From small clinic to medical empire

Chapter 259 Human Cloning Technology

After soaking in the laboratory all afternoon, Zhang Zifan didn't even eat afternoon tea, and kept his stomach full for dinner.

Shilinzhuang, the name sounds a bit earthy, but it is actually a very elegant private restaurant.

Zhang Zifan had only been to a similar place once before.

It's a bit embarrassing to say, but that time was a celebration banquet organized by Zhang Zifan's master supervisor with project funds.

It should be because the source is somewhat improper, and there is no taste in eating anything.

But this time, Zhang Zifan was very calm about the rich.

According to Zhang Zifan's estimate, the big money maker might not be Mr. Nie, but someone else.

After looking at the private room information on the text message, Zhang Zifan strode in.

……

Seeing Zhang Zifan, Nie Yuanping immediately stood up, and his ruddy face added a bit of radiance.

For his little friend, Nie Yuanping did not dare to slack off in the slightest.

Although it is said that Zhang Zifan is worth [-] to [-] million now, what Nie Yuanping values ​​is naturally not his financial resources.

In fact, Zhang Zifan, who is still wearing a popular T-shirt from a certain treasure, does not look like a rich man at all.

But for such an ordinary young man, even an old business tycoon like Nie Yuanping showed some respect from the bottom of his heart inadvertently.

As a half-neighbor, Mr. Nie knows all about the miracles Zhang Zifan has created in the past year.

Such a doctor, such a hospital, is undoubtedly worth making friends with, and worthy of running and maintaining it.

Apart from Mr. Nie, there were also Li's father and son in the room, as well as Zhao Sirui who was holding the child.

Zhang Zifan greeted several people, and it could be seen that although there was still resentment, Zhao Sirui forgave her husband after all.

"Brother Zhang, this meal is to thank your hospital for your kindness, benevolence, meticulousness and patience. If you hadn't persuaded the impulsive younger brother several times, if Dr. Yang hadn't discovered the clue, the consequences beforehand would have been disastrous!"

Li Jiaxian said the truth.

If Haoran Hospital hadn't been so patient and meticulous, I might have gone to the Civil Affairs Bureau with my wife. In that case, everything would be irreversible.

In case Si Rui does something stupid again...

In short, Li Jiaxian is grateful to Zhang Zifan from the bottom of his heart.

The same is true for Zhao Sirui.

An accident also allowed her to see clearly the warmth and coldness of human relationships, and woke up half of the wealthy fans.

Fortunately, although my husband is not an absolutely good man, he is still very responsible.

If her husband hadn't stood in front of her mother-in-law when she slapped her, Zhao Sirui felt that she would have made up her mind and left.

But the current situation is still acceptable.

Life is like this, most of the time, as long as you can live on, who is willing to let go?
……

In order to express his gratitude to Zhang Zifan, even though the child was not yet weaned, Zhao Sirui came here specially.

So not long after the dishes were served, Zhao Sirui toasted Zhang Zifan with water instead of wine, and then went to nurse the crying child in his arms.

After Zhao Sirui left, Zhang Zifan and Mr. Nie also talked about the interesting things about going to America together last year, which surprised the Li family father and son.

They just knew that this Dean Zhang was not simple, but they didn't expect it to be so powerful.

If Nie Yuanping hadn't been known as Jin Scale in the mall and had always been very reputable, the Li family and his son would almost have thought that this one-on-one match was just a game!
But in fact, Zhang Zifan was just chatting with Mr. Nie normally, without realizing how scary the things he mentioned casually were.

Li Jiaxian suddenly realized: "Brother Zhang, it turns out that you are the director of the best private hospital that has been making a lot of noise in the news before!"

Like most ordinary people, Li Jiaxian has some impressions of the current news.

But if you are not particularly interested in the content, most of them just read a title, and at most an abstract.

I have absolutely no impression of the specific characters in it.

Until Mr. Nie mentioned Schumacher and wanted to ask if he could follow Zhang Zifan's footsteps and invite the former car king to shoot an advertisement for Yuanhang Daily Chemical, Li Jiaxian finally knew how terrifying this brother Zhang was.

He remembered that one push even had an appalling title like "my country's brain function research is 20 years ahead of Europe and the United States."

At that time, Li Jiaxian thought that this was another scheme with Wu Renji and Xiongfengshan to collect IQ taxes from everyone.

Now it seems that it is really just an exaggeration of art, not some groundless rumor (now meaning, anti-bar).

Thinking of this, Li Jiaxian suddenly thought of something, and his eyes lit up immediately.

……

Shilin's rice wine tastes sweet and mellow, with a long aftertaste, and it doesn't taste very good.

Zhang Zifan drank several drinks before he became slightly tipsy.

I got up and went to the toilet, and as the water poured down, I felt comfortable again.

But when he turned around, a human face appeared in front of Zhang Zifan, which shocked him greatly.

Taking a closer look, it turned out that it was Li Jiaxian!
"You don't know how scary people are! There are so many slots, why are you queuing behind me!"

Zhang Zifan shook his head, ready to wash his hands.

Unexpectedly, Li Jiaxian quickly said: "Brother Zhang, wait, I...I have something I want to consult..."

"what's up?"

Zhang Zifan frowned, he couldn't speak on the table, but had to go to the bathroom, it didn't seem like a good thing!

Li Jiaxian rubbed his hands, and said a little embarrassedly: "Brother Zhang...I just ask...how can I have a child?"

"Isn't Li Miaomiao your son? If you still want it, work harder, the country allows the second child!"

Zhang Zifan glared at him, pushed him away, and prepared to wash his hands.

"No, no, I mean, can you have a child of your own...a biological child..."

At this time, Zhang Zifan was almost sober, he was stunned when he heard the words, shook his head and said: "There is no way, in the previous examination, all your sperm cells were of different genotypes from your somatic cells, that is to say, no matter what, Nor can you give birth to a child with whom you are biologically related.

I know, it's hard to accept from a man's point of view, but think about it, you are much luckier than your brother who died young. "

"Brother Zhang, please think of a way!"

Li Jiaxian begged, "I will take care of Miaomiao, but I really want a child of my own..."

Zhang Zifan shook his head and said: "Hey, don't think so much. Even if it's technically feasible, your wife just gave birth to a baby. How could you think about it so quickly..."

"Doctor Zhang, don't think about me."

At this time, Zhang Zifan had just finished washing his hands, and when he turned around, he saw Zhao Sirui.

"Sirui, that's not what I mean. Your body is the most important thing. I just want to..." Li Jiaxian quickly explained.

"Needless to say, I understand, Jiaxian, I also want a child that belongs to us, but for Miaomiao, you must guarantee his inheritance!" Zhao Sirui said to her husband.

She has already figured this out.

Any normal man must have a child that is completely his own. This kind of thinking cannot be blocked.

She herself also wants to have a child with the person she loves, not a illusory brother-in-law or something.

The only one who is pitiful is Miaomiao.

It is impossible for the husband to treat everyone equally.

Therefore, it is the most reliable thing to do a good job in property rights as soon as possible.

Thinking of this, Zhao Sirui turned to Zhang Zifan and said, "Doctor Zhang, Jiaxian follows his father, we have been married for three years and have no children, Miaomiao is actually doing test tubes.

To be on the safe side, I have frozen a lot of eggs in the Third Affiliated Hospital, so I can do the first-stage matching first, and then transfer the embryos after my body recovers. "

"You still don't know what it means to achieve this."

Zhang Zifan shook his head and said seriously: "If you want to use Li Jiaxian's somatic cells to fertilize your eggs, this involves related technologies of human cloning...

And it's far more difficult than cloning..."

Li Jiaxian and his wife stood there dumbfounded.

They never expected that what they thought was a very simple request would involve such a sci-fi field as cloning.

That's right, it's science fiction.

In the eyes of ordinary people, human cloning seems to only appear in science fiction movies. It is an evil path leading to eternal life for human beings, and it is a terrible Pandora's box.

Human cloning is an academic forbidden area and a red line that cannot be touched...

In fact, these views are all wrong, and they are very wrong.

First, cloning is not some new and cutting-edge science.

As early as one year ago, the British John Gordon successfully cloned Xenopus laevis.

More than 20 years ago, the famous cloned sheep Dolly was born in Ian Wilmut's laboratory at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.

Since then, a series of cloned animals such as cloned pigs, cloned cows, and cloned dogs have been born one after another, and the world seems to have ushered in the era of great cloning.

However, just when people were going smoothly and felt that this technology was bound to change the world, two successive thunderbolts completely made cloning technology fall from the cusp of academia.

At the beginning, the animals that scientists cloned were mainly frogs, fish and other animals that were fertilized in vitro.

Dolly the sheep is famous because he was the first cloned mammal.

Mammalian internal fertilization, complex genetic structure. ,
The birth of Dolly the sheep means that humans have begun to overcome the technical barriers of the world's most advanced animal groups.

In a short period of time, scientists have successively successfully cloned animals of the order Perissodactyla, Artiodactyla, Carnivora, Chiroptera, and Rodentia.

Although all of this cannot be said to be overwhelming, it can also be described as destroying cities and pulling out villages.It seems that there are no technical difficulties in cloning all mammals, only the selection of materials is different.

But when scientists turned their attention to our closest relatives, primates, something strange happened.

Whether it's macaques, chimpanzees, or even humans, the cloned cells of all primates either fail to start or quickly die after dividing briefly.

It seems that there is an invisible curse and shackle, firmly imprisoned on the primate gene.

This is the prototype of the gene lock in many science fiction.

Such a phenomenon is indeed puzzling.

Because from the perspective of species evolution, primates are not a special group.

Excluding humans, the strongest mammal, primates do not see anything special among mammals.

Even, primates and rodents belong to the superorder rodentia, and their genetic relationship is very close, but in the cloning experiment, the nature shown is completely different.

So far, cloning technology has encountered its first major setback.

Numerous famous scientists have been ruined or even ruined on the road of primate cloning, or human cloning.

Among them, the most famous one is the No. 1 in the history of Korean science from a national hero to an academic fraudster, the father of Korean cloning, the closest to the No. 1 Nobel Prize in non-humanities and social sciences, animal physiologist Hwang Woo-suk.

He successfully cloned a variety of animals, but finally fell under the ultimate barrier of human cell cloning.

……

If only this is the case, cloning technology will not usher in a cold winter.

Because there is no right or wrong in technology itself, human embryonic cell cloning has never been a restricted area in science.

What is prohibited by law and ethics is actually only cloning a living person, but scientists have never been prohibited from cloning a cell mass.

The significance of human cloning, or cloning of human embryos, is that in this mass of embryonic cells, medical scientists can find the key to treating patients, embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are a kind of basal stem cells with unlimited differentiation potential, which can theoretically repair the damage of any tissue in the human body.

However, the second bolt from the blue just hit this cornerstone of human cloning technology.

An unknown Japanese scholar unexpectedly created a blockbuster technology called "induced pluripotent stem cells."

The so-called induced pluripotent stem cells refer to the transformation of somatic cells into embryonic stem cells directly through induction technology without cloning technology.

This important discovery also made this scholar who had been depressed for the first 35 years of his life, doing nothing, and fractured No. 1, and finally reached the sky in one step, and won the 12-year Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

His name is Shinya Yamanaka.

Even Zhang Zifan's previously published paper "Directional Induction of Neuronal Cells in Vitro" also cited Shinya Yamanaka's article many times.

In fact, "induced pluripotent stem cells", like human embryo cloning technology, are still laboratory theoretical models and cannot be applied clinically.

The reason why Zhang Zifan's thesis caused a sensation in the academic world is because Zhang Zifan first successfully applied the induced regeneration technology in the field of nerve cells and overcome key problems.

Although neuron induction is not as versatile as induction of pluripotent stem cells, it is a great enough invention for neurosurgery.

After all, a bird in hand is worse than a thousand birds in the forest.

No matter how beautiful the pluripotent stem cells are, they are nothing but magic and cannot be applied clinically.

But neuron induction technology is different.

Schumacher's rehabilitation has proven to be an effective treatment for brain and spinal cord injuries.

……

Although pluripotent stem cells are not yet widely available, they are far simpler than cloning human embryos.

Since they are all for the purpose of obtaining embryonic stem cells, there is no need to look far away. The enthusiasm for human cloning research has gradually extinguished in the academic world, but science fiction fans are still enjoying it and talking about it.

However, nothing is absolute.

After all, a technology has its own uniqueness.

Zhang Zifan did not expect that he would encounter such a rare case of reproductive system mosaicism.

He also didn't expect that in order to help patients have their own children, he would actually think of human cloning.

Of course, the man wants to obtain sperm cells with his own DNA, which cannot be achieved by simple cloning technology.

Because sperm cells are the product of meiosis, the chromosomes are only half of those of somatic cells.

In traditional cloned embryos, the nucleus of the fertilized egg is directly replaced with a somatic nucleus, which can only be replaced by the mother, and there is no problem of chromosome reduction.

Of course, Zhang Zifan couldn't, and didn't dare to clone Li Jiaxian.

This is not at all the intention of the patient himself.

Cloning a person exactly like oneself is the real anti-humanity.

What Zhang Zifan has to do is to use and greatly modify the cloning technology, using Li Jiaxian's somatic cells to "create" a sperm.

And let this artificial sperm naturally combine with the egg to produce a real fertilized egg, not a clone of the father or mother!
This is even more difficult than simple human cloning!

For the first time, Zhang Zifan felt that he seemed to be facing an impossible task, with no hope at all.

"If it doesn't break the law... I want to try it for as much as I spend..."

At this time, Li Jiaxian took a deep breath and said seriously.

(End of this chapter)