The Long Life of Kara Zor-El

Chapter 17

November 2021

It has now been around a year and 2 months since Kara and Lena shared their first kiss after Kara saved Lena from the explosion and admitted to Lena and herself that she loves her. It has therefore been just over a year since Kara admitted to Lena that her biggest fear in life is that she will have to witness everyone she loves die because she will outlive them.

Luckily for Kara Lena has been working in her private lab several times a week to find a solution to this problem. At first Lena considered making something to give Kara a human lifespan, but Lena wasn't comfortable with the idea of shortening Kara's life, even if she knows Kara would do it. So Lena then began exploring the possibility of extending human's lives. The research itself was slow at first, and frustrating for Lena as she knew that she wanted to figure it out more than anything else. Eventually after 4 months of failures Lena had a breakthrough. Lena was able to isolate genetic material inside stem cells. What this meant is Lena could then run a simulated programme, and she found if she was able to cause the body to release a similar response to that of the material that makes up stem cells, then she could slow down a person's ageing process dramatically.

After this Lena spent months figuring out what her next steps were. She spent close to $150 million of her own finances on this project, and she was happy to do it. Eventually Lena was able to create a drug using a formula equation that she invented herself that could theoretically extend someone's life. The drug itself would have to be taken in 6 month increments and unfortunately cost close to $5 million per dose due to the ingredients needed. So this wasn't going to be something that Lena could ever provide to the wider public, but that was never her goal. The drug was tied to her genetic marker so it would actually most likely kill anyone else who injected themselves with it. But Lena could use her equation to easily create the drug with another person's genetic marker.

Of course Lena isn't a complete mad scientist she didn't just invent the drug and run hundreds of simulations and then use it on herself, that would be crazy. Lena is well aware of the history of scientists creating drugs that they know will either not be approved for human testing or will take far too long to get the results the scientist wanted, to know if the drug is safe or not, resulting in these scientists testing the drugs on themselves. As a result of this a large majority of the time these scientists would end up killing themselves, usually trying a drug they had invented to save them, or one of their loved ones, which was horribly ironic. So Lena knew that testing it on herself was out of the question, at least without doing some animal testing first. Lena knew that she couldn't test it on humans other than herself, as frankly the study might be approved, but would be far too expensive to give to a group of 1,000+ people to get a reliable sample and it would take longer than Lena's life to get results. But Lena was willing to take the risk, she trusted her science, as long as animal tests went well.

Lena isn't a big proponent for animal testing, but she knows it's a necessary to save human lives. So Lena's approach is to do animal testing but to make sure it's as safe as possible. The first animal test took place on a collection of fruit flies, all of whom were about halfway through their 40 day lifespan. Lena was able to give the drug to all the flies through a gas, and then just had to monitor the results daily. After 20 days all the flies were still alive, after 40 days they were still alive, even after 100 days they were still alive. This was an incredible result for Lena, so she moved on to test on pigs.

For the test on the pigs Lena knew she wouldn't have to wait long this time, as she could monitor the DNA/blood changes in the pigs before and after the drugs had been applied. Of course Lena couldn't exactly draw blood from a bunch of flies. So Lena injected the pigs with the drug designed for them. A few weeks later the results were astounding. The blood results in comparison showed that her drug had been able to not only slow down cell death, which is common in all species, even those that are not dying, but it even had been able to repair a large amount of cells to an extent. It showed with 95% certainty that Lena's drug worked.