Kurdi (The Rise of the New Humans)
Kurdi was a scientist who worked with the Monk to create a new species called "New Human".
Seeing the human body as a wonder, Kurdi wanted to enhance it, specifically the immune system to defend itself against diseases and make the human body constantly evolve, encouraging it to adapt all the time.
The Monk provided Kurdi with advanced scientific and medical technology and funding to carry out the experiments. Frustrated by the misogynistic and racist attitudes of the time, Kurdi was delighted for a chance to prove to the scientific community that she could make humans better. She was unaware that the Monk's desires were meant to make a profit to be sold on.
Early experiments simply involved helping human patients who ordinarily hospitals would have given up on due to lack of technology or knowledge.
The Monk's plan was to use the Third Doctor to help Kurdi make the breakthrough to create the "New Humans". He gave Jo Grant a glass of water with a deadly disease that would certainly kill her in order to motivate the Doctor into helping Kurdi with her work. She had been having problems with her work, frustrated by the inconsistent and randomness of the results. When she collapsed, the Doctor worked with Kurdi and tried to get through to her to see the dangers of what she was doing. Kurdi argued with the Doctor over the morality of the work. She wanted to make diseases like cancer and brain disease a thing of past, and make humans capable of stopping them in their tracks without a thought.
The Doctor was impressed with Kurdi's ability and her direction, but he was disgusted by her work. Kurdi pleaded with the Doctor to see the benefits of saving lives, but he argued that the Earth was having its resources drained on a daily basis and if she succeeded in making death a thing of the past, the human race would collapse. Kurdi simply argued the human race would just need to look for greener energy solutions and space for a growing populace. She claimed that, with her treatments, it would be possible for humans to adapt to environments like the deserts, the poles, and the oceans, living there in comfort. The Doctor turned the argument around, saying the humans who had adapted to live in those uninhabitable places would just destroy the eco-systems, and he went on to create habitation zones; an example would be for the oceans to become ghettos where workers would live because no one would want to see their "unsightly" gills.
The Doctor compared the New Humans to the Time Lords, when he realised that Kurdi had overlooked the fact that if the treatments changed humans so radically enough disease would be simple for them to adapt to, then they could effortlessly find a way to stop their cells decaying. During this argument, he was horrified when he learnt that Carey had been given the treatment without him knowing about it.
Despite their arguments, the Doctor was able to help Kurdi with her treatment and injected them into Jo while also spending the time to develop a cure to reverse the damage Kurdi and the Monk had done. The treatment worked - Jo was cured, but the patients had adapted to the treatments and turned it into an epidemic, becoming a new race of humans. Harriet's body had sorted out the instabilities of the treatments before the Doctor did, and she turned it into an infection that was transferred by exhaling. Kurdi became one of the New Humans as did some of the clinics orderlies, and together they became determined to spread it. (AUDIO: The Rise of the New Humans)
