Free Web NovelChapter 64: Chapter 64: Blind Peer Review
"How much?" Jiang He asked.
"49.5 in theory, 49.5 in clinical skills, for a total score of 99! Jiang He, from the ’06 clinical class, is first in the competition!"
The excited voices of Wang Bo and Li Zijian immediately followed from the other end of the line.
"Old Jiang, you’re fucking incredible!!"
"Barbecue at the north gate tonight, my treat! We have to celebrate!"
Listening to his roommates’ wild celebration, Jiang He’s expression remained calm. He replied softly, "We’ll talk when I get back from the library."
After hanging up, he casually opened his QQ group chat.
As expected, the class group chat was already being spammed nonstop.
But everyone seemed to be in a state of utter shock, unable to form words, and could only frantically spam question marks and exclamation points in the chat.
Finally, the class president, Zhou Yang, spoke up and summarized the situation:
[I originally thought that in a field like clinical medicine, which is so heavily dependent on experience, there was no way a third-year could beat a fifth-year intern. But the moment I saw the scores, I had nothing to say. The second-place finisher, a fifth-year senior, only got 82 points. Jiang He, a third-year from the ’06 class, got 99 and first place. That score gap... it’s an absolute slaughter.]
Two seconds later, the Youth League Secretary, Lin Yue, followed up: [Agreed.]
A long, uniform chain of "Agreed" messages instantly appeared below.
Jiang He closed the group chat window and casually checked his social feed.
The first post on his friends’ feed had just been updated. It was from Li Wei.
...
「A few minutes earlier, in the dorm.」
Li Wei was huddled under his blanket, staring intently at his phone screen.
He had just finished looking at the list of scores reposted on the school’s forum.
First place: Jiang He, 99 points.
Second place: Pan Wen, 82 points.
As for him, Li Wei, his name was somewhere in the twenties. He hadn’t even passed.
After seeing the results, Li Wei was surprisingly calm.
He opened a .txt e-book.
But as he stared at the dense text on the screen, he didn’t turn the page for a long time.
After a long while, Li Wei let out a long, heavy breath, switched back to QQ, and changed his status message to:
[Forever respect Jiang He. Forever respect Clinical Class 2.]
After posting it, he felt the heavy stone that had been weighing on his chest for so long suddenly vanish.
’Living is really just a process of constantly coming to terms with reality.’
’Admitting defeat to an ordinary peer is humiliating. But what if the other guy isn’t human at all, but a monster?’
’Then it’s not called being humiliated; it’s called yielding to the laws of nature.’
’If you can accept defeat with grace, that in itself is a kind of survival wisdom.’
’Thinking about it this way is much more comforting. Hehe, time to go read some Hou Longtao.’
...
「Meanwhile, in the clinical college’s faculty office.」
Yang Xu, Wang Xiaoqing, and Old Xie were also discussing the matter.
Old Xie said with a broad smile, "Jiang He from our class got first place in the competition."
Yang Xu also smiled. "My student, Jiang He, got first place in the competition." fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
Wang Xiaoqing: "?"
The corner of her mouth twitched.
’You’re both his teacher, so should I just leave?’
"However..." Yang Xu said, "I thought he might get a perfect score. It seems his precision in the practical part was still lacking a little. Once he joins the team, we’ll have to polish him up some more."
He was totally humble-bragging.
Wang Xiaoqing shot her old colleague a look. "Alright, Old Yang. Didn’t they just dock one point to keep him from getting arrogant?"
Old Xie burst out laughing on the side.
...
「Back at the library.」
Jiang He opened the campus forum, the Southern Medical Tea House.
Just as he expected, the entire forum had been completely taken over by posts about the competition.
The stickied post at the very top, highlighted in red, had a simple and blunt title: *Jiang He, ’06 Clinical Class, First in the Competition!*
The original post contained a screenshot of the scores, and the replies below were increasing at a frantic pace of more than ten per minute.
"Who’s Jiang He?"
"The genius who got a perfect score in the preliminaries."
"Awesome!"
"Jiang He, a third-year, first place in the competition!"
Around the 50th or 60th comment, a fourth-year senior suddenly said:
[Our school is really full of talented people. First, there was the mysterious anonymous hero at Feiyu Internet Cafe who saved someone’s life with a water seal bottle, and now there’s Jiang He, who dominated the entire field in the thinking competition.]
Someone immediately replied: "[Who do you guys think is more skilled? The dude who saved the person in the internet cafe, or Jiang He?]"
[Hard to say. The internet cafe incident was a real-life situation, a test of one’s psychological fortitude in an emergency. The competition is about systematic pathological thinking and standard procedures. They’re different things.]
[I still think Jiang He is better. After all, he’s the official first-place winner of a school-sanctioned competition. That’s a solid, tangible honor. He’s going to represent our school in the South China Region competition.]
Jiang He found these earnest analyses somewhat amusing.
Soon, an account with a "Graduate School" prefix appeared in the thread and left a comment that ended the discussion:
[They’re both talents from our Southern Medical University. Why must we rank them? Fools compare, the wise appreciate. If everyone has this much free time, you’d be better off reading a couple of research papers.]
At a seat by the window on the other side of the library.
Cheng Xiyao was sitting there, a thick copy of *Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual* open in front of her. Beside her was a stack of heavily marked-up scratch paper.
Her phone, lying on the table, vibrated. It was a text from a female classmate: [Jiang He took first in the competition. Highest score in history, 99 points.]
After reading the text, Cheng Xiyao’s gaze passed through a gap in the bookshelves, and she glanced toward Jiang He in the distance.
Then, she calmly looked away and placed her phone face down on the desk.
She realized she didn’t feel the slightest ripple of emotion, let alone any shock.
She didn’t know when it started, but in her subconscious, Jiang He had already transcended the category of "peer" and become an unparalleled master.
For a master to take first place wasn’t news. Taking second would be.
Her mind was now completely occupied by one urgent matter: in one week, Jiang He was going to test her on biochemistry and molecular biology.
If she failed, she wouldn’t be able to join his new project.
Cheng Xiyao took a deep breath, picked up her pen again, and went back to wrestling with the steps for RNA extraction.
Jiang He also got back to work.
Listening to the praise from those around him was occasionally pleasant.
But in the end, he had to keep his feet on the ground.
The extraction of cell-free miRNA from peripheral blood was the top priority right now.
After a full day of research, the biggest difficulty Jiang He faced was that the extraction kits were expensive, and their efficiency for small-volume plasma samples was extremely unstable.
If he didn’t solve this problem, the subsequent TaqMan probe validation would have huge data discrepancies.
Time was too tight.
Jiang He took out his phone and sent a message to the Dorm 402 group chat:
[No celebration tonight. I need to focus on work.]
Not ten seconds later, three messages popped up in the group in perfect unison: [?]
...
「Meanwhile, thousands of miles away.」
In the office of the Director of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery at a top-tier hospital in Hushang.
Professor Zhao Bingwen, a leading national authority in hepatobiliary surgery, was rubbing the bridge of his nose as he logged into the expert online review system for a core journal of the Chinese Medical Association. He was preparing to deal with the week’s backlog of manuscripts.
As a standing editorial board member and core external reviewer for one of the country’s top journals, Professor Zhao received a massive number of system-assigned manuscripts every day, but very few were good enough to catch his eye.
Most were just repetitive experiments with nothing new to offer, or academic garbage cobbled together just to get a promotion.
"Young people these days are so restless..."
Professor Zhao sighed, picked up his teacup to wet his throat, and clicked on a manuscript in his review queue that had been specially highlighted in red by the editorial department.
The status bar displayed a short, three-word status: [Expedited Blind Review].
Seeing those three words, Professor Zhao put on his reading glasses and became a little more serious. His eyes fell upon the paper’s title on the screen:
*"Improvement of the Lymph Node Ratio (LNR) Assessment System in Pancreatic Cancer TNM Staging and Cox Regression Prognostic Analysis Based on a Dual-Center, Long-Term Follow-up Cohort."*
’Dual-center? Core data from Peking Union Medical College Hospital over the years, and data from Nanshan First Hospital?’
He sat up a little straighter, gripped the mouse, and quickly scrolled down the page.
As he read deeper, the only sound in the office was the scroll wheel of the mouse.
’Rigorous statistical logic, a highly focused clinical and surgical perspective...’
This paper not only precisely pointed out the deficiencies of the current international TNM staging system in assessing lymph node dissection for pancreatic cancer.
But it also provided an LNR mathematical correction model that was so well-developed it was nearly flawless.
"Not bad..."
Professor Zhao muttered to himself, scrutinizing the regression analysis model for the survival curve two more times. A flash of admiration appeared in his eyes.
’This angle of approach and the masterful prose... definitely not something an ordinary person could write.’
’To be able to pull together such a large dual-center cohort between Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Nanshan First Hospital... there are only a handful of core teams in the entire country capable of that.’
Professor Zhao picked up his now-cool tea and took a sip. He then placed his hands back on the keyboard and, in the final comments section of the review system, typed out a paragraph:
"The data is comprehensive, and the mathematical model has extremely high clinical guidance value. The reasoning is rigorous. Only the caption formatting for a few statistical figures needs minor adjustment according to this journal’s standards. I recommend it be fast-tracked for priority publication after extremely minor revisions."
