The Ruin of AX520

The Ruin of AX520

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but at the Academy she was called “The Beast.”  You’d think a name like that would be tacked on to someone with a nasty temper, but that’s not how it started at all.  It started when she discovered that the AX520 was dangerous.

The AX520 was the big money maker.  The University had been receiving substantial grants for the mutated gene for two decades.  While the geneticists were always a bit vague on what AX520 was supposed to do, Dr. Kern was very good at convincing donors that it was going to do something spectacular.  It wouldn’t cure cancer, but it might just end world hunger…or something like that.  His brilliance was so reknowned that anyone who accused his data of being nebulous and poorly documented was scathingly dismissed as either too dense or too jealous to acknowledge the great man’s success.  He was untouchable for two decades.

The Beast(she doesn’t get called by her real name anymore because everyone refuses to see her as human now) was the one who broke the rules.  She ran the tests that Dr. Kern had stalled.  He was constantly claiming that the gene was still being studied and wasn’t ready yet.  What was being studied wasn’t clearly stated.  The University left him be because the man could charm 6 million dollars out of his marks in just a few clandestine luncheons.  The University didn’t want to know what went on in those meetings. No one questioned the man who got the Kern Laboratory Complex built.

 The Beast didn’t care about that, and apparently she didn’t care about ruining her career either.  She created a shadow identity for her study until she was sure. When it was clear that AX520 was a monster, she released her data in the one journal that would run it.  Only a few geneticists were willing to stand by her until competitors from the Academy smelled blood. Within a year, the University was facing a lawsuit.  Dr. Kern talked his way through the scandal, but AX520 and its grants were finished.  The Beast had ruined it all.

Kern’s supporters couldn’t keep her from talking, and the University couldn’t outright dismiss her, so they did the next best thing: they made her into the Beast, a bumbling, ugly-minded creature who callously destroyed the best thing the University had going for it.  She was the traitor in the lab, and no one would work with her.  They cut off her access to the labs and invented classes like Scientific Inventory Practices for her to teach.  Students took her class simply to harass her for trying to bring down the great man.

When I was writing my doctorate, I stumbled across her study.  It was more than science.  It was art. It was sublime and perfect and honest.  She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.  Everyone else deliberately blinded themselves to avoid looking at her.