Chapter 2284 - 1477: Authority (2)

Chapter 2284: Chapter 1477: Authority (2)

"Professor Yang."

"Sit!" Yang Ping sat down on another chair beside the bed, and settled himself down as well, "I heard you walked six hundred steps today?"

"Seven hundred steps," Lin Xiaoyu replied, "I walked three hundred in the morning and four hundred in the afternoon."

"Did you feel tired?"

"A little bit, but I recovered after resting. Unlike before, when a few steps would make my legs feel as if they were filled with lead."

Yang Ping nodded. "Your treatment isn’t over yet, the tumor hasn’t completely disappeared. Don’t walk too much, take it step by step. It’s not that exercising more will cure the illness faster; rather, because the illness is improving, you can walk this many steps."

Lin Xiaoyu nodded, then asked another question: "Professor Yang, if my tumor completely disappears, will I still need to continue treatment?"

"No need, if the tumor completely disappears, it means your body has figured out how to control it. What needs to be done afterward is to regularly check to ensure it won’t recur."

"What if it comes back?"

"Then treat it again. If it could be cured the first time, it can be cured the second time as well."

Lin Xiaoyu looked at him, remained silent for a moment, then said, "Okay."

Perhaps because of Sisi, Yang Ping paid special attention to Lin Xiaoyu’s treatment.

Yang Ping walked out of the ward, proceeded along the corridor toward the elevator. The phone in his pocket buzzed; he pulled it out to see a message from an unknown number, originating from the United Kingdom. The message contained only one sentence: "Professor Yang, your theory has made me rethink the data I’ve been researching for twenty years. Thank you."

Yang Ping looked at the message for a few seconds, didn’t reply, put the phone back in his pocket, and continued walking. He exited the inpatient building, crossed the garden, and returned to the institute. Passing the first-floor lobby, a small group of people were gathered around the notice board. He glanced and saw a new piece of paper beside Weber’s handwritten notice, penned by Manstein, with smaller, denser handwriting: "Additional verification: Preliminary results of Receptor X antibody in kidney injury models—kidney function indicators recovered 70% in 48 hours, 90% in 72 hours. Highly consistent with liver injury model results."

Yang Ping stood before the notice board for a few seconds, then turned and entered the elevator. As the elevator doors closed, he heard someone behind him mutter, "He didn’t even stop to look." Another person answered, "He doesn’t need to look; he knows the results."

The elevator reached the fifth floor, and the doors opened. Yang Ping stepped out of the elevator, didn’t return to his office, but headed for a door at the end of the corridor. There was no sign on the door, but Yang Ping knew what was inside—this was Chen Xiao’s temporary office space. He pushed open the door to see Chen Xiao seated at the computer, with an incomplete data chart displayed on the screen. Upon hearing the sound, Chen Xiao turned and saw Yang Ping.

He turned the screen toward Yang Ping. On the screen was a three-dimensional diagram depicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein, with different functional regions marked in color: blue for the ligand-binding domain, red for the signal transduction domain, green for the transmembrane region, and yellow for the intracellular tail.

"What is this?"

"The complete three-dimensional structure of Receptor X. I resolved it using cryo-electron microscopy, with a resolution of 2.8 ?. The Receptor X structure diagram you saw before was predicted using software, with an accuracy of about seventy percent. This is real. There’s a discovery worth your personal view: the intracellular tail of Receptor X has a domain that has never been reported, unlike any known signal transduction module. This domain might be an entirely new signal transduction model."

Yang Ping walked to the computer, bent down, and stared at the diagram. Blue, red, green, yellow—four colors intertwined, forming a complex three-dimensional structure; they’re very familiar with using colors in their illustrations now.

At the end of the yellow area, there’s a small curved extension, like an unfinished line. He looked at it for a while, then straightened up: "This tail, if we cut it off, can Receptor X still transmit signals?"

"I don’t know, haven’t done a truncation mutation experiment yet."

"Do it now, cut off this tail and see if Receptor X can still activate the repair program. If it can, it means this domain is not important; if it can’t, it means we’ve discovered a new signal transduction mechanism."

Chen Xiao typed a few keys on the keyboard, recorded a new task in the experiment log software. "Three days."

"After it’s done, send me the results."

Yang Ping turned and left Chen Xiao’s office. The corridor was bathed in sunlight coming through windows, casting bright squares on the floor. He walked back to his office, sat at his desk. The phone screen was still lit, the message from the United Kingdom still displayed on the screen. He didn’t delete it, nor did he reply; he just looked at it for a few seconds, then flipped the phone over, placing it face-down on the desk. Sunlight leaked through the cracks of the ginkgo leaves outside, casting dancing light spots on the desktop, like tiny golden dots. He lowered his head, opened the experiment logbook, turned to the page he wrote today, and added another line below the existing words: "The intracellular tail of Receptor X contains an unreported domain. Function unknown. Possibly an entirely new signal transduction model."

He closed the notebook, placed it in a drawer, stood up, and walked to the window. The ginkgo trees outside glowed bright green in the afternoon sun, the distant skyline starkly stretched across the blue sky, the buildings orderly and serene. He watched for a long time, then withdrew his gaze.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Yang Ping walked into the large meeting room. The meeting room was already full of people, not just his institute’s members; Tang Shun, Weber, Manstein, Chen Xiao, Lu Xiaolu were there, along with some familiar but unnamed faces. In the front row sat several suit-clad individuals, one of whom he recognized as the Asian Region editor of Science magazine. The person beside that he did not know, but wore a badge reading "Nature Medicine." Further along sat a middle-aged man with graying hair, bearing a badge labeled "Oxford University." Some in the last row stood against the wall, holding notebooks, as there were no seats left.

The Sanbo Research Institute today, any casual academic conference would have many international big shots seated in the venue.

Tang Shun saw him enter, stood, and walked a few steps to greet him, whispered, "These people came on their own. I didn’t invite them. They saw the notice on the board and came. Some just arrived on a flight this morning, others came from different cities."

Yang Ping glanced at the audience, then walked to the podium, didn’t sit down, but stood directly in front of the microphone. He hadn’t prepared a speech beforehand. The audience quieted down and focused their attention on him. He waited for a few seconds, then spoke.

"Today I won’t talk about my theory. You’ve already read my papers, there’s no need for me to repeat them. Today I’m discussing the new data we’ve generated in the past week, and the significance of this new data to the unified theory."

He pressed the remote control, a chart appeared on the screen—Weber’s graph from the second injection experiment. Red and blue curves lined up side by side, the blue one steeper than the red, descending faster.

"This shows the results of the Receptor X antibody’s second injection experiment on liver injury models. After the first injection, liver function recovery took three days. After the second injection, recovery time has been shortened by nearly half. We refer to this phenomenon as the ’repair program training effect.’ The repair program can learn and optimize. The first repair was exploratory; the second repair was the work of a skilled artisan. This finding tells us that the repair program isn’t a fixed assembly line but a dynamic system with adaptive capabilities. It accumulates experience during execution and performs better the next time it encounters the same task."

"Moreover, this pathway isn’t singular; it has simplified and accelerated routes that may omit certain steps."

Some in the audience were taking notes, some nodded, some whispered to their neighbors, yet none interrupted him.

These big shots never blindly worship authority, but standing before them today, Professor Yang naturally evoked a sense in them; he is the authority, whatever he says must be right.

This is not the spirit of scientists; scientists should question, critique, challenge tradition—they know all this.

Yet, they simply couldn’t suppress this feeling that they themselves didn’t quite agree with.