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Short story same as the "Lucy" movie


I am trying to remember the name and the author of a short story that seems to have a similar plot to the Besson's movie "Lucy".


I read that stories more than 30 years ago: A scientist made an evolution experiment on a man and a woman. The man de-evolves to a beast and the woman evolves to have God-like power, having to fight against people trying to control her.


I remember having read classic "pulps" authors at that time.




Edit
I have browsed lot of novella descriptions. There is one that seems to match, "Research Alpha" - Van Vogt (1965). It features an "evolution serum" and "big IQ levels". Unfortunately, I don't have the book at hand. If someone would check it that would be great.



Edit This list has been submitted by Deepak



  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

  • The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn

  • Understand by Ted Chiang.




Answer



You've pinpointed the correct story in the comments, so if you want to add your own answer I'll delete this. For now I'll answer in case anyone wants more information.


The story is called Research Alpha and appeared in the anthology More than Superhuman. It also appeared as a subplot in the novel Supermind. Van Vogt had a tendancy to bolt together his short stories to make novels - not always with happy results.


Spoilers follow:


The underlying idea is that the Great Galactics have injected some of their own genes into the races they encounter, but during human evolution these genes have become unevenly distributed. The scientist Dr Gloge is working on a project called Point Omega Stimulation which aims to enhance human evolution. Gloge secretly injects two people, Barbara Ellington and Vincent Strather with the Omega serum. Barbara possesses an unusually favourable package of Great Galactic genes and the serum enhances these so she basically turns into a Great Galactic. In Vincent the serum enhances other genes and he becomes a goblin like figure - it's implied but not stated explicitly that he's become mentally subnormal.


In Supermind it's made clear that this is a deliberate manipulation by the Great Galactic William Leigh. He had detected the favourable genes in Barbara and wanted her to attain her full potential so he can have her as a companion. Vincent was included in the experiment to demonstrate to mankind that the process would mostly fail so it shouldn't be used routinely. As far as I recall this aspect of the plot is absent from the original short story.


Vincent recovers, so it's a happy ending :-)


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