Thank You for Your Understanding and Cooperation

Han Meng began editing the SHANK3 gene in the rats. At this point, the nucleotide daughter strands had not yet been methylated, while the complementary parent strands contained methyl groups.

These methyl groups were not mutations and had the same pairing properties as those in the rats' normal nucleotides.

The time lag between DNA replication and methylation of the daughter strands gave Han Meng an opportunity to scan for mismatched bases.

Using DNA as a template in a cell-free in vitro system to imitate the genes that controlled transcription in living organisms was an expensive undertaking.

The lab's expensive precision instruments were fixed assets, and they depreciated over time. Add in the costs of raw materials, consumables, water, and electricity, and a day's work by five experimentalists cost tens of thousands of yuan, regardless of whether it produced results.

As the experiments progressed, they burned through more and more money.

The Central Biology Laboratory had a research budget of 300 million yuan this year. The first quarter had just ended, and they had already spent over 100 million.

Burning through money didn't guarantee results. Perhaps that was what people meant by the four great money pits: biology, chemistry, materials, and environmental science.

The five experimentalists couldn't tell apart the research funding provided by the state and the sponsorship Shen Qi had secured. What they did know was that this laboratory burned through money on an international scale.

Huahan Gene's labs burned through even more money—N times as much as Shen Qi's lab.

But a university lab couldn't be compared with a private company. There was simply no comparison.

Without sufficient funding, researchers in biology couldn't realize their academic ideals or life's dreams.

One of a lab director's most important duties was to bring in the money.

The five experimentalists understood