Chapter 76: The Conqueror of AIDS (10)

“Ack!” shouted Nicholas, who was watching TV, as he quickly got up. “What is he doing…?” Everyone froze as it was so shocking.

Nicholas thought that it wouldn't be easy to break the strong belief of anti-vaxxers with some vague logic and persuasion, so he expected Young-Joon to take strong action, given his personality. But he didn’t think it would be this dramatic. To administer the vaccine and HIV to himself?

“Wait, he’s putting HIV inside his own body? Is Doctor Ryu crazy?”

“Can he do that?” Joo Hwa-Young, the lab director of Lab Five, asked Nicholas as they were watching TV together.

“Whether he can or not, people usually aren’t able to do that, no matter how confident they are in their product,” Nicholas said.

“Isn’t human testing against research methods?”

“Um…”

Nicholas thought for a moment.

“It is normally against research ethics for the frontline experimenter to experiment with a sample from their bodies,” Joo Hwa-Young said.

“But Director Joo, Doctor Ryu is not only the frontline experimenter, but the project leader,” Nicholas replied.

It was normally against research ethics for a frontline experimenter to experiment with their own sample; it was banned by law, and the project leader would get punished. This wasn’t originally in the ethics guidelines, but it was created after a professor at a university forcibly collected eggs from his female students and conducted stem cell experiments.

“The reason the human research guidelines prohibit the self-experimentation of researchers is to protect them. If they allow that, superiors like a CEO or professors can force their subordinate scientists to donate samples or do experiments,” Nicholas said.

“That’s true.”

“But it isn’t a problem if you use the project leader’s sample.”

“That is also true.”

Joo Hwa-Young nodded.

There were two key points in determining research ethics in human subject research experiments: the first was whether the subject fully understood the experiment, and the second was whether the experiment occurred under completely voluntary consent. The frontline experimenter could fulfill the first condition better than anyone, but the law fundamentally prevented it as there was a risk of problems arising in voluntary consent.

Then what about project leaders? Because they were the manager of the entire project, they knew more about the purpose, principle, and the side effects of the experiment better than the frontline experimenter. There was no worry about them being coerced into the experiment or the donation of a sample as there was no one to give them orders about the experiment because they were the manager. As such, the project leader was exempt from the research guidelines of human subject research; there were no stipulated provisions at all.

Because of this, professors who burned with the passion to experiment often used their own bodies to experiment. Young-Joon also wasn’t the first person to administer a vaccine to their own arm. A few professors who studied vaccines had done this before the first phase of clinical trials.

These people weren’t even far from home; someone like Lee Sang-Hee, a veterinary professor at Chungnam National University in Korea, had injected a vaccine for bird flu into their arm. It was to test its effectiveness before the clinical trial. Someone like Kim Min, a famous parasitology professor, had once put parasites in their eye and cultivated them.

“But still, injecting HIV is too dangerous…” Joo Hwa-Young said in a worried tone.

“He’s probably showing some gut because he saw that a target antibody was created after the vaccine injection,” Nicholas replied. “He really is bold. Sacrificing his own body for the advancement of science.”

In A-Gen’s lab, a video that Young-Joon was filming live through the microscope was on the screen. The camera that was filming him also turned their cameras toward the video. Huge cells and tiny, dot-like viruses showed up on the screen.

—Let’s take a look together at what happens to these viruses.

As they listened to Young-Joon, Joo Hwa-Young asked, “Is Doctor Ryu going to show the immune response to the virus live right now?”

“It seems like it.”

“But it won’t be easy,” Joo Hwa-Young said. “I don’t know if you know this, but I studied molecular imaging in the past. It’s not easy to use a microscope that can observe viruses, and filming something like that isn’t just about how skilled someone is at using a microscope.”

“Let’s see what kind of miraculous science he will show us this time.”

* * *

The microscope was the most effective tool for humans to enter the microworld. The true value of biology began rising to the surface after Leeuwenhoek began studying microbes and Robert Hooke began studying cells. But the scientific community had yet to properly film a virus and the immune response to catch the virus.

Why were they unable to do so when they had a microscope with enough magnification? It was because after magnifying a part of the microworld like that, it was difficult to figure out which ones were the white blood cells, tissue cells, and the virus. It was similar to how it would be impossible to determine a grain of rice if it was enlarged to one thousand times its size.

Because of reasons like this, molecular imaging, the technology of observing the microworld through microscopes, had been established as its own field of study in science as it was extremely difficult work.

Things like observing viruses or filming the differentiation process of certain cells were often published in top journals like

Science

or

Nature

. There were quite a lot of scientists that studied molecular imaging as their performance would be very noticeable with just one good picture. Even so, there was no scientist who had succeeded in filming the immune response to a virus.

But not anymore.

“I put in four different kinds of dye in this blood sample. They will stain different types of white cells so that we can observe them at the same time.”

𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Only colorless and translucent cell masses were on the screen where the dye had not yet worked. There were black dots that looked like viruses, but their movements weren’t captured accurately. It was because they were too small and they kept moving out of focus.

“The dyes will stain neutrophils, B-cells, T-cells, and macrophages. Now, I also don’t know which of these giant white blood cells are which. But you can tell if you stain them.”

This dye was a fluorescently tagged antibody that recognized the biomaterials on the surface of the white blood cells. Young-Joon would be able to dye them according to what kind of type they were. For example, the dye would paint neutrophils green from their high expression of CXCL12. Additionally, he added a red fluorescent protein on the capsid of HIV.

Young-Joon made a darkroom by putting a lid on the chamber, then irradiated with a light that fluoresced the fluorescent proteins. Numerous red dots appeared on the monitor, and large cells that were emitting green light were following the red dots.

“The cells that are shining green are neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. They are one of the first T-cells to notice and react to a bacterial or viral infection,” Young-Joon said. “Can you see the small green dots that are left in the neutrophil’s tracks? These are signs that the neutrophil leaves. It’s a cell fragment with something called CXCL12.”

Young-Joon went on and explained further.

“Now, a white blood cell called a T-cell will follow this path.”

A little after, they could see cells that were stained yellow come into view.

“T-cells play a key role in regulating the overall immune system. And HIV recognizes a substance called CD on the surface of these cells and infects them,” Young-Joon said.

Red dots swarmed near the yellow cells, but even after time, they could not infiltrate the T-cells.

“But this time, they can’t infect the T-cell. Why do you think that is?” Young-Joon asked as he turned to the audience, but no one could answer.

“Do you see these gray dots on the surface of the red virus?” Young-Joon asked as he zoomed in on the screen a little more. “These are antibodies. Antibodies are biomaterials that bind to viruses. The virus cannot infiltrate the T-cells because the antibodies are attached to the virus, changing their structure.”

Young-Joon explained more.

“When the virus cannot infect the T-cells, the host of this virus, and gets stalled, the macrophages that follow the signal of the neutrophils will track them down.”

Young-Joon pointed to the purple cells that appeared on the screen.

“Macrophages are cells that engulf and destroy things that are weird and suspicious in our bodies.”

Now, the macrophages were swallowing up the red dots.

“Because macrophages have powerful digestive enzymes inside, they fragment everything that comes into the cell by endocytosis and destroy it,” Young-Joon explained. “This mechanism removes the virus from the body of a vaccinated person. It’s the first time I’m seeing it as well.”

Now, most of the red dots had disappeared. After they were all eliminated, the white blood cells began to scatter.

Young-Joon turned off the monitor. The broadcasting screen also returned to the camera that was filming the podium in the lab. Young-Joon turned to face the audience.

“The immune response is almost over now. Does anyone have any questions?”

The audience was silent. No one among the opponents could say a word. Even if logical explanations about the mechanism of vaccines and the process of antibody production were given to anti-vaxxers, their beliefs didn’t change easily.

But science was able to give irrefutable evidence. People who believed that the Earth was flat like a religion would have no choice but to accept the truth that the Earth was round if someone took them to outer space in a rocket and made a circle around it.

Young-Joon injected himself with the vaccine and HIV, and he filmed the immune response with an antibody-staining technology and an ultra-precise microscope and presented it as a video. Who in the audience would have thought they would see such a thing?

Producer Na Sung-Jin gulped as he looked at the audience’s expressions. They made the atmosphere for a live debate and whatever, but what debate? He had given Young-Joon gloves and put him in the ring to do a little sparring, but Young-Joon just pulled out a gun on the first round and shot the opponent.

‘How is this a debate? The other side was obliterated in ten minutes…’

Kim Pil-Young, the person who was the most fiercely opposed, was also silent.

“As you just saw, you can stop a virus from infecting your body if you have antibodies. Antibodies are produced by the white blood cells called B-cells. But for them to make it, they need a recipe, and the vaccine is the drug that delivers that recipe.

“...”

The audience was still silent.

“I know why you are against vaccines,” Young-Joon said. “It’s because you’re afraid. You would have heard a lot of stories that there are side effects, or that someone was sick after getting vaccinated.”

“...”

“Then, do vaccines really have side effects?” Young-Joon asked. “To be honest, no scientist will be able to be one hundred percent confident. Side effects could show up depending on the person who got the vaccine.”

Young-Joon approached the audience.

“There is nothing in the world that doesn’t have side effects. Your life could be in danger if you drink ten liters of water at once. Cats are usually safe animals, but they cause allergies in some people,” Young-Joon said. “If vaccines are made by humans, they will definitely have effects in some unlucky people. Side effects that couldn’t be found when conducting a clinical trial with hundreds of people could be found when it is conducted with millions of people. But we use vaccines because those side effects are weak and don’t happen often; the gain of using vaccines is much higher than the risks of side effects.”

Kim Pil-Young’s eyes met Young-Joon’s. He lowered his head, but he didn’t know why.

Young-Joon said, “The Lancet paper that states the MMR vaccine causes autism that the man sitting in front here mentioned earlier. After it was announced, many people refused to get the MMR vaccine. What do you think happened?”

“...”

“Measles, which was on the verge of eradication, was revived. MMR is a measles vaccine. There was a measles epidemic that developed countries like the U.S. hadn’t experienced before.”

Kim Pil-Young’s ears reddened a little.

“Infectious diseases find small weaknesses in our immunity and enter. They spread quickly, paralyzing our society. And the only way to fill those weaknesses is vaccines,” Young-Joon said. “Currently, our vaccine was developed with a formula that can produce antibodies to all seventeen variants. It has shown significant results in chimpanzees and is in preparation for clinical trials. From now on, we will start clinical trials with the International Vaccine Institute in areas like Kamathipura and other places with high infection rates.”