godfather of surgery

Chapter 1259 Blooming everywhere

The addition of top talent is like injecting high-energy fuel into the "Breaking Down the Barrier" alliance, which is struggling to climb uphill.

This influx of intellectual capital has rapidly transformed the R&D ecosystem of the core companies within the alliance, transforming it from a relatively closed, follower-oriented technological environment into a "technological hotbed" brimming with international vision and cutting-edge innovation.

Huang Jiacai's wall-breaking laboratory, built with a huge amount of money, has gathered a large number of top talents. He sends these talents to alliance companies to conduct research and development, helping these companies with their research and development.

Mr. Wang, the CEO of Jiten Technology, a veteran entrepreneur who had once been "reprimanded" by Huang Jiacai during a period of wavering and experienced intense inner struggle, now stood in his once somewhat dilapidated R&D workshop, which even reeked of machine oil and metal shavings. Looking at the completely transformed scene before him, his eyes couldn't help but well up with tears. This place was no longer just a place where experienced craftsmen hammered and filed away; it was more like a modern laboratory that integrated traditional techniques with cutting-edge theories.

His "Jiten Technology" has attracted a group of talents that he had previously only admired from afar in top industry journals and international exhibitions.

The leader was a Russian-born optics expert named Andrei Vasilyev, tall and taciturn, but his blue eyes were as sharp as a hawk's when examining optical components.

He served as a senior engineer at Zeiss in Germany for over fifteen years, participating in the design of several landmark optical systems. His almost obsessive pursuit of technical details created irreconcilable conflicts with the management team, who were more focused on cost and market pace.

Ultimately, it was Huang Jiacai who personally flew to Germany and visited him three times, winning him over with a substantial sum of money and sincerity. Vasilyev resolutely rejected Zeiss's offer to stay and the high pension, and moved his entire family to China with his life's experience and technical notes.

Accompanying him were several Chinese engineers recruited from Applied Materials in the United States and Nikon in Japan. They brought not only world-class processing concepts, tolerance control standards, and materials science knowledge, but also a profound understanding of global trends in precision instrument development.

The arrival of these top talents brought no fancy PowerPoint presentations or empty slogans. They donned the same work clothes as the veteran workers and plunged directly into the workshops and laboratories. Language barrier? They relied on gestures, blueprints, and translation software. Vasilyev, with his heavily accented and grammatically incorrect broken Chinese, coupled with skillful gestures, worked alongside the experienced, technically proficient but somewhat theoretically deficient veteran workers, meticulously scrutinizing and reconstructing the blueprints and samples of the "core optical component of the protein interaction detection module" that General Manager Wang and his team had previously tackled.

“Wang, the tolerances here, the theoretical calculations are good, but it won’t work.” Vasilyev pointed to a crucial dimension’s fit tolerance on the drawing, shaking his head vigorously, his fingers almost piercing the drawing. “You have to take into account the thermal expansion and contraction of the materials, the stress of assembly, and even the microscopic creep over long-term operation. With this design, a five-degree fluctuation in ambient temperature will cause the optical path stability to exceed the allowable range. We need to redesign this support structure, adopting active temperature control compensation and stress isolation design.”

A young engineer who had returned from Applied Materials in the US proposed a more disruptive idea: "Mr. Wang, why do we insist on competing head-on with Zeiss and Leica in terms of individual hardware specifications? That's a barrier they've built up over a century. We can take a different approach and use computational optics to compensate for some of the inherent limitations in our hardware." He excitedly demonstrated his concept on a tablet, "We can integrate a real-time image enhancement and aberration correction module that we developed ourselves, based on deep learning AI algorithms, behind this custom lens assembly. In terms of hardware, we might only be able to achieve 80% of their physical accuracy, but through this 'smart filter,' we can process and optimize the raw image data, and the final output image's signal-to-noise ratio and effective resolution can approach them infinitely, and even surpass them in certain specific observation modes due to targeted algorithm optimization!"

As Mr. Wang listened to these concepts he had never heard of before, and watched these top talents and his experienced workers enthusiastically discussing, simulating, and debating on blueprints, and then working together on the workbench to debug and assemble, the long-dormant passion for craftsmanship and innovation in his heart boiled again.

He no longer clung to the 50% acquisition premium that had once tempted him—it seemed like an easy retirement fund. Now, he saw it as a difficult but dignified and hopeful path to success. He personally immersed himself in the workshop, coordinating all resources to ensure that any improvement proposals from these "precious gems" received immediate response and support.

In just a few weeks, the breakthrough in optical components, which had previously stalled due to bottlenecks, achieved a breakthrough that even Wang himself found unbelievable. The new design not only solved the long-standing problems of long-term drift and temperature sensitivity through ingenious mechanical structures and active temperature control, but more importantly, it introduced an innovative "hardware + algorithm" dual-drive approach. This cleverly bypassed some extreme physical indicators that require extremely high levels of basic industrial expertise, such as ultra-precision machining and special glass melting.

Although the absolute surface accuracy and light transmittance of the lens may still have subtle differences that are imperceptible to the naked eye but measurable by instruments compared to the top imported products, the overall performance of the entire optical module, which integrates self-developed intelligent image algorithms, optimized structural design and localized precision manufacturing processes, has been preliminarily tested and is sufficient to meet, and even exceeds, the most demanding observation requirements of Yang Ping's research group for the device in certain parameters.

Mr. Wang stroked the prototype machine that had just rolled off the production line, its cold metallic luster gleaming and its internal structure as intricate as a work of art. He was extremely excited, and his voice choked with emotion.

……

At the same time, Mr. Li, who focuses on high-end biochemical reagents, also welcomed his "dream team," which instantly put his company, which was located in a remote corner and mainly targeted the low-to-mid-end market, at the forefront of biotechnology.

The team is led by Susan Chen, a Chinese-American female scientist with a capable demeanor and sharp insight. She has led the development of several key enzyme preparation projects at Merck Millipore, the world's largest reagent company, possessing extensive experience across the entire chain, from strain construction and fermentation optimization to purification processes.

However, as a Chinese American, after being promoted to senior director, she clearly felt the invisible "glass ceiling," with many core strategic decisions and cutting-edge project resources closing their doors to her. She harbored a deep sense of frustration and unfulfilled potential, as well as complex feelings about her own cultural roots.

When the call for the "Breaking the Barrier" project came through the overseas talent network, she declined the company's offer to stay almost without much hesitation, resigned from her enviable position, and returned to China with her encrypted hard drive, which contained twenty years of accumulated key experimental data and core technological concepts.

Along with her, several young PhDs who had returned from giants like Thermo Fisher Scientific and Takara Bio also joined Damei Bio. They did not complain about the relatively simple laboratory conditions and the limited scale of the pilot-scale platform at General Manager Li's company. Instead, they immediately devoted themselves to the emergency research on the "special enzymes" that were the bottlenecks and crucial to the progress of Yang Ping's research project.

Susan Chen did not simply repeat her work abroad, attempting to replicate or imitate the processes of imported products. She astutely pointed out: "Mr. Li, we cannot keep following behind others, trying to find gaps in their patent jungle. Their patent barriers are too thick, and many are based on specific host strains or purification media, which we cannot bypass. We must find entirely new technological paths that belong to us."

She led her team to first conduct a reverse analysis of the imported reagents, precisely analyzing their performance bottlenecks and potential defects.

Then, combining the latest research results in synthetic biology, yeast surface display and directed protein evolution in China, we have taken a different approach and designed a brand-new integrated process for rational design of enzyme molecules and efficient expression and purification.

They screened domestically constructed engineering strain libraries and, with the help of Dr. Chen Xiao from MIT, used advanced gene editing tools to perform directed evolution of enzyme molecules, making them more suitable for efficient expression in fermentation systems that are lower in cost and easier to scale up.

Meanwhile, they developed a one-step purification strategy based on novel affinity chromatography media, eliminating the need for several expensive and controlled imported packing materials that are relied upon in imported processes.

This brand-new process, although initially costly due to the need to optimize numerous parameters, has revolutionary advantages: it completely bypasses the patent blockade of international giants, ensuring full autonomy over all intellectual property rights; and the enzyme preparations produced, after repeated testing, have shown potential to be no less than, and even better than, imported products in some key indicators, in terms of activity resistance and long-term storage stability.

“Mr. Li, look,” Susan said, pointing to the steep and symmetrical purity peak curve on the HPLC screen, her excitement barely concealed, “this is the data for our 37th batch of small-scale test products. The purity has stabilized at over 99.8%, and most importantly, the protease impurities and nucleic acid residues that easily affect subsequent experiments are an order of magnitude lower than those in imported products. This means that when used in Professor Yang’s most sophisticated cell experiments and molecular interaction detection, there will be less background interference, and the reliability and repeatability of the data will be greatly improved!”

Looking at the astonishing data that he had only seen in the instructions for top-tier imported reagents before, Mr. Li was so excited that his hands trembled slightly, as if he were holding a priceless treasure.

He knew that this was not just a breakthrough in a few key reagents that solved the immediate crisis; it meant that his Damei Technology had found a possible path to break free from low-level repetition, achieve original innovation and high-end breakthroughs, and open up a whole new world of possibilities for the company's future development. As a family company, he was glad he joined the "Breaking Barriers Alliance," otherwise he would never have had such an opportunity to make a technological leap.

He immediately ordered that all of the company's superior resources be concentrated to fully cooperate with Susan and Chen Xiao's team to scale up the process and verify its stability. At all costs, they must stably produce this batch of "enzymes" that embodies their hard work and wisdom and deliver them to Yang Ping's laboratory in the shortest possible time.

……

At Xunke Software, the company where General Manager Zhang is in charge of scientific research, the changes are even more dramatic.

Mr. Zhang himself has a technical background and is quite confident in the company's existing data interfaces and basic analysis software. However, he found that the group of "experts" he recruited had a mindset, technical vision, and architectural capabilities that completely exceeded his previous understanding.

The leader was a young man named Lin Feng, only thirty-five years old, who had already served as a core researcher at both Google Brain and DeepMind, and was a top expert in the application of AI to scientific discovery. He brought not specific code or functional modules, but a completely new, ambitious concept of a "next-generation intelligent scientific research data platform" based on cloud-native, microservice architecture and data lake concepts.

“Mr. Zhang, we can no longer be satisfied with passively developing isolated data conversion interfaces and drivers for different brands and models of equipment, as we have in the past.” Lin Feng was rapidly drawing complex architecture diagrams on the whiteboard in the conference room, his eyes gleaming with the fervent light characteristic of a tech geek. “That’s just treating the symptoms, not the root cause. What we need to build is a unified, intelligent, scalable, future-oriented ‘scientific research operating system’ or ‘digital foundation’!”

He elaborated on his blueprint: "All research equipment connected to this platform, whether domestically produced or imported, regardless of brand or communication protocol, will have their raw data automatically identified, parsed, standardized, cleaned, and normalized by the platform, and tagged with unified metadata. This high-quality data will then be stored in a unified data lake, available for use by various AI analysis models, visualization tools, and collaboration platforms at the upper level. We can even integrate an automated workflow engine at the platform level to connect different equipment operations and data analysis steps, achieving truly intelligent and automated scientific research!"

The team members he brought were all highly skilled: there were experts who were proficient in various low-level industrial communication protocols and could "translate" the "language" of any device; there were engineers who were good at building high-throughput, low-latency distributed computing engines to process massive amounts of scientific data; there were front-end experts who specialized in 3D visualization of scientific data and virtual reality interaction; and there were algorithm scientists who specialized in researching knowledge graphs in the scientific research field and realizing intelligent data association.

With an almost radical determination and boldness, they completely overturned and reconstructed Xunke Software's original software architecture and technology stack.

In fact, although Xunke was originally a leading enterprise in China, compared with those top multinational companies, they were just enlarged versions of counterfeit workshops.

Currently, Lin Feng's team has designed a brand-new, open, and scalable data access protocol standard for scientific research equipment; developed AI-based intelligent data cleaning, correction, and normalization algorithms that can automatically identify and process common data noise and anomalies; built a powerful, elastically scalable distributed computing engine to cope with the massive data computing needs that may arise in the future; and begun to work closely with the Digital Medicine Center of Nandu Medical University to deeply integrate its core AI models and capabilities into the platform in the form of microservices, providing a series of intelligent services from image recognition and sequence analysis to drug design and prediction.

Although this brand-new, ambitious platform is still in a highly intensive development phase and far from perfect, with its underlying architecture constantly being adjusted, various microservices still undergoing integration testing, and its user interface being rudimentary, its forward-looking, open, and powerful potential has already given Mr. Zhang a glimpse of boundless hope and an exciting future.

He no longer hesitated for the slightest bit of "technology compatibility subsidy" provided by others, but instead devoted all the company's resources to fully support Lin Feng's team's seemingly "crazy" but visionary idea.

He knew that once the platform was successfully built and matured, it would not only serve the "Breaking Barriers" initiative, but would also likely become the core "digital infrastructure" or "new productivity tool" for the entire field of biomedical research and development in China, and even broader basic scientific research.

More importantly, his Xunke will become a true leader in China, capable of competing with top international companies.

……

As the brain and overall integrator of the alliance, Ruixing Research Institute has become a gathering place for top talents.

Huang Jiacai personally oversaw the operation, demonstrating remarkable courage and meticulous planning. He optimized the interdisciplinary and cross-domain combination of top hardware engineers, software scientists, biotechnology experts, and applied scientists from around the world, establishing multiple virtual task forces with clearly defined goals and responsibilities.

Their core task is not to simply copy or imitate a few imported pieces of equipment, but to creatively design, integrate, optimize, and tap the performance potential of systems based on the specific and dynamic research needs of Yang Ping's research group, as well as the current technological "capability boundaries" and breakthrough potential of each company in the alliance.

They deeply learned from and developed the "hardware + intelligent algorithm" collaborative optimization approach of Wang's company, conducting extremely rigorous performance testing, parameter calibration, error analysis, and interface standardization on the core hardware modules (such as optical components, sensors, actuators, pumps, and valves) provided by various partners within the alliance. Building upon the new-generation software platform constructed by Lin Feng's team, they began rapidly developing dedicated "application plugins" and automated scripts for the specific experimental workflows of Yang Ping's research group. Utilizing novel enzymes and optimized reagent formulations provided by Susan's team, they repeatedly conducted comparative experiments in Ruixing's self-built advanced verification laboratory, meticulously optimizing experimental procedures and reaction conditions to find the optimal performance point combining domestically produced equipment, reagents, and methodologies.

The noise levels, long-term temperature drift, and batch-to-batch consistency of domestically produced core components still show a visible gap compared to top-tier imported products that have undergone decades of refinement. The new software platform has a complex underlying architecture and contains numerous hidden bugs and performance bottlenecks, requiring continuous debugging and optimization. The new reagents also need to undergo the most rigorous testing in the real, demanding experimental environment of Yang Ping's research group.

The first prototype of the "integrated high-performance cell analysis system" based on a completely independent technology route, with all key components and software systems provided by companies within the alliance, has been successfully built!

Its appearance may be slightly rough and pieced together, with modules from different partners, varying chassis sizes, and somewhat messy cable connections, with some seams even requiring temporary manual reinforcement. However, when the engineers nervously and expectantly plugged in the power and started the system...

All parameters on the control screen load normally, all modules pass self-tests, the robotic arm smoothly performs sample transfer operations, the high-resolution camera captures clear cell images, and the built-in AI algorithm performs real-time identification and analysis, ultimately outputting structured data to a unified central database.

The laboratory erupted in a long, enthusiastic cheer filled with pride and joy!

“Although we haven’t yet reached the top level in any single indicator,” a senior Chinese scientist who returned from the National Institutes of Health said with deep emotion, looking at the stable and reliable data stream on the screen, “the most crucial thing is that it works! From sample preparation, sample addition, reaction, testing to data analysis, the entire complex research process can be automated in a closed loop! This means that we have our own ‘roots,’ our own ‘platform.’ With this completely independent and controllable basic platform, we can continuously iterate, optimize, and upgrade the hardware, improve the software, and refine the reagents. We no longer have to worry about being suddenly cut off from supplies, being held hostage, or having prices arbitrarily raised! We have taken the initiative in progress!”

Huang Jiacai stood at the back of the excited crowd, trying hard to suppress the surging emotions in his heart.

He gazed at the prototype of the "autonomous platform," which embodied the hard work and wisdom of countless people. Although it was still immature, it was full of tenacious vitality and infinite possibilities.

He knew that the most difficult leap from 0 to 1 had been taken, and the most crucial and solid step had been taken. Next came the climb from 1 to 10, and then to 100.

(End of this chapter)