Chapter 299: An Ordinary Scientist (13)

About a fifteen-minute drive north of the small rural area in Tohoku was a residential neighborhood that was only slightly more developed. There was a community center and Sendai Elementary and Junior High, which were right next to each other.

𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

There was also one large gymnasium, which was a community sports center used by students and residents. It was said it could be used as an evacuation space in case of an emergency, but none of the residents of Kagayashiki thought that it would ever be used for that purpose.

“There are quite a lot of people in the gym. Most of them are elderly people who didn’t evacuate earlier and stayed in town,” said a first responder as they were driving toward the gymnasium.

Masumoto and Kyohei sat on either side of the body in the emergency vehicle.

“We will give you time to say your goodbyes to the deceased later, but for now, please go to the gym and get first aid. There will be hospital transport vehicles coming soon, which you can take to get checked out,” the first responder said.

“Your grandmother’s body here will also have been exposed to quite a bit of radiation, so we will have to treat her separately.”

“Did she die because of the radiation?” Masumoto asked.

“... No. I’m sorry.”

The first responder dropped his head in guilt.

“Just before the nuclear plant exploded, a local evacuation order was issued. We were evacuating people, but the roads in this town were not well-maintained and were too narrow for rescue vehicles to pass through easily,” he said.

“We couldn’t visit every house, so we put out an announcement from the village hall asking the elderly to gather at the town hall. We rescued people there first, and then went to pick up those who hadn’t made it yet, but...”

“You were too late.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Your mother was not there.”

“...”

“Perhaps... It was difficult for her to get here as she has limited mobility...”

“...”

Masumoto covered his face with his hands. The first responder dropped his head again.

“A-GenBio says they can treat radiation exposure, so if she had managed to escape, she might have lived. It’s our fault...”

“No,” Masumoto cut him off. “No. This is because of Ryu Young-Joon.”

“What?”

Kyohei glanced at Masumoto in bewilderment.

“It’s Ryu Young-Joon’s fault. This wouldn’t have happened if that bastard treated your grandma’s aging. She could have lived.”

“What are you talking about? Treating aging?”

“Yeah. That bastard can treat aging. He could have made your grandma walk again.”

Kyohei and the first responder stared at Masumoto in worry; they thought he had lost his mind.

“Father, the reason Grandma died was because the plant exploded. I told you that we had to take her out of here!”

“She’s lived here all her life! Where would she have gone?!” Masumoto said angrily. “Look, he said your grandmother didn’t die because of radiation; she died because she was too old to evacuate to the town hall!”

“Wait...”

“He made a business out of a cure for radiation because he thought it would make money, but he gave up on aging because it’s a lot of work and tricky to manage. That’s the kind of person Ryu Young-Joon is. He’s the one who killed your grandmother!”

“Father!”

“...”

Masumoto trembled. He couldn’t bear the thought of the nuclear plant he was so confident in exploding. He couldn’t accept that it had killed his mother.

“Not... Not me. This is because of Ryu Young-Joon. I cannot forgive him.”

“Father, you know that’s not true!”

“We’ve arrived at the gym,” said the first responder. “Please wait inside, and take good care of your father.”

Then, he led Masumoto and Kyohei off the vehicle, but Masumoto didn’t enter the gym.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go to that bastard, Ryu Young-Joon. I always pay back when I get hit.”

“Ha... Father. Do you know how hard he tried to prevent this disaster? Now he’s even willing to treat radiation exposure. Please, just stop...”

“If you don’t know anything, just stay put. I’m going out for a while.”

Masumoto left Kyohei behind and staggered back the way he came.

*

“What do you mean you’re not going to get the treatment?”

Hishijima’s jaw dropped in shock.

“I heard there are only about five hundred residents with severe radiation exposure,” said Atabe. “But the medical expenses per person are significant. Director Hishijima, we already don’t have enough money to clean up the contaminated water from Fukushima, but should we have to spend astronomical amounts of money cleaning up the Tohoku mess and treating people who were exposed to radiation?”

“We have to pay that and get the treatment! Do you really not know why it is so expensive? All of A-GenBio has been working on developing a treatment for radiation exposure for a week now! We wouldn’t be in this situation if we had stopped the plant to begin with. Since we arrested Doctor Ryu, he had no choice but to take a step back and put all his energy into developing the treatment procedure!” Hishijima shouted.

Atabe bit his lower lip and stared out the window.

“That’s the problem.” he said.

“Just by predicting the nuclear explosion, Ryu Young-Joon’s image has skyrocketed, and we’ve become the big, bad villains. But if he also succeeds in treating radiation exposure, imagine how the public will react. A foreigner stopping a disaster that the government couldn’t prevent? It’s ridiculous. What does that make us look like? If we can’t do it, he can’t do it either.”

Hishijima’s expression hardened in disbelief.

“No... Sir, are you serious?”

“It’s a matter of trust in the government. If Ryu Young-Joon doesn’t carry out the radiation treatment, our mistake is merely that we trusted TEPCO too much and didn’t grasp the severity of the Tohoku plant during our investigation. We just need to take responsibility for that part,” Atabe said.

“But if we pay a massive amount of tax money to treat patients, we’ll only draw more hatred. People aren’t that heartbroken over a few hundred elderly people in villages dying, but if we let an easily preventable disaster grow and waste an enormous amount of tax money, they’ll pour out criticism. Our cabinet’s incompetence will be highlighted even more.”

“.. Honestly, it’s true that we were incompetent,” Hishijima said with a sigh.

“Yes, I admit it too. But the government still needs the people’s trust and respect. That’s the only way we can come together and overcome the nuclear disaster that’s happened now. If Ryu Young-Joon succeeds in treating radiation dose, the Japanese people will no longer trust our cabinet.”

“But on what grounds do we have to refuse radiation treatment? Do you think the citizens will accept us giving up their lives to save money?”

“That’s not what we’ll say. Didn’t they rush through the preclinical experiments anyway?” Atabe said. “Announce that we will not allow A-GenBio to use our people as guinea pigs for research based on flawed data.”

“Ryu Young-Joon’s technology will be successful...” Hishijima said. “The preclinical data is not flawed, either. In the past week, A-GenBio has sacrificed ten thousand rats and used six hundred beagles. Do you know that there are quite a few experimental groups that have been successfully cured? It’s a promising trial.”

“Yeah, it will succeed if it’s anything like the preclinical trials.”

“Sir, if we refuse the radiation treatment, and then A-GenBio shows that it works, we will be in even worse shape.

“But how can they show that?” Atabe asked. “It’s not like nuclear explosions are a common occurrence. How can they show that the technology will succeed if they don’t have patients to test it on? This technology will die if we keep our mouths shut.”

“So we’re going to let all the exposed technicians and citizens near the Tohoku plant die?”

“It’s a necessary sacrifice for the country to move forward. And there aren’t many of them, right?”

Hishijima dropped his head, devastated.

Atabe added, “I want you to take command of the site and help the patients pass away as peacefully as possible. I’ll leave the field to you.”

“... Yes, sir,” Hishijima said. “I’ll do as you say.”

*

Around four hundred patients were receiving emergency treatment for radiation exposure at Tohoku General Hospital. However, the treatment mainly consisted of administering antihistamines or steroids to suppress inflammatory responses and decontaminating skin of radioactive materials. The DNA in their cells throughout their bodies was shattered into pieces, and they couldn’t dissect each tiny, invisible cell and reassemble the broken DNA one by one.

There was nothing they could do besides excise necrotic tissue, suppress inflammatory responses, and provide pain relief to reduce suffering. The four hundred patients, with skin splitting and oozing pus, coughing up blood as their tissues rotted, created a scene that resembled hell.

Even veteran doctors found the sight chilling and nerve-wracking, so it was terrifying enough to make the rural doctors at Tohoku General Hospital want to run away.

Takeru, the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare had set up a control tower in the hospital director’s office to manage the situation. Now, he was consulting with Young-Joon.

“Half of the patients are expected to die within two weeks, which is an overestimate,” Takeru said.

“We can treat them in that duration. Right now, the doctors and developers at the Next Generation Hospital who have done preclinical work are bringing the treatment, though there isn’t much yet,: Young-Joon replied, ‘

“But when are you going to give us clinical approval? We need that so we can prepare,” Park Joo-Hyuk asked.

“Normally, I could have given it to you on my own authority, but since the matter at hand is so great, the prime minister told me to report to him...” Takeru siad. “But Director Hishijima went to report it, so he should be back soon.”

Thud!

Before he could finish, Hishijina burst into the room. He looked at Young-Joon and Park Joo-Hyuk with a look of mixed emotions.

“Did you get clearance for the clinical trial?” Takeru asked.

“...”

Hishijima clenched his jaw and walked over to Young-Joon.

“Doctor Ryu...”

A teardrop fell from his eyes.

“What is it? He told you that you can’t do the clinical trial?” Young-Joon asked, alarmed by the strange atmosphere.

“...”

Hishijima clenched his fists and slammed the clinical trial consent form on the table.

“You can succeed, right?” he asked Young-Joon.

“It will succeed.”

Hishijima pulled out a pen and left his signature on the form.

“I just authorized it. I’m going to process it this evening, and it will bypass the Prime Minister. I am the legal approval authority for this clinical trial anyway; if I authorize it, the prime minister cannot do anything about it,” he said. “This is not an overreach of power but is indeed insubordination. I might be dismissed at any moment, but I don’t care. I will see this situation through and then resign with my own hands.”

“...”

“I am the Director of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, the highest institution representing Japan’s health and science education. If I misuse the budget, I will be seen as an incompetent politician. However, if I’m going to be incompetent anyway, I would rather remain a scientist than a politician. So, Doctor Ryu...”

Hishijima suddenly knelt down. He bowed his head to Young-Joon.

“Please help us. I beg you. I cannot give up like this.”

*

The key players in the fight against incurable diseases in Nicaragua boarded a plane to Japan. They were the elite medical staff intensively trained at Next-Generation Hospital and A-GenBio. Along with them were the scientists who, in just ten days, had completed a significant portion of the preclinical experiments using a single DNA sequence sent by Young-Joon

Any member of this peculiar organization could easily secure a professorship at any university, but yet at A-GenBio, they were considered ordinary scientists.

“We will begin the report on what we’ve learned from the preclinical trials conducted by all seven laboratories.”

Cheon Ji-Myung, the lead on this project, began the briefing in front of Young-Joon, the lab directors, and the hospital's chief physicians.

“We inserted a chromosomal rearrangement gene into universal T-cells in the form of a plasmid for transient expression. This isn’t a personalized treatment but becomes a widely applicable cell therapy. When the T-cells reach the patient’s damaged tissues, they will be destroyed by the cytokine concentration, and the substances derived from

Deinococcus radiodurans

within the cells will enter the patient’s cells.”

“How will it be administered?” asked one of the doctors.

“It’s diffusion according to localization. In the early apoptosis stage, the patient’s cell membranes become unstable and more permeable. Our drug diffuses into the cells due to a simple concentration gradient and does not enter healthy cells. We tested one hundred twenty drug delivery methods on animal models without cell experiments, and this was the most effective,” Cheon Ji-Myung said.

“For patients in the prodromal stage, depending on the radiation exposure, we administered 0.2 or 0.5 milliliters of the clinical drug AR-1 intravenously per kilogram of the patient’s body weight, as shown in the table.”

Cheon Ji-Myung flipped through the slides to show the preclinical data.

“At this point, we had a one hundred percent success rate. For patients in the latent period, we increased the dose to one milliliter per kilogram, regardless of the exposure amount. But if there are signs that they’ve reached the manifest stage, then we have to AR-2. Unlike AR-1, AR-2 contains steroids in addition to T-cells, and trace amounts of antibiotics to prevent infection.”

“Do you treat patients who have been internal exposed by breathing coolant vapors the same way?”

“Yes. However, patients exposed to concentrations greater than five grays (Gy) should receive AR-3 by inhalation into the lungs while AR-2 is given intravenously,” Cheon Ji-Myung said. “Finally, there may be cases where we are proceeding with a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. These are patients with doses over twelve grays, and we have to assume that their normal bone marrow cells have been wiped out. We have to proceed with induced differentiation and stem cell production from intact tissue.”

“The engineers who were working inside the plant must have received that much radiation,” said the director of Tohoku General Hospital.

Young-Joon was awestruck as he listened to the presentation. The seven labs had combined their efforts to produce something that, although momentary, were comparable to Rosaline’s achievements. He wondered just how many researchers had shed their blood, sweat, and tears and stayed up all night over the past ten days for this research.

“If the radiation dose is that high, they will die within just a few days,” said Young-Joon. “Well, the treatment will work properly regardless. Let’s proceed with the treatment quickly.”

*

Song Ji-Hyun checked into a hotel slightly away from the Tohoku disaster area.

“Is this the right place?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m supposed to meet Ryu Young-Joon here,” Rosaline replied.

“I need to head back to my meeting,” Song Ji-Hyun said.

“Okay. Don’t worry about me, Baek Jun-Tae is here too,” Rosaline reassured her.

Baek Jun-Tae from the K-Cops security team was feeling particularly responsible because he had failed to stop a mysterious assailant and had suddenly fainted.

“I owe you a lot, Doctor Song. This time, I will do my absolute best and protect her!” Baek Jun-Tae declared.

“Then, I’ll leave it to you,” Song Ji-Hyun said as she greeted Baek Jun-Tae and waved to Rosaline.

She got into her car and headed towards Tohoku nuclear power plant, checking her phone as she went.

[To Doctor Song Ji-Hyun. We have already confirmed the details through the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. As you suggested, our Tohoku Fire Department will deploy all personnel and resources for the large-scale decontamination of the eight million becquerels of radiation released by the nuclear explosion. We have prepared fifteen helicopters as you mentioned. Upon your arrival...]

Song Ji-Hyun scrolled to the next message. It was a message from Cellijenner.

[We’ve finished transferring the metabolism gene group of the radiation-eating bacteria to the volcanium. It’s supposed to work the same way Doctor Ryu used it to stop the terrorist attack at the GSC before: the volcanium will fly around and eat up the radiation leaked into the atmosphere, then die. Please send us a reply as soon as you can.]