Lin Jia found it hard to imagine Chen Yuanguang's train of thought—or what state of mind he had been in when he made that decision.
Chen Yuanguang said lightly, "Yeah. The Science Fiction World public account I followed pushed a notification about this Science Fiction New Star Competition. I clicked in and saw that the final judging panel had invited Levitt Michael, a Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry.
I figured that, at worst, I could win a bronze award. As long as I had a chance to meet Levitt Michael, I was confident I could get him to write me a recommendation letter."
Lin Jia said helplessly, "Yuanguang, your imagination really is wild. Ordinary people wouldn't think of something like that, much less have the ability to pull it off.
Not only did you think of it, you actually made it happen. And you didn't just win an award—you won the gold.
I'm about to give the image of you in my mind a complete upgrade. From now on, your defining trait will be omnipotence. Hahaha."
Lin Jia was very happy. Chen Yuanguang's progress had gone so smoothly that it greatly increased his chances of getting into an american university.
She knew very well just how powerful an endorsement from a Nobel Prize winner was in applications to American universities.
Put plainly, it was equivalent to a Nobel Prize winner staking his own reputation to vouch to the professor submitting your application that you could get the job done.
Levitt would be joining Fudan University this September to establish the Multiscale Research Institute of Complex Systems and serve as its honorary dean. During his time teaching at Fudan University, he had written very few recommendation letters.
The news of his award spread quickly, especially within Jiang University. Lin Jia, his former roommates, his counselor, and many others took turns calling to congratulate him.
Chen Yuanguang found himself thinking that it would be nice if an AI could imitate his voice and handle these sorts of calls. That feature had become highly mature on future phones, yet it was rarely useful.
That was because there were no spam calls in the future. Human relationships had become atomized to the extreme, so this kind of AI anti-harassment call feature was a product of its era—available, but largely useless.
"Hello, Mr. Levitt. I'm the gold award winner of this Science Fiction New Star Competition, and I'm also a fan of yours."
Goose Factory had arranged for them to meet in the conference room of the hotel where Levitt was staying. Guo Wei accompanied them. Levitt smiled and shook Chen Yuanguang's hand. "Hello. I also liked your work very much. It was quite interesting.
Many of its projections about the future were very interesting as well."
Chen Yuanguang said, "That was probably because I pay close attention to science and cutting-edge technology, so I was able to produce some interesting results.
Sir, the main reason I wanted to meet you this time was to ask for your guidance on a paper. I developed a computer simulation method for simulating the directed evolution of proteins.
This method only required the physicochemical properties and sequence information of proteins to simulate their directed evolution.
The subject I selected was Protein DHR8. Through computer simulation, I evolved it to gain the ability to bind DNA or RNA.
Before carrying out the simulated evolution, I constructed an evaluation library containing thirty Penta-Peptide Repeat Proteins to assess sequence diversity and nucleic acid binding.
Penta-Peptide Repeat Proteins were proven RNA-binding proteins. Their binding sites were very clear and had already been systematically characterized.
That meant every PPR in my evaluation library had two distinct binding sites. Centering on each binding site, we used a short sequence of thirteen amino acids as an evaluation window, giving us a total of sixty evaluation windows.
For the short sequence in each evaluation window, we used 544 indicators from existing databases that described the physicochemical properties of amino acids to represent the amino acids. Thus, the amino acid at each position became a 544×1 matrix, and thirteen such matrices were combined to represent a peptide sequence thirteen amino acids long.
For the 544×13 matrix of an evaluation window, I optimized the K-means++ Algorithm, then used the optimized algorithm for clustering, grouping the 544 row vectors into fifty classes. In visualization, each class represented a waveform. For each class, we could use the arithmetic mean of each column in the subset of matrices contained in that class to generate its characteristic waveform."
After handing the printed paper to Levitt, Chen Yuanguang briefly explained his approach.
One of Levitt's major areas of work involved protein simulation: using computational analysis of protein sequences to predict protein structures, with a focus on homology modeling.
Chen Yuanguang's paper aligned closely with his field, and both its underlying ideas and algorithmic optimizations were highly valuable.
At first, Levitt had not thought much of it. He knew the other party was still a fourth-year undergraduate and assumed the paper was merely something written to create a topic of conversation—at best, a reasonably well-summarized review.
But he had not expected Chen Yuanguang to open with something so substantial. Both the computational rules he had designed and his optimization of the classic K-means++ clustering algorithm were full of careful thought.
"Excellent work." After offering that assessment, Levitt discussed several detailed points from the paper with Chen Yuanguang.
Meanwhile, Guo Wei was having an existential crisis. Who am I? Where am I?
Guo Wei had joined Goose Factory in 2013. In five years, he had become a senior manager at Goose Factory Video. He had graduated from a prestigious university, and because copyright operations often required him to travel abroad, his English had not deteriorated. He was not the sort of theoretical speaker who had merely passed the CET-4 and CET-6 exams. His English was not excellent, but he could still hold direct conversations in it.
He had only seen Chen Yuanguang and Levitt finish saying "nice to meet you," then Chen Yuanguang handed Levitt a stack of papers. After that, he could no longer understand anything they were saying. There were far too many technical terms; even when he tried to guess from context, he could not understand what they meant.
Guo Wei thought, Are young people really this fierce now?
"Yes, yes, exactly. There are conserved regions to prevent the sites responsible for the internal helical hydrogen-bond interactions of DHR8 from being damaged, thereby avoiding damage to the structural motifs of the repeat protein. That design is correct. This kind of simulation can both reproduce real conditions and constrain mutations within a certain range."
"Excellent idea. Keep running randomized simulations, select the one with the smallest degree of difference as the best match, then compare it against the waveform to calculate the goodness of fit."
Levitt lavished praise on Chen Yuanguang's paper. He had originally set aside fifteen minutes for the conversation, but they had now talked for more than two hours, and he was still reluctant to stop.
"Yuanguang, your paper only lacks one thing: experiments to verify your theory. Use your simulation method to transform Protein DRH8 into a short peptide capable of binding nucleic acids.
With that, this paper could be published in Nature. Without it, it could still be published, but perhaps only in a subsidiary journal," Levitt said.
Chen Yuanguang replied, "I have some ideas. Later, I'll apply to the university and refine it."
Since no laboratory had been available for him to use before, Chen Yuanguang's paper was entirely based on computational simulation and lacked experimental validation.
Levitt asked, "Did you complete this paper independently, or did you work on it with others?"
From their exchange alone, Levitt knew that Chen Yuanguang had to be the paper's main contributor, because he explained the ideas and designs in it with great clarity.
Chen Yuanguang said, "I did it alone."
Levitt said, "Then when you submit it to Nature, if you don't mind, you can list me as the second author. That way, it will definitely be published in Nature."
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