--- Murray mjsmith@tcd.ie wrote:
Una,
Hmm, it could be Gan was the first human subject
they tried it on, and they
decided it wasn't a cost effective way of going
about things - perhaps they
realized the limiters would have a short working
life (it breaks down pretty
quickly, doesn't it?) and they'd be better just
executing or imprisoning violent
prisoners.
In Trevor Hoyle's novelisation of the first four episodes, _Blake's 7_, Gan explained to Jenna in Chapter 11 that the limiter implant took place before his trial because 'They needed humans for their research, so I was just handed over'. There is an implication there that he was not the only person experimented on.
I think that Gan would have been an early subject, and that limiters would have been abandoned fairly early on. Implanting and maintaining a limiter involves fairly complex neurosurgery, which doesn't make a lot of sense if the prisoner is just going to be left to rot on Cygnus Alpha. I suspect that the whole op. was just done for research processes - which bit of the brain governs the impulse to kill and can we knock it out without killing the subject ? I think that Gan's fate was an experiment in Neurosurgery, with Gan as a lab rat, not an act of penal reform.
Stephen.
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