Surgery Godfather
Chapter 707 - 629: Detailed Dissection

Chapter 707: Chapter 629: Detailed Dissection

After settling the matter of recruiting Tang Shun, Yang Ping felt much more relaxed.

In this way, with a member focused on basic research, many tasks can be carried out much more easily in the Stem Cell Laboratory.

Yang Ping’s experiments in the system space laboratory are ongoing, and he takes advantage of the suitable times to continue his work almost daily.

Yang Ping continues to collect the inducers for stem cell directional differentiation, discerning and recording each one with a cryo-electron microscope. He then further verifies them with reverse experiments. Much of this work is trial and error in nature. Without strong interest as a supportive drive, it would be challenging to make such tedious work exciting.

For some repetitive tasks, such as slicing muscle into single-cell layers, Yang Ping delegates this work to robotic arms. The robotic arms, lacking subjective initiative, perform tasks according to Yang’s arrangements and serve as excellent laborers.

Muscle cells, also known as muscle fibers, are long, columnar, multinucleate cells, ranging from 1-40mm in length and 10-100µm in diameter. A single muscle cell contains dozens or even hundreds of nuclei.

How these muscle cells organize into muscle tissue, how nerves, blood vessels, and lymph vessels weave within the structure, how many layers these structures are divided into, what types of cells make up each layer, and how these cells connect with each other.

This is what Yang Ping currently aims to comprehend during his meticulous anatomical study of muscles.

In the system laboratory, besides the very affordable time, the robotic arms also serve as cheap labor, as their numbers can be increased as needed.

All the photomicrograph and electron micrograph images of the slices are stored in a computer. Then, they are used to reconstruct a detailed 3D anatomical model of an entire muscle tissue.

These fundamental tasks are extremely tedious, but they are also especially important. No steps can be carelessly missed.

When a muscle tissue is sliced into single-cell layers, just considering muscle cells alone, the saggital and coronal sections can yield more than twenty thousand slices. However, considering blood vessels, nerves, and lymph vessels, the three sections can result in millions of slices.

Yang Ping has discovered a very good method for creating single cell-layer muscle slices through numerous slicing trials. He summarized this method and applied it to actual experiments to reduce trial and error time.

In scientific research, much time is wasted on trial and error, but it’s a necessary step in the process.

The reason why some senior companies in various technology industries can form monopolies, such as world pharmaceutical giants, is that their scientific research databases include countless data on both successes and failures. It’s possible that the drugs that emerging companies invest heavily in developing were already found to be errors by these larger companies decades ago.

Therefore, for these types of companies, the longer their operation time and the greater the number of experiments conducted, the more valuable their data becomes, whether successful or not. These data are considered to be their core secrets.

Some other companies, such as some high-end steel manufacturers, keep recipes of materials, which are data accumulated over decades or even centuries of trial and error. These cannot be surpassed in a short period of time.

Therefore, in high-tech industries such as materials, chemical industry, pharmaceuticals, etc., it’s challenging for the followers to surpass the pioneers unless there is a technological revolution and a change in the track. Otherwise, the possibility of overtaking on curves does not exist.

After coming out of the system space, Yang Ping relies on his memory to write down the method he arranged for creating single cell-layer muscle slices. Then, after some organization, he sees these as valuable assets after countless trial and error verifications.

The current team responsible for making single cell-layer muscle slices is the Nandu University Medical Digital Medical Laboratory. Having already accumulated rich experience when constructing a digital human, they were able to conduct muscle slicing smoothly.

In the project to complete a digital human, a young man’s body was selected out of 20 donated bodies. Using a grinding technique at the sub-millimeter level, the body was sliced from head to toe into slices less than 0.2mm thick, totaling up to 8972 slices. Over twenty researchers worked around the clock to process more than 200,000 images, each with a resolution of 4040*5880, using these images to construct a digital human.

The difference is, the muscle slices currently need to be made into single-cell layers, which requires high technology, and more images need to be processed, with hundreds of thousands of slices just for one direction.

Moreover, each image needs to be distinguished at the cellular level. If it is a known cell, it needs to be clear to which category it belongs; if it is an unknown cell, it needs to be identified.

The task of directing stem cells to grow into muscle cells is completed by the Stem Cell Laboratory of Sanbo Hospital. Not only do they need to differentiate into muscle cells, but they also have to differentiate into cells that make up nerves, blood vessels, and lymph vessels. All types of cells involved in a muscle tissue must be directionally grown.

After these two tasks are completed, the next steps begin to diverge into two routes: one is biological 3D printing technology, and the other is gene expression regulation technology.

The biological 3D printing technology is in the charge of the Sharp Medical company’s laboratory, and the gene expression regulation is the responsibility of the Genetics Laboratory at Nandu Medical University.

The whole process requires multiple units to cooperate and divide the tasks, and if it weren’t for the joint efforts of Sanbo Hospital and Nandu Medical University, it would take a year or more to contact and coordinate the cooperating units.

Chen Zhi at Sharp Medical is a Master’s graduate in Bioengineering. This outstanding graduate student is studying for his Ph.D. at Nandu Polytechnic in his spare time. He has a unique talent for the development of medical instruments and devices. Under Huang Jiacai’s instruction, he is currently organizing a team to develop a new type of biological 3D printer.

The existing biological printers in the world cannot print a piece of authentic muscle. The muscle currently printed in the United States is merely a stack of muscle cells with partial functionality. It doesn’t have nerves or blood vessels, and the connections between the cells aren’t simulated authentically.

Each link in the process is fundamentally researched, making it extremely difficult and requiring huge human, material, and financial resources.

But, it is the only way to truly succeed.

---

"Professor, can I participate in any projects?"

Robert has been paying attention to this matter for a long time.

Yang Ping has his own considerations. He definitely can’t allow Robert to participate in core projects. Good relations do not warrant sharing details that could potentially form the basis of national technological expertise in the future.

Currently, the United States strictly maintains confidentiality with many advanced biotechnologies, including stem cell research projects, and refuses to allow foreigners to observe.

For example, the technology of directional differentiation of stem cells, the inducers needed, the proteins they actually contain, and how to match them are all top secrets of the laboratory.

It’s like the technology used in the aviation industry for manufacturing engines; it is absolutely not for sale or disclosure.

However, Robert can participate in the subsidiary projects.

"Analyze the structure of articular cartilage, make single-cell slices, and then reconstruct the 3-dimensional anatomical structure of the cartilage."

Yang Ping assigns a task to Robert.

"What about me?"

August also wants to participate.

"You work on the detailed structure analysis of the intervertebral disc."

Yang also assigns a task to August.

These projects are peripheral research for Yang Ping’s main topic. He does not have the capacity to divert attention to them for now, so delegating them is beneficial. It not only maintains international top-level scientific research connections, but also doesn’t lose control over the core technology of the project.

It’s like building an airplane: he focuses his energy on building the engine, and others can be assigned as necessary, rather than researching and manufacturing everything himself.

Whether it is the research on cartilage or intervertebral disc, both would be massive breakthroughs if successful.

Both Robert and August are more than willing to undertake these tasks. They believe that under Professor Yang’s guidance, they will be able to succeed.