Then She Created Man

Then She Created Man

by E. W. Shannon

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. The United States Sentinel does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this article and we are not responsible or liable for any content, accuracy, or quality within the article or for any damage or loss to be caused by and in connection to it.

New York, March 2024

Two months ago, most people had never heard of me, Ria Casey, even though my family's pharmaceutical company, RiaPharm (rye-a-farm), has developed some of the most important cures and treatment therapies of the last fifty years. They certainly wouldn't have stood outside in the sleet and rain to yell obscenities at me based on rumors they saw online. The press and the government have painted me as a mad scientist who should face trial for crimes against humanity instead of mere pharmaceutical fraud. I reject that image. If anything, my crimes were the most pro-humanity of their kind; an attempt to fix some of the broken parts of us...well, men. To be clear, I would never ordinarily write something like this, but this is my attorney's attempt to get me a fair trial, if not in Federal Court, then in the court of public opinion.

I am Ria Hera Casey, my mother made sure my name had three, four, and five letters because her mother once told her 345 represented growth. She always remembered the tiniest of facts said in passing. I was born in Switzerland to two American scientists, my father worked on schizophrenia medications and my mother developed treatments for leukemia; ironically, the disease that would take her life two days after my sixteenth birthday. After her death, my father threw himself into his work and soon started RiaPharm, the company I currently sit at the helm of. They taught me the importance of science and gave me a love for it that continues to this day. Science to them, and me, was never about making billions of dollars, it was a gateway to helping humanity live better lives, to lessen suffering attributed to the aging process, and to help people with mental disorders live as normal lives as possible. It's the reason I still carry fifty-one percent of the stock; I would rather be obligated to humanity than to investors.

Mental disorders were of particular interest to my father and I since both my mother and I had forms of autism. Her autism primarily presented in the form of self-isolation. She only allowed one person into her little world of one and that was my father; I think he was all she could fit in there. From an early age I knew she loved me, would do anything for me, but I never felt close to her. As I aged, my symptoms became more prevalent. My father would call me "the arrow," because once I had an idea in my head, I would be laser focused until the idea proved true or false. During these episodes, the world does not exist to me, it's like when movie directors put a camera on an arrow and fire it at a target, you can see the tip of the arrow and the target, but everything else is a blur.

Most people assume I'm Black, or African American, or of African descent, depending on which country I'm in, but I am a mix of many ethnicities. The United States, where so much of the country still believes in the 'one drop' rule, remains the only place I feel 'black' instead of just human. Both my parents were mixed race, and both could 'pass' if needed, especially if father wore a hat and covered the curly hair I would inherit. I often wonder if they were disappointed in my dark skin, blonde afro, and light green eyes. I often drew attention, especially in Europe in the fifties where dark skin was an anomaly. And just an anomaly, not a detriment.

Father came from a white male stockbroker of Irish descent and an African Parisian woman he met by chance at a party. From pictures I saw of them at different parties in New York during prohibition, I would say they were the epitome of the phrase "zest for life." They never married, opting to live in 'sin' for fifty years. Mother's parents weren't as lucky in where their lives took place. She, a first generation American of Greek descent, was an English teacher at a high school in Dayton, Ohio where he worked as a custodian. No matter how much I searched through my mother's boxes of pictures I could never find one where they held hands or even smiled at one another. To the residents of Dayton, Ohio I doubt they appeared as a married couple, just a white teacher with a black boarder. I guess, at the time, it was safer that way.

Between my mother's autism, my father's workaholic nature, and my inability to make friends, I was always alone, first as a child and then as an adult. When you're alone a lot you get to observe the world around you and, if you're fortunate enough to have people point it out to you, the world at large. My father's work moved us to New York when I was ten and I started noticing protests. Black people, women, gays, and Latinos all started to equate to blocked streets and angry people carrying signs and yelling out chants. Every time I asked my father what a group was protesting, he always answered the same, "White men in some form or another." As I went through high school, college, and on through my doctorate, I carried that thought with me and expanded on it.

Because of my lack of social skills, I had more than enough time to wander the stacks and find books describing the history of global conflict. So many male names, so many idiotic reasons for fighting, so many dead. The glaring absence of female instigators in my study of global conflicts made me question if there was something innately violent in the genetics of men. For many years my hobby, if you want to call it that, was scanning data to find a link between testosterone and violence, but, while the data showed testosterone certainly affected men's moods, it didn't show it as a consistent catalyst for violence. I would wait decades for my science to catch up to my curiosity.

1975 brought the discovery of DNA sequencing just as I was about to start my PhD in biomedical science and "the arrow" was reborn. I would spend the rest of my life focused on a 'what if' while marriage, children, and any sort of normal life passed me by. I didn't care, I needed to find a way to stop the violence of men.

On September 11, 2001, I sat down at my desk after making a cup of tea, felt the ground shake, and then watched as a giant white cloud of pulverized concrete and human remains passed my window and enveloped the city. My secretary, knowing my penchant for disconnecting from the world at large, rushed in with tears running down her face and told me what had happened. Our office and lab, like the rest of the city, stopped. We all went home to check on our families; mine consisted of a few goldfish who always turned away from me and a snail who loved to spit water out of the tank. While everyone else went home and hugged their children, ate comfort food, or stared endlessly at the television, I started creating what would become Lunalaport (loon-al-a-port). I found it poetic when Lunalaport's release date was two weeks after the 2020 election, when an orange male demagog held the United States democracy hostage.

Lunalaport's main, or advertised, purpose was as a long-lasting male contraception implant. The implant has three sections, the first being a rod made of a proprietary combination of anabolic-androgenic steroid and progestogen that releases medication over a five-year period. The next section of the implant contains two medications, the first, a special genetic editor to fix the gene responsible for hair loss. If you're a man losing their hair for any other reason than a genetic predisposition for baldness, then the gene re-programmer won't help you. The other medication in this part of the implant is a proprietary libido enhancer to counter the effects of the contraceptive. The FDA was aware of the contraceptive and the libido enhancer, but not the gene editor for hair loss.

These two sections of the implant served merely as a gimmick to ensure male patients wanted the subdermal implant. It's also why the implant is fluorescent blue, so it shows up as a sort of badge of honor for men. It allowed for men to be proud they were taking the reins of contraception. I have even heard some men got lean and muscular to make it more pronounced. I kept the hair loss reversal a secret and let it come out slowly through social media and, eventually, did a press conference where RiaPharm confirmed the side effect. Because so few people knew about the side effect before the drug's release, RiaPharm scientists and media liaisons were genuinely surprised. You might wonder how I could hide such an amazing thing, but if you ever saw the sea of data created by clinical trials, you'd understand how easy it was to do, especially with the gutted version of the FDA we worked with between 2017 and 2020.

I was surprised at how fast the implant caught on, even before the side effect of hair loss reversal became known. Men took to the transdermal implant almost immediately. I'm sure our ads had a lot to do with that, as well as the blow back to the ads from right-wing conservative groups. They were especially offended by the ad showing a girl facing six men on the dance floor with their implants glowing under the black lights and a tag line reading, "So many more options now. Thanks, Lunalaport." But once men started posting before and after pics of their hair, there was a stampede for the implants. I know of many doctors around the world who spent their days just placing implants, assuming we could get them the product.

Now for the third, and largest section, making up about sixty percent of the 4cm long by 3mm diameter implant. Here is where you will find the culmination of my life's work. Two inventions: Luna and La Port. La Port was the harder of the two to create because its function is to fool the blood brain barrier. It is a modified glucose transport protein attaching to a glucose molecule on one side and Luna on the other, allowing for transport through the blood brain barrier, hence its name which means 'door.' Luna is a combination of a DNA programmer and a proprietary autoantibody that continues to replicate within the body. The DNA programmer part of Luna changes the endothelial tissue of the brain and allows for transfer of the Luna autoantibody through the blood brain barrier. This special autoantibody can enter the brain during times of stress and attach to a N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptor. What is different about the Luna autoantibody versus autoantibodies found naturally in the body is Luna has no risk of encephalitis in the instance there is inflammation present. I know the last few sentences don't mean much to most people, but, in the simplest terms, Lunalaport is akin to giving the patient a low dose of ketamine directly, and only, to a targeted location in the brain. The idea is, if the patient experiences stress then the Lunalaport autoantibodies will act as an antidepressant and curb the patient's (men's) propensity towards violence. The FDA had no knowledge about this section of the implant.

It took some time, but slowly I started to see reports for the instances of rapes, murders, hate crimes, and violent crimes in general falling. Lunalaport was working. A year after our initial product launch, I plotted on a map the places with a twenty percent or greater drop in violent instances and it matched our most saturated distribution areas. At the two-year mark I did it again, except this time used a fifty percent drop in violent instances as my criteria, and again it matched our most saturated distribution areas. All alone in my office one evening, I opened a bottle of Champagne and toasted myself. Just like the rest of my life, the only person to share this experience was a reflection in my office window.

Everything went well until the summer of 2023 when the news reported two deaths from Lunalaport, one in China and the other in India. I immediately flew to China while my assistant went to India. A Chinese government official sat me in a plain room for an hour and then an investigator came in with a smug attitude. He threw down a clear plastic evidence bag containing an inch-long white tube resembling uncooked spaghetti. "Your company make this?"

I took out a real implant and showed it to him. "No, all of ours are fluorescent blue." I picked up the evidence bag and waved it at him, "This one is counterfeit." After many more questions from the authorities, I asked for a brief rundown of the victim's health history. While the Chinese authorities would not let me take the counterfeit implant with me, I was hopeful the Indian authorities might be more cooperative and then the man's health history might show me what killed him.

Shortly I was back on my plane and headed to India. My assistant greeted me on the tarmac. "I got bad news; they cremated the body with the implant still in it. But they did take a picture of the man's arm." She swiped at her phone and brought up a picture of a picture of an arm with that grey-blue tinge found only in the lifeless. 

"This is the best they have," I asked.

"You know how India is. RiaPharm manufactures generics here." I did know how India was, like a pendulum swinging between the best and worst of all things. My assistant continued, "What don't you see?"

"No blue." Another counterfeit.

We ended up spending a week in India and, while tracking down where the man had received his implant, discovered the popularity of Lunalaport had created a black market for imitations. The Indian government shut down the clinic where the victim got the fake implant but assured us there were likely many more. Before we left, I obtained a brief medical history on the man who had died, and my assistant made sure to procure a few of the imitation implants for us to analyze back in New York. It took our lab only a few hours to realize the imitations contained a mix of luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists and finasteride in an attempt to replicate the contraception and hair growth. In basic terms, they were creating hairy chemically castrated men with no interest in sex. For the Luna and the La Port portions of the implant, the counterfeiters had not been very sophisticated. They must have given up trying to figure out what was in that end of the implant and resorted to creating a slow-release rod of ketamine.

The ketamine proved to be the killer. Both men who died had a history of aneurysms and drank heavily. On top of that, the slow-release rod the counterfeiters had manufactured was unstable, resulting in a flood of medication all at once causing undue pressure in the brain and aneurysms as they slept. RiaPharm unleashed a media blitz throughout Asia to warn men of the counterfeits, but twelve more men would die.

Here in the United States, the FDA started studying Lunalaport independently and soon would be showing up at my office asking questions and seizing hard drives. Perhaps a younger me would have held out and made them search for the thumb drive I kept all my data on, but at seventy-one it was kind of fun to show them they had been staring at it the whole time. If you've ever seen a picture of me, you've seen it. It sits tucked behind a Siberian amethyst in a brooch my father bought my mother from Black, Starr and Frost in the fifties.

So, there you have it, the whole story. As I've stated many times before to authorities of every rank, I'm fine with being incarcerated for life, if need be, for pharmaceutical fraud. At this age, and being autistic, spending my remaining days quietly alone in a minimum-security white-collar prison doesn't seem at all like the worse thing. Especially since, at this late stage, it will be almost impossible to reverse what I've done. The 'corrected' gene is dominant and will pass through the population. To undo it would require expensive stem cell therapy I doubt many insurance companies would be willing to pay for.

It should be noted, although I'm sure my attorney will be cross with me for broaching the subject, no civil suits have been brought forward by patients or patients' families. Not once has anyone contacted RiaPharm and complained about how the implant has worked. In fact, even since the realization of the DNA editors in the implant, many mothers with autistic children have inquired about the implant as a means to quell violent outbursts in their children. Sadly, they may have to wait decades for a chance to see if it works. The real implant has had no adverse side effects in four years of distribution, not even any on the exhaustive list of possible side effects our legal department makes us put on medications to cover us from liability.

Countless people in the past few months have asked if I'm sorry for what I've unleashed on the world and my answer is always a resilient 'no.' Sorry for what? I could understand if we still lived in the times of the caveman and a male's aggression could help save his family or his community, but it's 2024 and it's no longer necessary. What do we need with this much aggression and potable anger in a being? We've gone without a mass shooting for over two years. TWO YEARS. Even things I never thought to attribute to male violence, like traffic accidents, have diminished since Lunalaport. I saw a video online of a police chief talking about how his department had finally caught up the backlog of rape kits since they weren't inundated with new ones on a daily basis. No, I am not sorry. Not one bit.

Some will say I'm stupid for nearly collapsing a giant of the pharmaceutical industry and have even heard people saying how disappointed my father would be, but I disagree. He saw the aggression (that would eventually span the globe like a well written ad slogan) in American male eyes when we moved to New York in the sixties and he would have been proud I played a part in correcting men’s violent tendencies. Other people accuse me of playing God. While I don't believe in such an entity, my reply must be: Haven't men been playing God for all eternity?