Chapter 2298 - 1483: Unpredictable Loss of Control

Chapter 2298: Chapter 1483: Unpredictable Loss of Control

A month after the review was published.

When he swiped his card to enter the office area, Tang Shun was already standing at his office door, without a folder, holding only a mobile phone. Tang Shun turned the phone screen towards him, showing a video.

"Professor, take a look."

Yang Ping took the phone, opened his office door, and walked in, with Tang Shun following behind. The video’s background was a laboratory, with white countertops, neatly arranged pipette racks, and a centrifuge in the background, giving off a standard professional vibe. A middle-aged woman in a white gown stood in front of the camera, with a whiteboard behind her displaying chemical structures. The video was titled "Unsealing Plan Laboratory Releases First Batch of Data: Successful High-Intensity Activation of Receptor X Simulated In Vitro."

Yang Ping pressed the play button.

The woman spoke in a steady and confident voice, "Based on Professor Yang Ping’s unified theoretical framework, we optimized the activation scheme, achieving twenty percent of Receptor X’s maximum activation capability in an in vitro model. Preliminary results show that the activated cells exhibit enhanced DNA repair capability and reduced apoptosis rates. We believe this data preliminarily validates the feasibility of Receptor X as a target for lifespan extension. Next, we will move on to animal models."

The video was less than three minutes long. After Yang Ping watched it, he watched it again from the beginning. On the second viewing, he focused on the details of the image; several key groups in the chemical structures on the whiteboard were drawn incorrectly, and the centrifuge in the background was an old model from five years ago, unlikely to be used for high-precision activation experiments. But he also knew that only peers could spot these details. To the millions of ordinary viewers of this video, the image presented a "person in a white gown speaking in a laboratory," a scene where the symbols "laboratory" and "white gown" alone conveyed a sense of authority.

"Fake!" Yang Ping handed the phone back to Tang Shun, "At least it’s incomplete. She mentioned ’enhanced DNA repair capability’ without providing any control data. ’Reduced apoptosis rate’ without indicating statistical significance. This is a press conference, not a scientific report."

"That’s not the problem." Tang Shun pocketed the phone, "The problem is, this video has been shared forty thousand times on social media. Forty thousand times, in less than six hours since it was published. The most common comment is, ’Yang Ping is still hesitating, while others have already taken action.’ Someone is using you as a comparison."

Yang Ping placed the phone on the desk, sat down, and glanced at the time in the bottom right corner of the computer screen. Eight thirty-four. He had left the institute at eleven last night, slept less than seven hours, but at this moment he felt no fatigue, only a continuous, low-intensity tension. He opened his email; the number of unread emails was over eight hundred again, and he closed the email window, having assigned all emails during this period to his assistant.

"Has Weber arrived?"

"He’s in the mass spectrometry room; the 12.5% group’s metabolomics data is due out today, and he said he’s watching the instruments run it personally."

"What about the morphological changes? The one you saw last night."

Tang Shun’s expression became subtle, "I looked at it again this morning, and the changes remain. But not the way I thought. The cells didn’t become round, didn’t float, didn’t exhibit typical stress morphology. They just... arranged differently. They were originally spread in a monolayer, but now some areas show multilayer stacking. It’s like the cells are ’stacking up’ to grow."

"Contact inhibition disappeared?"

"I think so, but only in partial areas, not entirely. So I can’t be sure if this is unique to the experimental group or a fluctuation of the cultivation conditions. We have to cross-check the metabolomics data when it comes out."

Yang Ping nodded, multilayer stacking; if this phenomenon were confirmed, it would mean that the 12.5% activation intensity had already disrupted the cells’ ability to perceive spatial density. Contact inhibition is one of the most important tumor suppression mechanisms in normal cells; once lost, cells would proliferate indefinitely. But this was just a preliminary observation, more evidence was necessary.

"Keep a close watch," Yang Ping said, "With the 12.5% group, report any abnormalities immediately, no matter how small."

After Tang Shun left, Yang Ping sat alone in his office, facing the window. He recalled the woman in the video’s mention of "twenty percent activation" and felt a specific and real fear. Twenty percent. He didn’t know which scale of his definition their mimicry experiment’s twenty percent corresponded to, but he knew that in his experimental system, fifteen percent had already torn a breach at the epigenetic level. If the activation intensity was pushed to twenty percent, what would happen? The people at that laboratory clearly didn’t know, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care.

He opened his computer, typed the company’s name into the search bar. When the search results page loaded, he saw that the company had already launched a new official website, with the homepage featuring a manifesto-style text about "liberation of human lifespan," and the footer listed the founding team. He looked at each name, finding that out of the twelve people, five had business backgrounds, one was from computer engineering, and only six were biology PhDs.

Yang Ping closed the browser, stood up, and walked a few steps around the office. He walked to the window, then back to the door, and once again to the window. His heartbeat was a bit fast, and he felt something accumulating in his chest; it wasn’t fear, fear is vague and diffuse; it was concrete, like a stone, with weight and edges. He knew what it was, it was concern.