Alison Meier was born in Munich, Germany in July 1976. Her early years were much the same as any normal little girl…no broken household; just a pair of upper-middle-class parents; her father was a doctor, and her mother an engineer. She went to school, got good grades, had friends, played with dolls. Nothing outside the pale.
High school brought no changes from the general routine, save one. It became obvious that young Alison was very intellectually gifted. She easily scored top marks on her exams with minimal effort, and keeping her challenged was a constant struggle for her teachers. The remainder of her life continued smoothly enough.
She graduated and moved on to University, majoring in biology, and finding a natural talent for it. She moved on, getting her advanced degree and finally her doctorate in genetics. She had a natural talent for it; the kind of mind that usually only comes along a few times in a generation. She specialized in cutting-edge work— gene therapy, retroviruses and the like, and was hired on by a German biotech company — _pinehearst.
Despite the work she was doing for Pinehearst, and the fact that she was making them a substantial amount of cash, it was the advanced, cutting-edge theories that she was interested in; pushing the frontiers of the science. It was when she was checking into the cutting-edge theories that she came across Chandra Suresh's theories, and his book. She was fascinated by the idea, but there was really no way to look into the matter.
Then, as if fate was dropping an answer into her lap, there was the explosion in New York.
Shortly thereafter, Homeland Security was looking for genetics experts, trying to find out what they could about the Evolved. The offer was far too fascinating for Alison to pass up. She got her paperwork, and moved to Washington D.C., working with Homeland Security. It gave her a first-hand opportunity to inspect the Evolved, and the conclusions were obvious these were the next step in human evolution.
Dr. Suresh was correct.
The problem was, she had been left behind. All her intelligence, all her ability and yet she was, like the rest of humanity, an evolutionary dead-end. Obsolete. It was unacceptable. Alison began to delve deeper into a depraved and sadistic side of her research, experimenting on prisoners captured by Homeland Security's black hole, their nickname for Tier-3 unregistered evolved whom were made to disappear. Nothing was fruitful.
Some time later, after moving across the United States to California, a chance encounter with one of Chandra Suresh's former accomplices in the study of the Evolved — Doctor Lewis Zimmerman — she began to realize the mistakes made in her research, and started to discover the basic ideas that would form her first retrovirus, designed to capture Evolved genetic information, and manipulate it into her own genetic structure.
This research would ultimately gain the attention of Pinehearst's secret and subversive true master, Arthur Petrelli, who in a part of a grand plan to undermine the Company, their work, and the achievements of his wife and former friend Daniel Linderman, was seeking to restart research into a formula designed to give abilities to the Evolved.
Given access to a vast laboratory of work and special scientific administrative aides, Alison was able to develop her retrovirus, and successfully copy — in part — the Evolved ability of another Pinehearst scientist, modifying her own DNA. The retrovirus worked… but only to a point.
The genetic markers were inserted into her own DNA, and she developed the same biomanipulation abilities as the subject. But there were costs. The first was a cost of her ethics — perhaps of sanity. Whether it was the result of the treatment, or simply as a result of choices and knowledge that people should not have to bear, her mind broke. She lost any sense of a moral compass, and became obsessed with unlocking as much as she could about the genetic mysteries of the Evolved.
But worse still, the retrovirus did its work imperfectly. Her own genetic structure was damaged, slowly degrading, causing her a number of sicknesses and ailments. The answer, of course, was obvious to her mind. More tests. More information. Which of course meant more test subjects. Perhaps the doctor's son might be able to help her find the solution to repair her damaged DNA, and to perfect her process.
In secret, Alison continued to work for Pinehearst wile contracted by the United States Government. Her research at Pinehearst's behest resulted in horribly mutated Evolved that would degenerate on a cellular level after attempting to endow them with synthetic abilities. With their research in the same directions, Alison became the head of genetic research at Pinehearst, following the work of Doctor Zimmerman…
