Free Web NovelChapter 2148: Chapter 1797
The Nature Medicine paper came out first.
Manstein chose a Thursday night to put the paper online; that was the usual practice for academic journals—go online Thursday night, the news media follow up Friday morning, the weekend lets it ferment, and by Monday morning the whole world knows. He knew this rhythm inside out; this wasn’t his first time publishing in a top-tier journal.
Yang Ping was jolted awake by his phone at two in the morning.
The nonstop notification chimes dragged him out of deep sleep. Half awake, he groped for his phone, squinted at the screen: forty-seven unread WeChat messages, twenty-three emails, and three missed calls.
"What’s going on?" He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and tapped the top message.
It was from Tang Shun: "Professor Yang, Manstein’s paper is online! Nature Medicine! Take a look!"
Yang Ping froze for a moment. He’d known the paper would be published, but he hadn’t expected it this soon. He opened his email, found the system notification from Nature Medicine, and clicked through to the article page.
Familiar title, familiar author list, familiar data figures. The only difference was a new label in the upper left corner of the page: "Published online ahead of print." Below it, a line in small font: "Accelerated article preview."
"Accelerated preview" was a special treatment Nature Medicine reserved for its most important papers.
Yang Ping scrolled down to the acknowledgements section. The very first line of Manstein’s acknowledgements read: "The authors thank Professor Yang Ping for his foundational three-dimensional guided gene theory; without this theory, this work would not have been possible."
Yang Ping read that sentence twice, then put the phone down and lay back on his pillow.
He understood now how weighty an original theory could be. It could give rise to many other theories and technologies of great significance; with a new theory in place, things that had once seemed impossible could suddenly be done with ease.
Within less than twelve hours of the Nature Medicine paper going online, the reaction in the academic community was far stronger than he had expected.
Manstein’s email inbox was already packed with dozens of messages: congratulations, requests for cooperation, requests for raw data, and critiques of the results—the last kind being the most numerous. Manstein read them one by one, didn’t reply, just silently sorted them in his head.
The one most worth noting came from a neuroscience professor at a top university in the United States. The email contained only three sentences:
"Congratulations on your publication in Nature Medicine. The results are impressive, but almost too good to be true. I look forward to seeing independent replication."
After reading the email, Manstein replied within seconds: "We’re already designing a replication protocol—not for others to replicate, but for us to replicate ourselves. The same cohort of monkeys, the same methods, the same conditions."
On the third day after the Nature Medicine paper was published, something happened that Yang Ping had not anticipated.
That afternoon, he was in his office revising a grant application when Tang Shun knocked and came in, his expression a little odd.
"Professor Yang, there’s a phone call for you."
"Who is it?"
"She says her name is..." Tang Shun lowered his head to glance at the slip of paper in his hand. "She says her name is Emily Chen. She’s a reporter from Science."
Yang Ping looked up.
A reporter from Science—not from Nature, from Science.
"She says she’s seen Professor Mainshtan’s paper in Nature Medicine, and she wants to do an in-depth feature on the ’three-dimensional guided gene theory.’ She hopes to interview you, individually."
Yang Ping was silent for a moment.
For Science to do an in-depth feature on a theory—that wasn’t common. Under normal circumstances, Science and Nature each did their own news coverage and stayed out of each other’s way. If Nature published a paper, Science wouldn’t go out of its way to cover it; that was an unspoken rule, a kind of mutual understanding. But now a Science reporter had proactively reached out, which meant they weren’t treating this paper as a Nature news item, but as a bigger scientific story that transcended a single article.
"I’m no longer interested in this sort of thing," Yang Ping said.
"Okay, I’ll get back to her," Tang Shun said.
After they sent in the revised manuscript of the Medical paper, the reviewers’ feedback came back much faster than expected.
It took only two weeks.
When Manstein opened the email, he wasn’t feeling much in the way of waves. Everything that needed doing had been done; every gap that needed filling had been filled; everything that needed saying had been said. The rest was out of his hands. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
The body of the email contained just one line:
"We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted by Medical." fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
Manstein stared at that line for a full five seconds, then went back to work.
When Yang Ping arrived at the animal facility, Manstein was squatting in front of M7’s cage, recording behavioral data. As Yang Ping pushed the door open, Fritz raised a finger to his lips: M7 was trying to walk; don’t disturb it.
Yang Ping stood in the doorway and watched M7.
It was standing in the middle of the cage, forelimbs not holding onto anything, its hind legs trembling slightly. Then it stepped forward with the right hind leg, placing it firmly; the left hind leg followed, shifting its center of gravity; the right hind leg stepped again, and the left followed again. One step, two, three, four.
At the fifth step, it stopped—not because it was tired, or had lost its balance, but because it had seen Yang Ping. It turned its head toward the doorway and looked over, its eyes carrying that expression Yang Ping had come to recognize—not fear, not expectation, but a quiet, unhurried curiosity.
