Chapter 284 - 189: Wang Qian

Chapter 284: Chapter 189: Wang Qian

2008. The United States, Maryland, Baltimore City.

Johns Hopkins University, Medical School.

Wang Qian held two Americanos as he walked briskly into the research building.

He and Zhang Sui had clearly taken completely different paths after graduation.

Here, Wang Qian was like a fish in water.

He took the elevator straight to the eighth floor and arrived in front of a spacious private office.

The nameplate on the door read: Professor Alan Miller / Principal Investigator (PI).

He knocked and entered obediently.

"Good morning, Professor Miller. Your Americano."

"Oh, thank you, Wang."

Professor Miller didn’t seem to be in a good mood today; his face was dark.

He said, "Close the door and have a seat."

Wang Qian keenly sensed his boss’s unusual mood.

For him, reading people was the top priority.

He turned to close the door properly, then pulled out a chair and sat down.

"What’s wrong, Professor? You look like you haven’t slept all night."

Professor Miller looked down at his desk, annoyed. "This is a review invitation the NEJM editorial department sent me yesterday. I just finished reading it."

Wang Qian glanced at the title. "An Early Prediction Model for SAP? Isn’t that the key area our lab is working full-throttle on?"

"That’s right," Professor Miller said irritably. "We’re still in the initial stages, but they’ve already produced the data."

"Wang, look at this. The AUC value is an astonishing 0.915. They’ve even completed multi-center validation. The logic is tight, the data is solid—it’s impeccable. Once this paper is published, it will directly rewrite international guidelines..."

Wang Qian understood.

In the world of medical academia, this was a cruel and common reality.

Countless top laboratories were all eyeing the same prize, everyone wrestling for it in the shadows.

Scientific research was a race with no patent protection period. Whoever produced the results first took everything.

If someone else published first, even if your lab had already invested millions of dollars and years of hard work, you could only stop what you were doing, stand outside the finish line to applaud them, and then sweep your own research into the trash.

"Which lab produced it? Mayo Clinic? Or Massachusetts General Hospital?"

Wang Qian picked up the first page, his gaze sweeping over the author and institution sections.

[China, Southern Medical University, First Affiliated Hospital.]

Wang Qian was taken aback. "A team from China? Southern Medical University? What the hell is Southern Medical University?"

"I’ve never heard of it either, but that’s not important. The results are what matter. Wang, we’ve fallen behind. We have to shut this project down. Once this paper is published in the NEJM, the right to set the international standard for early prediction of SAP will no longer belong to Hopkins."

Silence filled the office.

The steam from the coffee slowly rose into the air.

Watching the worried Professor Miller, Wang Qian’s mind began to race.

He remembered how, many years ago, he had been in a similar predicament and had taken Zhang Sui’s research results for himself in exchange for the opportunity to stay at Hopkins.

’Morality? Principles? Those things are worthless under the spotlights of top-tier academia.’

Wang Qian spoke slowly, his tone calm.

"Professor, this is indeed a pity, but perhaps... we still have time."

Professor Miller frowned. "Time? They’ve already submitted the manuscript to the NEJM. I’m the reviewer. According to procedure, I can only provide an objective evaluation."

"In that case, Professor, why don’t we just reject the manuscript?"

Miller was stunned. "Reject it? On what grounds? The quality of this paper is high enough."

"Is it?"

Wang Qian took the paper and looked through it carefully before speaking.

"Professor, I believe there’s an issue with the data ethics. They used cryopreserved serum from many years ago. We can question the transparency of their ethics approval process and claim there are compliance risks. For another example, racial bias. All their data comes from an Asian cohort. We can argue that this fails to represent the global patient population and lacks generalizability."

"Professor, as long as you make the decision to reject it, it will take them at least several months to recollect data and build their arguments to fix these ’flaws’."

Professor Miller’s brow furrowed tightly. "Wang, you’re asking me to use my privilege as a reviewer to suppress a peer. If it were just to buy some time, that would be one thing. But our model isn’t even ready!"

"That’s why we need to speed up. They’ve already written out the core variable selection mechanism and the characteristic markers with perfect clarity in the paper. We don’t need to fumble around on our own anymore."

Professor Miller stared at Wang Qian in disbelief. "Are you suggesting... plagiarism? My God, that’s insane! This is academic misconduct! Do you want my decades-long reputation at Hopkins to be completely destroyed?"

"No, Professor Miller. You’re using the wrong word."

Wang Qian’s tone was gentle. "This isn’t plagiarism. It’s called a modified study based on a local, independent cohort."

"We won’t use a single line of data from their paper. We’ll use our own serum to run the algorithm model they provided. As soon as we get the results, we’ll write it up immediately."

"The content we generate with our own data is our own original work. We haven’t cited their data, so how can you call it plagiarism?"

Professor Miller was clearly having a massive internal struggle. "But... but they are the originators, after all. What if they find out later and appeal to the international medical community?"

"Appeal? Professor, you overestimate those Chinese doctors. As long as we beat them to it, publish the paper in a top journal, and seize the international standard, public opinion will naturally be on our side."

"At that point, even if they publish that rejected manuscript elsewhere, people will just assume that their unknown Asian team is merely validating our original model from Johns Hopkins."

"Just think about it, Professor. At next year’s European critical care medicine conference, you’ll be standing center stage, announcing the SAP prediction standard that you led to the entire world. You will rewrite medical history. And that Chinese team on the other side of the planet won’t even have a chance to make their voices heard."

In fact, to describe Wang Qian’s plan at this moment as plagiarism was too mild.

This was outright robbery.

Perhaps some might question: wasn’t it a form of plagiarism for Jiang He, an ocean away, to use future medical knowledge to dominate the present-day 2008?

But in reality, in the field of the pancreas, including the modified SAP protocol and the miRNA research, Jiang He was using his own achievements.

Those were things he had developed in his past life, through countless surgeries and painful late nights, all for the purpose of saving Shen Yu and conquering pancreatic cancer.

He was simply withdrawing his own intellectual property and bringing it into the present.

And what were Wang Qian and Miller doing?

Sitting in an office, drinking ten-dollar-plus pour-over coffees.

Casually hitting copy and paste.

They were stealing the fruits of someone else’s exhaustive labor, slapping their own expensive label on it, and trading it for vanity and profit.

They were nothing but robbers.

Robbers dressed in white coats and sharp suits.

Professor Miller mumbled to himself.

"If... if we run it with our own cohort and ensure the algorithm’s performance reaches above 0.8... then that would mean the model genuinely needs support from Western population data. Our work would have independent value, right?"

Wang Qian handed him the final fig leaf. "Absolutely correct, Professor."

After a long silence, Professor Miller took a deep breath.

"Go prepare the reviewer’s comments for me, Wang."

"Understood."

"Also, call a meeting with everyone in the lab immediately. Starting today, the entire team will work in two shifts. Pull all the serum samples from pancreatitis patients at Hopkins from the last five years and run them through that variable selection logic. I want to see our first draft as soon as possible!"

Wang Qian stood up straight, a smile spreading across his face.

"Leave it to me, Professor. You just need to prepare your speech for next year’s conference."

...

Ten minutes later, Wang Qian returned to his own office.

Closing the door, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the bustling Baltimore streets below.

He took a light sip of his coffee, scoffing internally.

’A domestic team?’

’Southern Medical University?’

’Ridiculous.’

’In this world, without power, your life’s work is just a stepping stone for others.’

’Back then, Zhang Sui couldn’t see that. And what was the result? I climbed up by stepping on his shoulders, while he could only scurry back to China in disgrace.’

’Now, it’s the same for this team from China.’

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

The door was knocked.

An Asian young man with a buzz cut and black-framed glasses pushed the door open and walked in.

His name was Zou Ji, one of Wang Qian’s most capable doctoral students.

"Teacher Wang."

Zou Ji looked somewhat exhausted. "This is the paper on the risk factor analysis for postoperative recurrence of cholangiocarcinoma that you asked me to revise. I’ve re-run the multivariate regression analysis as you requested. Please take a look."

Wang Qian took the paper and casually flipped through a couple of pages. His eyes scanned several data charts, and his brow immediately furrowed.

"This is what you spent all this time revising for me? The logic is loose, the data is imperfect, and the arguments lack force."

Zou Ji hurriedly explained, "But Teacher Wang, the objectively collected data just looks like this..."

Wang Qian cut him off. "Zou Ji, are you trying to teach me how to do research? If the data doesn’t look good, that means there’s a problem with your processing method. If outliers are interfering with the core conclusion, it means those samples didn’t meet the inclusion criteria in the first place. Exclude them and redo it."

Zou Ji’s face flushed red, his eyes filled with struggle.

He knew very well that this so-called "exclusion" was teetering on the edge of academic fraud...

"Also,"

Wang Qian took a sip of coffee and added, "change the author order on this paper. I guided the core idea and I set the direction. I’ll be the first and corresponding author for this paper. Put yourself as the second author."

"What?"

Zou Ji looked up in shock. "Teacher Wang, I did everything for this paper myself—from proposing the topic, collecting cases, and analyzing the statistics, to writing the first draft. I pulled all-nighters to write it. You... you..."

Wang Qian said flatly:

"What? Feeling wronged? Zou Ji, get your head straight. Who gave you the recommendation letter to get into the lab at Hopkins? Whose name is attached to the funding you use and the medical records you access? Without my name, Wang Qian, on it, do you think any journal would even look at a manuscript from some unknown Ph.D. student? To be honest, I feel like I’m getting the short end of the stick publishing a paper of this quality under my name. This isn’t easy for me, you know."

Zou Ji was rendered speechless, his eyes filled with anger and humiliation, but in the end, he could only compromise.

Not only was he being forced to alter data, but the results he had worked so desperately to produce were also being shamelessly plundered by his supervisor.

But he had no room to resist, because the power to sign off on his graduation was held firmly in Wang Qian’s hands.

"Get out. Clean up the data and bring it back to me."

Zou Ji’s eyes were slightly red. He silently picked up the paper from the desk and walked out of the office.

Watching the office door close again, Wang Qian smiled leisurely.

’The strong devour the weak. That’s the law of the jungle in academia.’

He was once a victim at the bottom of this system, but now, he had climbed up and become a vested beneficiary of its rules.

He opened a Word document and began to ghostwrite the reviewer’s comments for the professor.

"As a reviewer, I must point out the potential risks in this study’s ethical compliance review... Furthermore, the single-race cohort lacks generalizability... Given the NEJM’s high standards for clinical guidance, I strongly recommend that the editorial board reject this manuscript. I suggest the authors attempt resubmission after supplementing their work with multi-center, multi-racial data."

After typing the last word, Wang Qian could almost see the devastated and desperate expressions on the Chinese team’s faces when they received the rejection email.

But he didn’t care.

’This is the best of times.’

’All resources will flow to the top.’

’As for those struggling at the bottom... just obediently rot away in the darkness.’

’They should feel lucky to be able to provide me with their results, shouldn’t they?’