Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Julian Bashir

The doctoring of Doctor Bashir's genome began life as the B-plot of a pitch by freelance writer Jimmy Diggs. It had Dr. Lewis (or Louis) Zimmerman and the new 'Long-term Medical Hologram (LMH)' with Bashir as template, but according to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, writers struggled at first to find the core element of the story, now the A of the episode, but not yet of Adigeon Prime. As René Echevarria stated, "There needed to be some big secret that Zimmerman uncovers, and we couldn't, for the life of us, think what it would be".

As the Deep Space Nine Companion goes on to note, there were still a lot of unanswered questions about Bashir's past, even by season five. He had chosen triage over tennis, but was he good enough to go pro at the sport in the first place, or did he drop the racket just to please his parents? Bashir had been very mysterious about them too. In Homefront, O'Brien practically offered up his folks' place in Dublin as a holiday home to Odo, but Bashir didn't seem to want anyone dropping in on his relations. Finally, of course, there was the matter of those damned ganglions.

The Eugenics Wars-inspired Eureka moment of an answer apparently came from then supervising producer and writer Ronald D. Moore, who, in a "bolt of inspiration," asked, "What if Bashir had been genetically engineered?" The rest was the retroactive of "accelerated critical neural pathway formation" on the titular planet. In an early draft of Doctor Bashir, I Presume, only O'Brien and Zimmerman would have found out the truth about Bashir, the former then blackmailing the latter to keep it quiet. Alexander Siddig opposed the idea, however, not wanting to act the rest of the series with the heavy burden of such a secret.