Free Web NovelChapter 2126: Chapter 1787
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When the news from Berlin arrived, Yang Ping was in the laboratory at the Institute, looking at a cell-stained slide.
It was Manstein, a voice message, sounding very excited.
"Professor, I’ve done it!"
The voice was not loud, even somewhat hoarse, like someone who had stayed up several nights.
"It’s original cell repair, not scars, real, functional nerve tissue with normal electrical signal conduction. I used your three-dimensional guiding gene theory, and now original cell repair has improved to 14%, my God, 14%, this is a great advancement, meaning my approach is entirely correct."
"Last time I told you the good news, I had only discovered scattered spinal original cells at the injury site, even if scattered, I confirmed it’s the success of your theory. I didn’t give up, continued improving the method, now it’s 14%, I firmly believe one day I can achieve 100%."
"If I achieve 100%, spinal injury repair will become easy."
"If it reaches 50%, I will attempt head-transplant experiments on monkeys." fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
The voice message ended.
Yang Ping placed the phone on the lab bench. He hadn’t finished looking at the cell-stained slide, so he continued. Under the microscope were cell nuclei marked by dye, blue dots densely covering the field of view, like a silent night sky.
Yang Ping’s three-dimensional guiding gene theory centers on a very simple idea: the human body is constructed of cells. Why are the cells not laid flat but able to build the body in three-dimensional space? Hidden within genetic information is a special ability of three-dimensional spatial positioning. This ability allows cells to grow in the direction they need, ultimately forming the human body, instead of a cube or sphere.
Previously, there was also a theory that said cell migration behavior in three-dimensional space is determined by the spatial gradient expressed by genes. This idea isn’t new in developmental biology. Scientists have long proposed similar "morphogen gradient" hypotheses. But Yang Ping’s contribution is that he turned this hypothesis into a true theory, not a crude guess, but a scientific system theory.
Manstein’s application of Yang Ping’s theory in spinal injury also went through many twists and turns, having lost his way at times. Back then, Manstein was trying to break through from precise crawling of nerve axons. Manstein’s original words: A gene expression increases X hours after injury, leading to B protein forming a gradient in Y spatial range. This gradient guides axon growth of C type cells toward direction D. If you use drugs to inhibit gene A at X hours, the axon’s growth direction will change to a new direction E."
Scientific theory can not only explain but also predict, and prediction is the most hardcore part of science. It’s never about explaining what has already happened but predicting what hasn’t. If a theory can only explain the past, it is nothing. If a theory can predict the future, it’s a candidate for truth.
Manstein used Yang Ping’s theory to develop a spinal theory that predicted a specific time window: 48 to 72 hours after spinal injury is the best time for intervention. Within this window, if you can precisely control the expression level of a certain gene, you can change the microenvironment around the damaged region, creating a gap in the "wall" that inhibits regeneration, allowing original cell repair for nerves.
Manstein and Yang Ping’s communication was very frequent and in-depth. Not daily, but anytime. When Manstein thought of a question, regardless of the time—whether it’s 3 AM in Berlin or noon in Nandu—he would send Yang Ping a message. Sometimes it’s a voice message, sometimes a casually taken experimental record photo, sometimes just a few keywords with a question mark. Yang Ping might not reply immediately, but he would always reply on the same day. His replies never beat around the bush, never pile up jargon, never put on airs. For a given question, he could provide the core answer in three sentences. If he didn’t know the answer, he would say "I don’t know," and then say "but we can think together."
Later, Manstein told August: "Professor Yang is a genius, but he still remains honest to himself, honest about the problem, honest about things he doesn’t know. Such honesty is exceedingly precious in academia."
The breakthrough in original cell repair didn’t happen overnight.
Manstein is already 57 years old. He once won the Nobel Prize, which was the peak of his academic career. But after the peak came a long downhill, not downhill in reputation, but in research direction. He turned to the spinal injury repair field, this "hard nut to crack", bringing the aura of the Nobel Prize and the best resources from Charité Medical College, but he was stuck in this problem for a full fifteen years.
Fifteen years, for spinal injury patients, is over five thousand days and nights in wheelchairs. For Manstein, it was countless experimental failures, countless hypotheses overturned, countless times facing the silence of the microscope alone in the laboratory at midnight. He tried chemical genetics, optogenetics, cell transplantation, biomaterial scaffolds; all advanced technologies were used, but all only achieved "scar repair." Axons grew but direction was chaotic; synapses formed but electrical signal conduction was abnormal; the animals’ motor function was improved at best but far from "cured." ƒгeewebnovёl.com
Once, after a failure, Manstein called Yang Ping. Yang Ping barely said anything on the other end, just occasionally saying "Hmm" to indicate he was listening. After Manstein finished speaking, Yang Ping paused for a moment and then said a sentence that Manstein remembered for a long time:
