Literary Master 1983

Chapter 377 Watson's China Tour

Watson asked, "Yu, you're a big shot in China, how can I help you?"

Yu said, "I hope you can bring more academic resources to China, cultivate a group of talents, and exert your influence."

Historically, the pharmaceutical industrial base in Suzhou, southern China, had a deep collaboration with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, led by Watson. At the beginning of the new century, Watson's support for the Suzhou industrial zone spurred bold capital investment in the local biopharmaceutical industry.

But it's not the beginning of the century, it's the 1980s, and everything is still in the early days.

Watson, naturally arrogant, retorted, "Why would I do that?"

"Because these children are highly intelligent, to some extent, helping them is more beneficial to the continuation and development of human civilization."

Watson was stunned, seemingly unable to believe what he had just heard: "You're a fascist too?"

"What? I'm not!" Yu Qie quickly denied.

"Then you must be a nationalist!"

"I……"

Watson said, “I’ve discovered that you Chinese are all extreme pragmatists. Do you know that saying these things is 100% racist in the United States? You’re essentially acknowledging that Chinese people deserve an education more than others! You don’t know that because this kind of thinking is as natural to you as breathing air.”

“However, I wholeheartedly agree!” Watson said with a smile.

He specifically asked Shizuo Kakutani, "Do you agree?"

Kakutani Shizuo remained noncommittal. He wanted to save face for the host country, "Yokiri," while also distancing himself from racial discrimination. He could only vaguely say, "I agree with the part that is beneficial to human development."

Watson scoffed, "You're not even as good as your daughter, Michiko Kazuma. If she were there, she would definitely support me."

Watson then realized the educational predicament the country was facing. Many bright people did not have enough opportunities to be educated, and their intelligence was being wasted.

Project Hope?

Watson, of course, couldn't possibly have gotten even a tiny bit involved. He was a thoroughly American.

However, he can champion the brilliant minds of the Chinese people. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is currently at its zenith, one of the world's leading biological laboratories, with numerous pharmaceutical companies across the United States collaborating with it, who are lamenting the laboratory's exorbitant research and development costs.

This prompted Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to continuously seek suitable partners. They shared some research and testing tasks by establishing affiliates. This naturally boosted the local economy.

Some universities in certain regions even developed strong biology departments as a result. For example, Shuangyashan University in southern China later became a leading institution in this field.

“I understand what you mean. You hope to bring more international exchanges to Yenching University and, with the endorsement of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, ultimately find opportunities for your local Chinese pharmaceutical factories to manufacture for international giants.”

“Developing industries is the greatest form of charity, that’s for sure. You remind me of the successful investments of your richest Chinese man.”

"But it's not easy."

Watson had his own method; he decided to start by testing intelligence.

Internationally, there are already tests in this area, covering logic, geometry, memory, and recognition—it requires almost no knowledge of English and is a purely intuitive choice.

Test takers need to answer all the questions within a limited time. These questions are used to evaluate the test takers' intelligence.

Because human intelligence is composed of these basic abilities.

Two days later, Watson brought over two hundred questions. The first group to receive these tests were the students from Yenching University who were staying on campus for the summer. Watson personally proctored the exams and graded them himself.

Watson, like a rural teacher, was excited about the students' exam papers:

"113!"

"Oh, this person is 134!"

"105... How did he get here?"

"127?! Great, that's normal."

Among the sixty students selected, their average intelligence reached 120-130, generally placing them in the top 10% of the population. Human intelligence distribution follows a normal distribution, with the vast majority of people concentrated around 100, and the further away from this range, the fewer people there are.

When an intelligence test score of 140 or higher is achieved, it means that the individual's intelligence level is in the top 1%, and they begin to enter the category of what is commonly known as genius.

"1% is data from China, specifically East Asian men. If we look at the whole world, regardless of gender or race, you'll see that this is the top 0.15%. These people deserve to succeed because they've won the grand prize given to them by their genes."

However, the students at Yenching University were exceptionally intelligent, which did not arouse Watson's excessive excitement.

Because there are a billion people here.

There are some intelligent people, that's for sure.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which Watson looks down upon, there are still intelligent people. Humanity has its share of genetic mutations, and given a large enough population, it's not difficult to gather a group of intelligent individuals.

The difficulty lies in achieving a high level of universality.

With the coordination of the education department, Watson went to the nearby Yenching University Affiliated Primary School to conduct an investigation. Yu Qie told him that some of these students were among the two thousand students at the airport.

Watson was deeply impressed by those "human-shaped LEDs." He was so engrossed in watching them that he didn't want to put them down, and ended up with a bruise near his eye from being hit by Márquez's elbow.

Thousands of students moved with perfect coordination, forming hieroglyphs. Despite their young age, they could operate with the precision of industrial parts after minimal training.

What about applying this capability to scientific research and industrialization?
Biopharmaceuticals is largely a labor-intensive industry—only it requires highly intellectual labor.

He said to Yu Qie, “Do you know that organizational and execution skills are also a kind of intelligence? Some people cannot understand complex instructions, such as a garbage truck driver who needs to transport garbage and dump it in a designated place, or transport it from one landfill to another and observe the germs on it under a microscope… Many people cannot carry out such instructions. And this kind of ‘garbage dumping’ happens every day in biological laboratories.”

"Yes, I'm talking about sub-Saharan Africa, and some of the grass-skirt-wearing indigenous people in Oceania."

Yu Qie dared not respond to Watson's words, because Africans and Oceanians also bought his books.

If he expressed even the slightest agreement, Watson would embellish his words and include them in a revised edition of the national textbook "The Double Helix".

Then he said: "I'll finish the rest too!"
Kakutani Shizuo stood to the side, deep in thought. Although he, like Yokichi, dared not get involved in this topic, he was also very interested in the distribution of human intelligence.

For mathematicians, intelligence is a direct ability.

There are many legends of highly intelligent geniuses in the mathematics world. Compared with these people, Shizuo Kakutani is just a mayfly in the vast sky.

"May I take your intelligence test?" Shizuo Kakutani asked.

Watson readily allowed him to take the test, but only gave him one-third of the normal time. Because the intelligence test questions differ for different age groups, with the younger ones being much simpler, and Watson didn't have multiple sets of questions available, he had to shorten Kakutani Shizuo's test time.

"Yu, would you like to test it?"

Yu Qie took a set of test papers and started writing. He felt he had hardly thought about anything, answering each question instinctively. He spent no more than ten seconds reading each question.

Watson quickly made them stop writing and started calculating the score on the spot.

Shizuo Kakutani got 190!

This is the highest intelligence score ever recorded by humankind—obviously impossible. His score should be reduced by at least thirty to forty points.

Yu Qie was only ten points less than Kakutani Shizuo.

Now, the person who is truly shocked is Yu Qie.

Am I that smart?

Watson explained, “In fact, the most intelligent person in human history is not Einstein, but the German writer Goethe. So don’t be surprised by your intelligence! Writing requires a lot of intelligence.”

“I would be surprised if you only scored 110 or 120. I would guess your true level is between 140 and 150. You will never be a great mathematician, but you are good enough to be an economist.”

Kakutani Shizuo nodded repeatedly beside him.

Two hours later, Watson called it a day. Without saying a word, he collected all the papers, and some of the students from Yanda Affiliated Primary School cried because they couldn't finish the questions.

Watson reassured them, "I gave you so many questions precisely because it's impossible for you to finish them all."

That evening, Watson reviewed the papers again, and this time the results surprised him.

The IQ of primary school students at Yenching University Affiliated Primary School is as high as 118.

What level of intelligence is this?

In the United States, if things had continued as they were, these individuals could have chosen to attend a second-tier school from the Ivy League, any one of which would have put Yenching University to shame.

Watson had the feeling of an old monster meeting a junior member of his clan.

Upon waking up, the intelligence of all humankind has increased by fifteen points!
An excited Watson announced that he would donate a standard American elementary school laboratory to Yenching University Affiliated Elementary School, and said, "If any of you here want to pursue a career in biology and want to visit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or get an internship, I will help you."

At this point, Watson's peculiar intelligence tests began to come into the public eye.

Domestic newspapers cautiously reported on Watson's experiment: "Nobel laureate Watson affirmed the talent of Chinese students. He believes it is a place where geniuses gather."

A reporter from the Beijing Evening News provided a detailed account of the affiliated primary school's academic performance: even Nobel laureates are captivated by the high intelligence of its students!
This kind of satisfying, wish-fulfillment-style plot led to a craze for geniuses and tutoring at the affiliated primary school in Beijing for a period of time.

In the past few days, Yu Qie discovered that Watson was a person who spoke without restraint.

Some of his so-called conclusions actually have no scientific basis; he speaks entirely based on his own preferences.

For example, when groups of international students at Yenching University were sunbathing on the lawn, Watson commented, "Sunbathing is closely related to desire, which is why Latin Americans are passionate and outgoing, while the British are pale and indifferent."

Watson himself is thin, and he also likes the generally thin physique of Chinese people. He said, "Thin people are unhappy, so overall they are more ambitious than fat people... So when you are interviewing fat people, you feel sorry for them because you know you will never hire them."

There are not many women in the Department of Biology at Yenching University; it is mainly male.

Watson was quite satisfied with the situation: "The presence of women in the lab is pleasing to the eye, but they are not very efficient."

Since coming to China, he has let himself go, and every word he wrote could have made Watson a target of criticism in the United States. However, in China, at present, Watson rarely receives fierce criticism.

This made him feel a connection to this place.

“Yu Qie, I’ve always known you don’t like my words,” he said to Yu Qie.

“But you thought I could help you, and what I did was more important than what I said wrong, so you forgave me… This is a precious virtue of you Chinese people. Fundamentally, I love the Chinese people, and I have always had a strong interest in China.”

A week after Watson arrived in China, he introduced Yu Qie to a biochemist named Cao Tianqing.

They were old friends. They embraced warmly upon meeting.

Cao Tianqing is the director of the Department of Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the president of the Shanghai branch of the Academy, and a joint academician of both China and Sweden. Watson once worked with Cao Tianqing; they both studied DNA proteins.

According to Cao Tianqing's recollection, Watson once looked down on the Chinese.

This is a common perception in the Western scientific community. When Einstein visited China, he wrote in his diary that it was "dirty, dull, and numb" and that "it was more like a machine than a human being. Everyone was squatting on the ground, even the children who should have been lively."

However, Chinese researchers, represented by Cao Tianqing, quickly reversed Watson's impression. After investigation, he realized that his previous understanding was a shocking lie! There were not just one or two geniuses here, but a general distribution of high intelligence.

Then Watson showed an astonishing level of acceptance towards Chinese people, which was unusual for a villain like him. Whenever a researcher from China, whether well-known or unknown, corresponded with him, Watson would reply and ask if he could help.

Yu Qie enjoyed an unforgettable family dinner at Academician Cao's home.

It was also learned that this was not Watson's first visit to China, and that he had good relationships with many domestic biologists.

Yu Qie began to look at Watson with new respect.

This is a difficult person to evaluate. He is indeed racist, and putting aside any honors, he is simply a wicked person. However, he does not discriminate against Chinese people and helps them.

Moreover, you can't ignore his Nobel Prize honor, because it is one of the greatest honors a person can receive.

Yu Qie could neither agree with Watson nor completely reject him.

He privately discussed Watson with Academician Cao. Academician Cao told Yu Qie: This may be related to Watson's own experience, because he was an Irishman and Scotsman who was bullied by the English. Although he had some English ancestry, he did not have a bloodline identity with England.

In his mind, the more intelligent Irish and Scots were bullied by the inferior English and were unable to recover for hundreds of years, suffering all kinds of stigmatization—ultimately, it was discovered that the English had the lowest intelligence.

That was like a shockwave!
Moreover, Watson's most hated academic collaborator and rival, Clark, was also English.

After a two-week visit to China, Watson had to return to the United States. His spectacular intelligence test had to come to an end.

But Watson still cares about the education of Chinese students. It is a tragedy that a group of obviously more intelligent people cannot give full play to their talents.

Before he left, Yu Qie wrote a short science fiction story depicting rural teachers in China.

The novel was titled "The Village Teacher," and Yu Qie gifted the manuscript to Watson.

The manuscript begins with:

[To express our gratitude to Mr. Watson for donating the laboratory to Chinese students, and for any future efforts he may make]

Watson opened the book and saw this sentence; his heart skipped a beat.

(End of this chapter)