Peregrinator wrote:fallsfromtrees wrote:I believe that comment was a sarcastic aside, as opposed to a statement of Mesa's intent. I certainly took it that way.
I suppose with respect to the slave lines it could depend on what the customer wanted. (And in any case, would it be Mesa or Manpower that administers the prolong treatment, or the customer? I tend to think the latter.)
That said, if one views the slave lines as a test bed for genetic improvements to be applied to the alpha/beta/gamma lines, it's unlikely that Mesa would deliberately introduce any genes that caused the subject to be resistant to prolong. Though they might try this or that modification that had the ultimate effect of doing so.
It was mentioned in either ToF or AAC that slaves and their offspring had an extremely high chance of genetic health issues due to the DNA experimentation, and many would have a very short lifespan (relatively) without treatment, and Torch was actively scanning all citizens to give treatment.
This doesn't appear to be true in the Star lines, so their modifications are definitely more... deliberate and measured.