I Became a Plague Doctor in a Romance Fantasy Novel

Episode 67. Fleming, Alexander Fleming (2)

Episode 67. Fleming, Alexander Fleming (2)

Meanwhile. Mint’s room. The Princess was lying on her bed. Hugging the doll her teacher had given her.

Even Mint herself thought it was a bit forced, but she’d actually gotten a vacation schedule.

They say it’s a side trip because of the conference, but still. Whitby was definitely a resort. Makes you wonder if they held the conference there *on purpose*.

Anyway! Mint was in a pretty good mood. How good? Good enough to go on a trip.

1,000 petri dishes of blue mold.

The work finished an hour later. After a long slog, Istina and Amy finally completed the blue mold inoculation on all thousand petri dishes.

Istina took Amy to a restaurant near the academy. Not a place Istina could usually afford, given her wallet situation.

But she was still carrying the wallet she’d gotten from the professor last time he asked her to buy cookies, so it didn’t matter. It was the professor’s money anyway…

But why didn’t the professor realize his wallet was missing? Does he have multiple wallets?

“Man, I’m stiff. A thousand dishes…”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

Amy stretched, then hesitated a little.

“Hey, um, what do you think of our professor?”

“He’s a good person.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, yeah. He’s a good person.”

Istina glanced around. Since they were near the academy, the professor himself, or someone close to him, might be around?

“Honestly, more than good. He’s just…weird. His methods, everything.”

His personality too. But Istina didn’t feel the need to state the obvious.

“Looks like it. Still, didn’t the professor save a lot of lives because of it?”

“Yeah.”

“Is working with Istina sunbae manageable?”

“For me, what else. I definitely recommend it. I think I made a good choice, and I sincerely think it’s great that Amy joined too.”

Of course, Istina’s perspective was a little biased. If Amy joined, at least some of Istina’s workload would decrease.

“The professor knows way more, is capable of more, than what it seems from the outside.”

“Really?”

“Even if you look at papers. It’s not just about publishing a paper, is it? Publishing a paper in a few weeks, having discussions about it, defending your position, and moving on to the next topic without a problem…the whole process itself…”

“Isn’t humanly possible?”

“Right.”

From Istina’s perspective, it didn’t just look like she knew or came up with the content.

It wasn’t about knowing, it was the fact that she controlled the situation that didn’t make sense and was amazing.

“It might look amazing on the surface too, but. It’s something that’s only possible if you know all the results research will produce, the processes it will go through, and even all the possible rebuttals.”

“That’s weird.”

“I don’t know how she does it. Sometimes, it feels like she can see ghosts.”

Amy nodded this time as well.

“Are there any other special things I need to know?”

Of course, there were more than just one or two. Istina glanced around the restaurant again.

“There’s, what do you call it. There’s a professor’s student who comes to the lab. Princess Mint.”

“Ah. Is she a real princess? Why?”

Istina, at first, was hesitant, but after confirming, it turned out she really was a Princess. Istina nodded.

“The real Princess. She’s got a lot of stuff to do, and from experience, you shouldn’t talk to her, just say hello.”

“Ah.”

“Our professor is from the Imperial Medical Corps. But he’s not one to be all formal or anything. He’s not scary, either.”

Amy scratched her head.

Even after thinking about it, she still couldn’t grasp what this professor’s lab was all about. Should she have trusted her gut feeling about not going to grad school?

“Do they give out co-authorships well?”

“Yeah. They take good care of you. For the epidemic dysentery paper, I was even the lead author.”

If she had to boast about herself, she could do that quite a bit too. Istina had struggled these past few months, but she had also gotten a lot of opportunities because of it.

“Amy, you should meet him yourself. The professor isn’t that picky either.”

The conclusion was that he’d probably be a good person. Maybe.

A while ago, one of my students came to see me. Said they wanted to be a graduate student in my lab. It was a truly moving moment.

Even with all the achievements, I was still a new professor, barely a year since I’d taken the position.

For someone to trust in me and invest a few years of their life – that was definitely not an easy choice.

I had to live up to their expectations, so they wouldn’t regret it. Getting early graduation permissions, creating an integrated Bachelor’s-Master’s program, I’d put up quite a fight for those—

“Ah. Hello! I’m Amy.”

“Yeah, good to have you.”

Amy had arrived at the lab.

She had a quite different vibe from Istina. Maybe it was because she was new to the job, but she was, how should I put it? Fresh-feeling.

I’d dissected alongside Amy back in the day, during that anatomy lab. But this felt different. How long would that energy last?

Grad students and professors didn’t all start out as drab people. It’s just that, working and studying, they became that way to adapt.

“I heard you were in the lab with Istina yesterday. How was it? Did she make you do anything?”

“Yesterday, I just touched a ton of petri dishes.”

Ah. Blue mold.

That must have been rough, wrestling with blue mold petri dishes all day on her first day.

Sometimes I think Istina’s kind of a hardass.

Is the first thing she makes new lab members do really petri dish grunt work? That seems like a bit of an issue with character.

“That must have been rough, from day one.”

“It was okay though! It wasn’t hard.”

“Did they explain *why* you were doing it?”

“Yeah. To make a drug that kills bacteria, right?”

When that’ll actually happen, who knows.

But, clearly proving that antibiotics exist is how related research will progress, so it’s more academically significant, for now.

“Is that actually possible?”

“It’s possible.”

“It’s harder to kill mold than people, though. You leave a person in soap all day, they’re dead, but mold can just hang in there.”

That’s what makes it so difficult, yeah.

Amy sat down at my desk, chattering away. How inspiring the class was, what her first impression of Istina was.

Then, mid-sentence. Amy seemed to have remembered something, and stopped talking, looking at me.

“But I just didn’t get it, you know?”

“What?”

“What’s the reason you think blue mold would produce a substance that kills bacteria?”

“Well, couldn’t it?”

Senior Fleming had told me. But there wasn’t a way to just explain it. I thought about how to answer.

“Isn’t blue mold also a living thing that causes decay? It’s similar to bacteria. Is there any reason mold would kill bacteria?”

At first glance, it did seem that way.

“Exactly. I’m asking if there’s any basis for it?”

“Yeah.”

As always, Amy was sharp, and couldn’t hold back her questions. Even if she was wrong.

Just like how the discovery of penicillin made by blue mold wasn’t a coincidence, the fact that the blue mold produces that substance isn’t a coincidence either.

Amy’s speculation, based on their similarity, did have logical grounds. Bacteria and mold are both living things that cause plagues and decay.

It was a question of whether we shouldn’t expect mold to kill bacteria, really.

I took out a fresh petri dish.

“Take a look at this petri dish.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve seen a petri dish with bacteria growing, right? They take over the space like they’re playing territory games.”

Amy nodded. If you just leave bacteria to grow, they’ll spread and grow all over the petri dish.

Mold is the same.

“What if there are different types of bacteria?”

“I don’t know. There must be a difference in their spreading power, right?”

Yeah. Each bacterium has a different rate of spread. Bacteria and fungi have different abilities too.

“The thing we’re trying to find is a blue mold with sterilization properties, right? If we succeed in finding it, what would it look like in a petri dish?”

Having sterilization properties means preventing bacteria from growing.

“Well… wouldn’t it be that bacteria aren’t growing near the mold? You wouldn’t see the bacteria dying with your eyes.”

Though under a microscope, you can actually see penicillin bursting bacteria in real time.

“Think about it from the mold’s perspective.”

“Think about it from the mold’s perspective?”

Amy made a look of disbelief.

It’s like a land grab.

Mold can’t just keep up with the reproduction rate of bacteria. Though, they can use more complex structures like slime molds or spores.

“Earlier you compared it to a land grab. That bacteria can’t grow near mold means that the mold has occupied that resource.”

An idea that originates from evolutionary theory.

Here, since evolutionary theory is still an unclarified field of study, it might not be understandable that penicillin came about as a result of a resource competition between bacteria and mold.

Yeah. I nodded. The area that the mold occupies in the petri dish, that’s the amount of resources the mold can use. And that’s why mold creates substances to kill bacteria.

“So… a land grab?”

Amy seems to be starting to understand.