Richard Lerna

You couldn't Let Go, could you ?

### Position

Head of the School of Biosciences at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology (formerly)

### Storylines

Military storyline

“*[...] I would appreciate it if he would keep ethics out of my lab and in his classroom, where it belongs. I've got enough on my plate keeping the Dean happy and the school funded. [...]*”
—Personal Logs: Lerna, R.

**Dr. Richard Lerna** is a character in Fallout: FROST.

## Overview

With one of his responsibilities being to sustain and expand financial appropriation, Dr. Lerna, in his role as Head of the School of Biosciences at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, held what possibly was one of the most influential positions in his employers institution next to the Dean of Biosciences.

In this capacity he did not limit himself to mere fundraising, but also actively pursued collaboration between different institutions in and outside of the School of Biosciences/CIT in order to make use of their expertise and facilities, notably Parsons State Insane Asylum and an SoB/CIT sister lab located in Oslo.

Pursuing their goal of improving human physiology and its regenerative capabilities, Lerna and his collaborators went as far as amputating limbs without any medical indication, theorizing that their testing subjects would be capable of regrowing them, if treated with genetic material extracted from organisms exposing increased regenerative capabilities.

Codenamed "HR" line, these human testing subjects were additionally exposed to a multitude of hazards, ranging from infectious diseases to prolonged radiation, while Lerna and his research teams tried to counter their effects by using what they called "gene tonic", which at one point included the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV).

In an effort to further improve regeneration times and counter cell decay, Lerna decided to start facilitating brain implants starting with test subject "HR-D4".

Considerations about possible mental effects of those implants lead to Lerna singling out testing subject "HR-D4" to be transferred to Oslo for further research shortly before the Great War - only to order its immediate return. By this, Lerna unknowingly paved the way for what will become his own demise and one of the most prevalent chain of events in the Commonwealth.

Albeit it is unknown, if the full extend of Lerna's research, especially the highly questionable nature of his methods, was known outside of a comparably small circle of graduate students, colleagues and collaborators, reports indicate that the first and sole recorded resistance on the grounds of ethics came from a fellow scholar at the SoB, Dr. Earnest Flemmel, who is reported to subsequently have become another testing subject in Lerna's "HR" line and ultimately was admitted to Parsons State Asylum for further experimentation.

Despite Lerna having expressed his concerns about the actions of his fellow scholar, his involvement in Dr. Flemmel purportedly agreeing to voluntarily participate in the experiments can not be sourced from surviving reports, although it would seem to have been a very efficient way for Lerna to silence his critic.

While his efforts in genetic engineering initially were solely focused on improving methods and technologies for sustaining and eventually extending human life by utilizing implants and changes in genetic code, repeated setbacks ultimately led him to believe, that the limiting factor was the human body itself, and that no augmentation, even if as sophisticated as Robert House's life-support systems, would be able to counter its main inherent shortcoming: Mortality.

Concluding, that the only way to overcome this limitation was to "let go of [...] flesh and bone", he seems to have considered using the neural scanner still present in the Institute five years after the Great War for transferring his consciousness into a machine.

Unable or unwilling to take this final step, Lerna is caught up by his past involvement with what is known to him as "HR-D4", and to most others simply as "the package" - Janus, in pursue of the package, manages to enter the CIT Concourse, leaving a message to what he assumes to be "HR-D4" after providing final proof to Lerna about the importance of Letting Go.

Lerna is found dead in the CIT Concourse.