(Forgive me firestorm fans if the characterization is incredibly wrong, I don’t know too much lore for firestorm as I’ve not read any of his solos and have only consumed media of him where he was mainly as background character in comics & cartoons.)
Oooo the prof must be absolutely Fascinated with this little guy too!
I’d imagine that Prof Stein would push Robbie to learn more about lil baby man and ask to see if the results could be replicated but.. the only thing coming out is these green floating blobs.
Unfortunately, animal studies isn’t the professor’s specialty nor was it what he studied. So the few papers that come out of Robbie (with Dr. Martin Stein credited too, of course) mainly concern the anatomy of these creatures. Papers are published through Firestorm with credit to the Prof detailing largely the chemical makeup of these being and speculations on the Core’s function, as well as basic observations into the behavior and intelligence of the creatures.
But since the professor can only go so far with ethically stretching his degree in physics, he gets Robbie to link up with some of Dr. Stein’s good friends that are doctors in biochemistry and biology and specialize in animal studies. Getting Firestorm to send the creatures to the various universities where the Prof’s old friends teach in the US for study and to other labs around the world.
Martin Stein hasn’t been this enriched in a good long while, learning about a new field of science he did not frequently discuss or have too much knowledge of outside of discussions with friends over the phone and being able to reconnect with those friends after the accident.
The amount of ethical intelligence studies, anatomy studies on the core, behavioral, and chemical makeup studies that pump out in the following months involving these sentient green blobs baffles the scientific world as paper after paper is published over the following year by scientists and many, many grad students.
Soon, however, the GIW catches on and attempts to delete all trace of these studies showing the chemical makeup, intelligence and clever problem solving of these creatures. Which is highly unfortunate because an extremely large number of grad students now suddenly have their thesis project suddenly retracted by every journal and paper.
Now, there’s a large amount of furious new scientists coming into their field as they no longer can use the project they spent a massive amount of time and effort on to get a job as their employers cannot find it. Many grad students currently working on studies involving the creatures also cannot publish their thesis and have to restart all their research! That’s a big deal!
The elder scientists who worked on studying these creatures are also furious. Not only on the behalf of their grad students but also because of the lack of explanation for the data being restricted.
Due to most of the research involving study in the US, most of the research is suddenly scrubbed from the internet within the US.
But one extremely pissed and determined grad student using a VPN found that if you didn’t use the Universities’s library and searched up the papers from a non-US location, papers published from other countries on the blobs weren’t retracted and were accessible.
I’d imagine that due to the Prof’s physicist research, he’d likely have colleagues he worked with in other countries and had made connections there. Causing studies on the blobs to make it outside the US due to Martin having connections overseas. And all those studying it outside the sudden information blackout were baffled. The censorship and redaction of papers from the US on this new creature that was forming into a massive field of study due to the unique makeup of the blob halted a lot of progress. Grad students in other countries that were basing their papers off of US studies suddenly couldn’t support their hypothesis, and more.
An uproar in the scientific field emerged, papers getting retracted is a big deal. The process of getting a paper published and approved to be published in a journal isn’t anything to sneeze at.
But wasn’t a case of retraction due to unethical practice. This was a case of blatant censorship with no seeming reason and scientists were pissed.