Bertram Navarre

A mysterious scientist working on unethical experiments for the Syndicate – no, not Professor Hasegawa, another one. He is only mentioned in the console text below. One wonders if the Syndicate had a number of scientists working for them in separate locations. Presumably the experiments were meant to yield products which could be sold legally or illegally, or else to develop something that would be useful as a weapon, such as a super-soldier.

TCTF Case File 201A-G Picasso Island CLOSED: Synopsis Renegade scientist Bertram Navarre discovered a way to 'retask' cells, making it possible to reshape bodies without having to worry about organ integrity One experiment consisted of successfully splitting the spinal column of a research subject by 'telling' the cells between the two severed halves to serve as nerve linkages. Unfortunately, he was obsessed with seeing how far this discovery could be pushed and was prepared to perform ghastly experiments on human captives he had bought from the Syndicate.

Procedure: Civilian refugees from a pleasure boat outing narrowly escaped mercenary pirates from Navarre's island laboratory and reached TCTF authorities. A full-scale raid of his island facilities was mounted and the lab installations were destroyed, but Navarre's body was never recovered.

Added value

Will reality soon outrun fiction?

• At first scientists tried to repair nerve damage by taking embryonic stem cells (ESC) and letting them replicate and then specialize into nerve cells.
  • In 1999 a mouse spine was repaired with ESC to some degree. (This was the time period in which Oni's story was rewritten. It might be possible that Hardy read about the experiment and pushed the idea a few steps further.)

• Due to ethical concerns, scientists looked for an alternative way to gain human pluripotent cells. (Some people argue that separating human embryonic stem cells is tantamount to murder because of the cells' potential to become a complete human. Other people don't have concerns about this because the embryonic stem cells would be separated before neurons and a consciousness could form.) With the new methods, mature cells are reprogrammed into so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Those cells – which are very similar to ESC – can then be prompted to differentiate again into the desired cell types.
  • In 2012 a mouse spine was repaired with iPSC.

• Producing those pluripotent cells and let them transform (differentiate) into the desired cell types is only the second-best option because errors can occur during the process and often more than one transformation is necessary.
  • Along comes transdifferentiation very handily, a process which changes the cell type directly.

• In 2013 another direct cell-type conversion was demonstrated whereby only one type of protein needed to be repressed. That's good news because methods based on viral vectors, plasmids and RNA can alter the genome in an unintentional way or have other problematic side effects.

• In 2017 control of plasmids (ring-shaped bacterial genomes) has been improved. Using them, normal stem cells have been reliably differentiated. As soon as this can be achieved with iPSC, tissue engineering should get a boost resulting in a myriad of applications. For incurable diseases, we can expect that they will cut out the diseased tissue and replace it with a lab-printed version.

Thus in the year 2032 it seems totally plausible for Bertram Navarre to be regenerating spinal damage in humans, albeit with horrifying methods and aims.

Related

• Deadly Brain
• Daodan Chrysalis