bullyxtreme Chapter 390 Shooting Down the Wings of a Genius
Chapter 390 Shooting Down the Wings of a Genius
The hall was filled with a cacophony of noise, like a boiling cauldron, with applause, cheers, and chatter mingling together, almost lifting the roof off.
Tang Yuze stood at the center of the storm, but his expression was unusually calm, as if the shocking debate that had just taken place had nothing to do with him.
He simply made a necessary clarification, a rebuttal to arrogance.
However, Professor Zhong Qi on the podium was unable to recover from this enormous shock.
His face was ashen, and the eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses had lost their former brilliance, leaving only a crushed emptiness and disbelief.
That crown of genius, woven from countless praises and successes, was shattered in full view of everyone by an undergraduate student whom he regarded as someone who did nothing but eat, drink, and relieve himself, using the purest power of knowledge.
"No...impossible."
His lips moved slightly, his voice so faint that only he could hear it.
Zhong Qi's proud logical system, and the academic confidence that he had built up over many years and that supported his disdain for his peers, appeared so pale and narrow in the face of Tang Yuze's many grand arguments.
He tried to organize a rebuttal in his mind, but found that every thought that arose was immediately dismantled by the higher-dimensional criticism that the other party had already pre-set.
This sense of frustration is far more intense and profound than a failed experiment or a rejected paper, because it directly shakes the very foundation of his understanding of the world.
In this stark contrast between the cacophony of the hall and the utter silence of the individual, a sharper, more resentful voice, carrying the last vestiges of desperate struggle, was forced from Zhong Qi's throat, even drowning out some of the noise:
"and many more!"
He suddenly raised his head, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Tang Yuze, who was about to turn and leave.
His eyes were like those of a dying beast, filled with resentment and a final, desperate gamble.
"You wanted to debate the mysteries of the human genome with me? Very well!"
"The human genome! It is the cornerstone of life sciences, the jewel in the crown!"
"You, an undergraduate who doesn't even look like a senior, how can you spout nonsense about some 'ultimate mystery' about a vast star map made up of three billion base pairs?!"
"I won't go into the rest of the slides. Let's have a proper debate about the mysteries of the human genome!"
Zhong Qi's voice was hoarse, carrying a sense of resignation and despair.
He practically roared it out, trying to reclaim a shred of dignity in this grander, more fundamental realm, even if it was just to prove that the other party was not omniscient or omnipotent.
These words immediately quieted the audience considerably. While the students were excited, they also knew the complexity of the human genome—a field that couldn't be mastered simply through intellectual depth.
Luo Mingcheng's heart, which had just been at ease, jumped again as he nervously looked at Tang Yuze.
Dean Yang Yi, sitting in the front row, frowned slightly, feeling that Zhong Qi was at his limit and had lost his composure.
The director of the academic affairs office even started to facepalm. He had originally invited Zhong Qi back to give a speech because he thought Zhong Qi was the most outstanding student to graduate from their school in recent years, hoping that the teachers could build a relationship with him.
As a result, this young, brilliant professor is now looked down upon by a group of teachers and leaders present.
Tang Yuze looked at Zhong Qi, who seemed to be going crazy, and a trace of pity flashed in his eyes, but there was more coldness in them.
"It seems that Professor Zhong still doesn't understand."
His voice was clear and calm, like the flow of an icy spring.
"The realm of knowledge may have boundaries, but the dimensions of thought do not. You are obsessed with proving yourself by digging deeper into a single field, while I am simply using a higher-level framework to examine the common logic of all fields."
He paused for a moment, but there was no need for preparation; the thoughts about the human genome had been swirling in his mind for a long time.
"The mysteries of the human genome? It is no longer just that static 'book of life' written by ATCG." Tang Yuze began his narration, his tone calm, yet carrying a power that revealed the essence of things.
“What we are talking about now is a three-dimensional, dynamic genome that dances with epigenetic markers! It is the distant ‘handshake’ between enhancers and promoters in the space within the cell nucleus, the phase separation physics of chromatin switching between different states, and the precise regulation of gene expression networks by the vast dark matter ocean composed of non-coding RNA.”
He strolled to the podium, not looking at Zhong Qi, but facing all the students below, as if he were giving a real popular science lecture.
"The rapid development of sequencing technology has given us letters, but the real challenge is how to understand the 'programs' written from these letters, which are full of nested structures and dynamic interactions. It's like we have the machine code of a supercomputer, but we don't know its operating system, its programming language, or its real-time running state."
"And you, Professor Zhong, and many researchers like you, are still obsessed with finding a single 'key gene' and trying to establish a simple 'genotype-phenotype' causal relationship. This is as absurd as trying to explain the operation of an entire operating system or the presentation of a complex game by finding a few specific characters in computer code!"
"The ultimate mystery of the human genome lies not in the 99.9% similarity, but in how the 0.1% difference, amplified and buffered by a complex network, produces such astonishing phenotypic diversity; in how the balance between the robustness and fragility of the gene regulatory network determines health and disease; and in how environmental signals, through mechanisms such as epigenetics, 'sculpt' and 'rewrite' the expression patterns of the genome, even generating transgenerational inheritance!"
Tang Yuze once again demonstrated his vision ahead of his time, integrating genomics, systems biology, computational biology, and even information science.
Of course, even though Tang Yuze was explaining these ideas to all the teachers and students, very few of them could understand them.
Only Yang Yi could somewhat understand what Tang Yuze was saying, so while everyone else was completely baffled, he was deeply shocked.
As Professor Zhong Qi listened, the color drained from his face. He realized that he, too, was unable to refute this point. What the other person was pointing out was precisely the future direction discussed in top journals, a predicament he himself had vaguely sensed but had been unable to articulate clearly.
He tried to interject by raising a specific technical challenge, such as "how to accurately predict the functional impact of mutations in non-coding regions," but Tang Yuze immediately dissected it from multiple perspectives, including algorithmic bottlenecks, data integration difficulties, and the complexity of biological verification, breaking it down completely.
This is no longer a debate, but a one-sided, ideologically-driven attack.
Zhong Qi suffered a series of defeats, utterly powerless to resist. His prized knowledge base appeared so laughable and pathetic in the face of his opponent's seemingly boundless knowledge system and profound insight.
Finally, when Tang Yuze concluded with a philosophical question about "how to define the connotation and denotation of the fundamental concept of 'gene' itself in the new era," Zhong Qi was completely speechless.
He opened his mouth, making a "hoarse" sound in his throat, but couldn't utter a single word.
His pride, his confidence, everything about him as a genius was utterly shattered and crushed into dust at this moment.
Zhong Qi staggered, only managing to stay upright by grabbing the podium. His eyes dimmed completely, as if his soul had been ripped away.
Thunderous and prolonged applause erupted once again in the auditorium.
This time, it wasn't just out of a sense of relief and admiration, but also out of a sincere respect for knowledge and thought.
This lecture, which was full of twists and turns, finally came to an end in a way that no one could have predicted.