Chapter 2535: A Deeper Meaning

Of course, your average broke-ass med student absolutely cannot afford pricey experimental animals, so they just use regular lab mice or house rabbits. The problem is, there’s very little funding allocated for student research. How poor is "poor"? Under the premise of meeting experimental requirements, you inevitably have to think about cost. If you can use a rat, you won’t use a mouse, simply because a single mouse costs a few yuan more than a rat, enough for cash?strapped researchers to haggle over. As for rabbits, forget it, they’re way more expensive than mice.

Student Wei, who can probably afford a Hermes stethoscope, heard this and thought: This isn’t a big problem for me. When the time comes, I’ll just have my dad wire some money to the teacher so they can buy more for me.

He was thinking too simple. Student Wei. This hassle isn’t just about the money to buy the animals. Once you buy them, you can’t just use them directly. For many experiments, you have to build animal models. Because in clinical medical research, you’re basically studying diseases, and the animals have to be made to carry certain diseases to simulate patients so they’re convenient to study.

For example, when they were interning in OB-GYN, Xie Wanying and Student Duan had the good fortune to get in touch with some clinical research project documents. When the teachers were studying gestational diabetes, they needed to establish a rat model of gestational diabetes in the lab.

So how do you get this model? Either you buy it from a specialized model company, which is way more expensive than ordinary lab rats—each one can cost several thousand to tens of thousands. No matter how rich you are, it’s hard to burn through that kind of money. Most of the time, researchers will try to build the model themselves and raise "diseased rats." First, they buy rats that meet the experimental requirements for weight and age and raise them for two weeks so they get used to the environment and diet, avoiding external factors affecting the experimental process and results. Then they mate the male and female rats. Once pregnancy is confirmed, they divide them into a control group and an experimental group. They inject normal saline into the peritoneal cavity of the pregnant females in the control group, and streptozotocin into those in the experimental group to induce diabetes in the female rats.

As long as there’s even a tiny deviation in the middle that makes the results fail to meet the experimental assumptions you set, you can only scrap everything and start over from scratch.

At that point, is it still just a matter of the price of a single animal? No. Money can’t buy you experimental results. Some research students and teachers, because they failed to produce results within the planned timeframe, got so anxious and irritable they were under enough pressure to feel like jumping off a building or into a river.

After Student Xie finished explaining all this to Student Wei, that counted as the most basic kind of lab?related FAQ answered.

Student Wei and Student Pan, who hadn’t yet had any exposure to research, were left completely dumbfounded. Dai Nanhui once again seriously doubted: are this Student Xie’s parents really just ordinary people?

"So what you’re saying, Yingying, is that the most important thing is—" Wei Shangquan asked.

Going back to that earlier comment about someone accusing their whole class, including her, Student Xie, of being arrogant just because they had talent. Now it seemed that it was exactly the opposite. Precisely because Student Xie knew research too well, she respected every supervisor and didn’t want to cause them trouble, so she was being cautious in choosing one.

Wanting to avoid detours and not waste effort, the most important thing is the experimental design at the initial stage. For this, you need to find a supervisor whose thinking is aligned with yours to guide you. So what Senior Yoo said at the beginning was the most correct.

The surroundings were too quiet; a few students looked up and were startled to realize that at some point the seniors had started eavesdropping on their conversation, so they immediately lowered their voices.

Cheng Yuchen and Duan Sanbao exchanged a look: their superiors’ expressions and eyes both looked a little off.

Before long, Xie Wanying could feel a meaningful glance shoot over from those deep, scheming, black?bellied beautiful eyes of Immortal Brother up at the front, enough to make one’s heart skip a beat.

This Student Xie really was surprising. Someone who looked like she’d never touched research actually knew a lot about it—what was going on here? The most ridiculous part was that quite a few people clearly already knew and hadn’t told him. No wonder everyone was scrambling to recruit her.