogram ☜

2. functional MRI ☜