After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

Everyone looked at each other.

They're translating Chinese into English to study it? Since when did the characters of that Eastern country become worthy of their attention?

Williams noticed the hesitation of the crowd and did not rush to refute them.

He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and wrote a line of numbers next to the anatomical diagram.

"Although I didn't witness the surgery myself."

Anderson raised an eyebrow.

"But I performed another surgery on the same stage as her."

Williams turned around, his gaze sweeping across the faces of everyone present.

"An aortic root replacement surgery that preserved the patient's own valve. I was her first assistant."

The air in the conference room seemed to have been sucked out.

Everyone present knew Sir Williams's stature in the European cardiothoracic surgery community—it hadn't happened in at least twenty years that he had served as someone else's first assistant.

"In that surgery, her precision in suturing, her judgment of tissue tension, and the stability of her fingers when making impromptu adjustments during the operation—"

Williams paused, as if searching his mind for a suitable word.

"All I can tell you is that I stood across from the operating table for four hours, and in the end, what I was doing wasn't assisting, it was learning."

He tapped the outline of the teardrop-shaped patch on the whiteboard with the cap of his pen.

"So when this paper told me that she had performed a complete outflow tract reconstruction using her own pericardium in a six-year-old child with tetralogy of Fallot, with an immediate postoperative pressure gradient of 15 mmHg—"

Williams looked at Anderson.

"I didn't doubt this number for a single second."

Green pushed his reading glasses up his nose and reopened the Materials and Methods section of the paper.

His finger lingered on the line of glutaraldehyde concentration data for a long time.

"0.6 percent, ten minutes."

Green read the number twice.

"If the concentration is too low, the cross-linking will be insufficient, and the pericardium will degenerate and soften within six months after surgery. If the concentration is too high, the membrane will become like cardboard and cannot be sutured at all."

He looked up at Williams.

"How was this concentration and time window determined? The paper doesn't include preliminary data from animal experiments."

"No animal testing was conducted."

Williams shrugged.

"She went straight to clinical practice."

Anderson lifted his hand from the journal and leaned back in his chair.

"That's insane." He shook his head. "In England, that would get your license revoked."

"But it succeeded."

Williams walked to the window and looked out at the gray, rainy London landscape.

"This is the place that keeps me up the most."

He turned around.

"The appendix of the paper contains complete postoperative hemodynamic monitoring data, from immediate to 24 hours, with each set of values ​​falling within the optimal range. She is the first author, and there are 37 Chinese experts who co-authored the paper."

"If this solution is replicable and scalable—Anderson, do you know what that means?"

Anderson paused for a moment, then remained silent.

But everyone in the meeting room could calculate the cost.

If autologous pericardial membranes can truly replace artificial patches, then the polyester and Gore-Tex patches consumed in cardiac surgeries worldwide each year will become a pile of untouched warehouse stockpiles.

The material costs saved on each machine are enough to support a middle-class British family for half a year.

Hawkins remained silent.

The head of cardiac surgery at St. Mary's Hospital began flipping through the clinical data at the end of the paper as soon as he sat down.

He closed the journal, took off his glasses, and wiped the lenses.

"Arthur, what's the name of that Chinese female doctor you mentioned?"

"Ye, Ye Zhen."

Williams turned around.

"The surgeon who performed that operation at Charité Hospital in Berlin."

"I remember that report," Hawkins said, putting his glasses back on. "You said on the phone that she was a genius."

"I was talking about geniuses."

Williams paused.

He glanced down at the teardrop-shaped patch diagram he had copied on the whiteboard. The lines were very similar, but compared to the original diagram in the paper, something was missing—an absolute intuition about human anatomy that could only be honed through countless practical exercises.

"Now I feel that this word is not enough."

Williams picked up the thin Chinese Surgical Journal from the table and weighed it in his hand.

The cover was simple, and compared to the rows of European and American periodicals with gold-embossed covers on the opposite bookshelf, it was like a country girl in coarse clothes who had wandered into an aristocratic salon.

But what was inside was enough to make the entire salon stand up and bow.

"Green." Williams put the journal back on the table, his voice carrying a solemnity that even he himself found unfamiliar.

"Please contact the Department of Oriental Languages ​​at University College London. I need a professional translator who can translate medical Chinese."

"You want to translate the whole book?"

Not a single word can be omitted.

The debate in the meeting room continued until evening.

When Professor Green left Brompton with a copy of the journal, the rain in London had not yet stopped, and the streetlights cast dim, yellowish halos on the wet pavement.

He got into the back seat of the taxi and took out the paper again to read it once more.

"Damn Chinese."

Green stuffed the copy back into his briefcase, muttering a curse under his breath, his voice a mix of annoyance and resignation.

---

Three days later, Williams received seven letters and twelve phone calls.

All the emails came from cardiothoracic surgeons at major teaching hospitals in the UK, and their requests were remarkably similar—could you send a few more copies of the Chinese paper you've been circulating? My colleagues here also want to see it.

Williams sent his secretary to the copy room three times, and the copy machine almost started smoking.

The paper spread ten times faster than he had anticipated within the British cardiac surgery community.

On the fourth day, the phone rang again in Williams' office.

The person who called wasn't from the same industry; they were from a medical device company.

"Sir Williams, I am Parker, Marketing Manager for Europe at Gore."

The voice on the other end of the phone was polite, but spoke a beat faster than normal – a common problem in sales: when in a hurry, one can't keep things under control.

"We have noticed that you recently circulated a paper from China among your colleagues, concerning a clinical protocol for using autologous pericardium to replace artificial patches."

Williams leaned back in his chair, picked up his enamel mug, and took a sip of the now-cold jasmine tea.

"The news spread pretty fast."

“We take this very seriously.” Parker’s voice tightened. “Sir, as you know, our company invests over £30 million annually in the research and development of cardiac surgical materials. If these unproven alternatives spread unchecked in academia, the impact on the entire industry… how should I put it, will be significant.”

Williams did not respond immediately.

He put the enamel mug back on the table and traced a circle with his finger around the Chinese characters with red stars printed on the mug's surface.

"Mr. Parker, are you calling me to ask me to stop sending that paper?"

"No, no, no, of course not. Academic freedom is the bottom line we respect."

Parker's speaking speed increased again.

"We just feel that there are some obvious scientific doubts in this paper: it lacks long-term follow-up data, there is no preliminary verification in animal experiments, and the chemical parameters of pericardial tanning also lack independent third-party replication experiments."

He paused for a moment, as if considering his words.

"Therefore, our company is prepared to fund an independent academic evaluation team, composed of several top European cardiac surgeons, to travel to China for on-site inspections and technical consultations. If the Chinese approach can indeed withstand scrutiny, we would welcome it. But if it cannot withstand scrutiny—such an immature approach should not be pushed into clinical practice."

Williams finally spoke.

"Mr. Parker, I have a question for you."

"Speaking."

What is the factory cost of one Gore-Tex pericardial patch at your company?

There was a three-second silence on the other end of the phone.

"This is a trade secret."

"Let me say it for you."

Williams' voice was neither hurried nor slow.

"The cost of production is no more than £80. The retail price is £2,000. The profit margin is 2,400 percent."

Parker didn't respond.

"The Chinese treatment uses the patient's own pericardium, which costs zero. Including the bottle of glutaraldehyde solution, the total cost is less than half a pound."

Williams picked up the enamel mug and took another sip of the cooled flower tea.

"Mr. Parker, you're not calling me because you're concerned about any scientific doubts."

He placed the jar back on the table, the porcelain bottom striking the wood with a crisp sound.

"You're concerned about your next quarter's financial statements because of the difference of £1,999.50 between two thousand pounds and half a pound."

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

"Sir, I respect your judgment. But please understand, if an unproven, inexpensive alternative is used on a large scale and a medical accident occurs, who will bear the responsibility?"

"Good question."

Williams pushed the enamel mug aside.

"So you can go to China and see for yourselves how that female doctor performs surgery."

"Then you should weigh the pros and cons: is your £2,000 patch more reliable, or is their half-pound pericardial membrane more reliable?"

Parker hesitated for a moment on the other end of the phone.

"Sir, since you've put it that way, our evaluation team is expected to be assembled next week. Would you be willing to accompany us as our academic advisor?"

"No."

Williams' answer was concise and to the point.

"I will not go to China under your company's name."

Parker clearly hadn't expected to be so tightly blocked.

"but?"

"But I will go."

Williams put down the phone receiver and picked up the Chinese Surgical Journal again.

He still couldn't recognize a single Chinese character on the cover, but he could draw the teardrop-shaped patch diagram in the paper with his eyes closed.

He turned to the title page, where Ye Zhen's signature and the magazine's address were displayed.

Williams picked up his pen—a newly bought Parker, since his old Montblanc, which had been with him for twenty years, had long been "confiscated" in Beijing—wrote a line on a notepad, and then pressed the internal phone button.

"Secretary, connect me with the Chinese Embassy in the UK and find Counselor Chen Yuanshan from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."