It always bothered me that I don't understand Gally, her character or motivations. And then Zekka's words hit me: "Man's passion". The reason why I didn't comprehend her, was because she's a female character, written by a male mangaka to be mysterious. That's why she's so unrealistic, and questionable. And even the whole manga is male-centered. Of course the main heroine is Gally, but all the stories are about men. About Ido, Figure, Jashugan, Kaos, Zapan, Desty Nova, Aga Mbadi, Zekka and Sechs, who even became male to pursue her(his) own passion. Gally is more of a Narrator to their stories. Gosh, even Melchizedek and Zeus are males. Most certainly Write What You Know, but to what extent?
The "Secret of Tiphares" - that at age 19, every Tipharean has their mind copied to a chip and their brain removed. Desty Nova reveals this secret by slicing open his own skull without anaesthetic. That's not the Fridge Horror, though; until several hundred years before Nova's birth, those brains were simply incinerated along with all the rest of Tiphares' garbage. However, once the Unanimous system was created, those brains were preserved in an "Incubator" as part of a system to control the collective unconscious of humans in the Orbital Ring network. Recovering Lou's brain is Alita's primary goal throughout most of Last Order. Over the course of the manga, three entirely independent iterations of Nova are running around - Jim Roscoe kills the Nova seen in the prologue, extracting a brain chip from his head and a back-up from his torso. Nova's "sterotomy" Nanomachines rebuild him, and this iteration goes up to the Ring will Alita - who retrieved those chips from Roscoe. Nova is captured by Mbadi, and Alita ends up trading the chips to Weasel for his assistance - who puts one chip in a portable computer to aid in retrieving Lou's brain. Porta-Nova is destroyed during the heist, and Nova-X is put on ice when the Scrapyard finally restores its connection to Tiphares... but everyone seems to have forgotten that Nova's brain was in the Incubator as well - and Mbadi put Super Nova in charge of the Incubator when the megalomaniacal administrator allied himself with the mad scientist. THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL WHERE IT ENDED UP. Or the other 299 G.E.N.E. Project subjects, for that matter. One of which killed 12 million people.
Something off must be with the Stellar Nursery Society parenting techniques, because, while we know that they are an Orphanage of Love, a lot (if not all) of their alumni explicitly mentioned in the story failed to fit into society and become antagonists to some extent: for example, Molnev Menhil went mad (though not without Whopon's help), became Spring-Heeled Jack and founded Starship Cult, and Zappa Terracotta is implied to be Dasein, the Big Bad of Mars Chronicle.
Ido and Desty Nova are doctors that often deal with cyborg brains, but in Salem where they learned their skills, no one has a brain.
All There in the Manual: Ido learned those skills in the Scrapyard, and at first had a distaste for operating on cyborgs. Only after the events of "Sweet Night"(Gunnm vol. 7.5), a heart-breaking experience with a runaway clone, did he start treating cyborgs as people.
It's very like they learned their respective skills via simulations considering the technology they had access to. Also Salem regular receives large shipments of organs including brains from the Scrapyard. It's like those are also used for medical training.
On the other hand, Desty Nova learned how to rip people apart and re-assemble them as he desired in the manner you'd expect from a sociopathic genius who'd cut open his own skull on a whim and without anesthetic just to make a point.
