Lieutenant Worf after being devolved by Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome.
Counselor Troi after being devolved by Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome.
Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome is an artificial disease, accidentally created by Dr. Beverly Crusher aboard the USS Enterprise-D in 2370. Attempting to cure Lieutenant Reginald Barclay of Urodelan flu, Dr. Crusher used a synthetic T-cell to activate the gene that would fight off the infection. However, an anomaly in Barclay's genetic structure caused the T-cell to mutate and activate all of Barclay's dormant genes, including his latent introns. Interaction with the Urodelan virus caused the T-cell to become airborne then spread throughout the ship, causing the crew to "de-evolve". The syndrome was cured by using amniotic fluid to create a retrovirus to eliminate the effects.
Initial symptoms of the disease include abnormal behavior, irritability, hyper-activity or decreased activity, chills, fever and paranoia.
Ultimately the active genes become aggressive, drastically altering the body and causing the suffering patient to physically regress into an earlier form of his or her respective species, or even a combined form of multiple animal-types. (TNG: "Genesis")
List of victims
Though every living life form aboard the Enterprise-D was affected the following is a list of people shown to have been affected.
- Reginald Barclay
- Beverly Crusher
- Dern
- Livingston
- Alyssa Ogawa
- Jean-Luc Picard
- William T. Riker
- Spot
- Deanna Troi
- Worf
Background
The science behind "Genesis" is mostly apocryphal. Activating the transcription of pseudogenes within or outside of introns would not make a human "de-evolve." Instead, the large number of aberrant proteins created would most likely cause death by any number of pathways, however, Dr. Crusher does claim that the synthetic T-cell had mutated, which would no doubt have unknown and unexpected effects on a body.
Toward the end of the episode, Dr. Crusher comments to Barclay that it is traditional to name new diseases after the first patient. If true, this tradition apparently appeared after our own time period. Eponymous diseases (those which carry a name) have almost always been named for the first person to describe them in medical literature (Parkinson's disease; Down's syndrome; Marfan's syndrome; Kartagener's syndrome). Rare exceptions from our time include Legionnaires' disease (so named because the first known outbreak occured at an American Legion convention) and Lou Gehrig's disease (named for its most famous sufferer). Therefore, following modern-day nomenclature, Dr. Crusher would have likely named it Crusher's Protomorphosis Syndrome. Of course, it is entirely possible that Dr. Crusher was just trying to make Reg feel better about what had happened.