Brainoid

[Kind tips]

This article is not to persuade people to learn biology, on the contrary, it is an article to persuade people to quit. Young people who are interested in life sciences can just read articles. There is no need to experience the pain of finding a needle in a haystack when actually doing research.

——From: Comrade Agrobacterium whose experiment failed for two consecutive months

_._._._._

Qi Min woke up from her desk and reflexively reached for the water glass she usually kept under the bed.

When her hands touched the keyboard, she realized that she was no longer the loser who stayed at a friend's house three days ago and had a confused future.

Qi Min is 28 years old and a scientific researcher. At a high level, she should be considered a neurobiologist, but at a low level, she is just an unlucky biology Ph.D. who was rejected N times for her article and almost failed to graduate. After graduation, she was rejected N times when she was looking for a teaching position. Fortunately, she has finally found a school that is willing to accept her, but she is not assigned to a neurobiology laboratory, but a bioinformatics laboratory.

That's okay. Compared with being forced to change the direction of research, the most unlucky thing Qi Min has ever experienced is much more extreme.

Five years ago, she was studying for a Ph.D. in the United States, and met many cool and unique guys from all over the world in school. Handsome guys, beautiful girls, gays, bisexuals...everyone is there. That's a really weird place. But it was there that Qi Min met her longest-lasting boyfriend Anton, an ordinary mixed-race boy who delivered takeout in a Chinese restaurant.

No, Anton was not the one who hurt her. In fact, it was even Qi Min who hurt him.

At first, Qi Min was simply attracted by Anton's delicate, angelic face. His appearance was more oriental, but he had big European-style eyes with slightly drooped corners, and his skin was fair and even, as if he had his own filter. However, Qi Min later learned that Anton was trafficked to the United States by a human trafficking group when he was young. He was almost forced to engage in the illegal child pornography industry. Fortunately, he escaped at the time. He was arrested by the locals because he looked more Chinese. Adopted by the owner of a Chinese restaurant, he helped in the kitchen and learned cooking skills.

Later, the owner of the Chinese restaurant had to return to China due to family matters, but he transferred the restaurant to a guy from Southeast Asia. The new boss no longer cooks traditional Chinese dinners, but instead cooks improved Chinese fast food. There is no need for so many people in the kitchen. Half of the chefs were fired. Although Anton did not lose his job, he was driven to the street to deliver food. .

But he did learn his craft at the original Chinese restaurant. What surprised Qi Min was that he, a young man who learned how to cook Chinese food in the United States, could actually make shredded pork with Beijing sauce that tasted the same as the home-cooked restaurant in front of her house.

However, Jingjiang shredded pork could not prevent the eventual breakdown of their relationship.

Three years ago, Anton passed by a bridge while delivering food and found a newborn baby girl under the bridge. Most of the time, the baby was the product of an unmarried pregnancy and the inability to have an abortion due to doctrinal issues. Out of sympathy, Anton took the little girl home to raise with Qi Min, and named her "Meme", whose nickname was Mimi. Although it costs more to take care of a baby, Qi Min's life is not too tight because he still has a PhD student salary.

But the unfortunate thing happened just a year ago, when Qi Min was busy submitting articles. Because Mimi was still too young, Anton took her with him when delivering meals. However, the restaurant owner suddenly wanted to expand the scope of food delivery. Anton suddenly had to deliver food more than ten kilometers away, so he had to put Mimi in Qi Min's laboratory first.

However, Qi Min was busy correcting her paper and did not notice that Mimi walked to the balcony where the guardrail was temporarily removed while being painted. As a result, Mimi fell from the fourth-floor balcony, resulting in paralysis of her lower limbs and having to live in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

This incident not only greatly affected Qi Min's mood in the article, but also caused Anton to break up with her.

At that time, Anton said that she only wanted to publish an article, graduate, and then ditch him and Mimi and return to China. She had not considered Mimi's future at all. This sentence seems to have become a curse. Sure enough, after that, Qi Min's article was rejected after being submitted N times, so he had to rely on other people's articles to graduate. After returning to China, he encountered obstacles in finding a teaching position.

When Qi Min was busy looking for a teaching position and spent all her money, and was so depressed that she could only live in a friend's house, she also thought that it was because she left Anton and Mimi and returned to China by herself, that she was subjected to the so-called "karma". But as a scientific researcher, Qi Min's life trajectory should be like this. If Mimi's fall hadn't caused Anton to break up with her, she should have been able to bring them all back home. One of Anton's biological parents should be Chinese, and Mimi seems to be at least half Asian.

But unless Mimi can walk on her own like a healthy and normal child again, Anton will probably never forgive her.

Fortunately, Anton's curse did not last long. A month ago, Qi Min finally found a university that could accept her, provided that she was engaged in research in bioinformatics.

For a person who has had no income for nearly half a year, it no longer matters what research direction he pursues. Moreover, this school's ranking in the country is pretty good. From Qi Min's point of view, it's like a piece of cake falling from the sky.

So she became a new laboratory PI (Principal Investigator, chief researcher, equivalent to the laboratory boss) in the biology department of this school, and got a laboratory with only a few computers, refrigerators and PCR machines that had been eliminated from other laboratories. empty room.

Fortunately, Qi Min carefully studied the topic on which her article had been rejected N times, and found that if she expanded it a little more, it could have something to do with bioinformatics.

Qi Min's original project was to study and record the typical connection methods of cerebral cortex neurons through molecular biology methods such as antibody in situ hybridization and FRET, so as to establish a connection model of real neurons. This method is actually not as convenient as other research groups studying brain neurons through electrophysiology, fMRI, etc. Therefore, although the data she obtained was more precise, it was not accepted by the magazine editor because the amount of original data was too small.

But if she can mathematicalize this model that reflects real neuron connections, and use it as a basic unit to build a connectome in the computer, then she may be able to expect that this connectome can reflect some characteristics of the real brain. Qi Min named this "brain-like body" and wrote a project plan related to this overnight to apply for funding.

Anyone who has watched "Transcendence" knows that neurobiologists have long had the idea of ​​​​simulating the human brain in computers. However, Qi Min's "brain-like body" does not really have the mathematical topological structure of the brain, but is simply a product of the accumulation of digital brain neurons. The extent to which it can reflect the characteristics of a real brain is actually quite unclear. But no matter what, with this project, Qi Min can apply for funds to support himself.

Now that the model of neuron connection is available, the new school's supercomputer group can also provide sufficient computing resources, so Qi Min only needs to put the data into the supercomputer group and run it. As for what will happen in the end, Qi Min actually doesn't care much. No matter what came out, she only had to write the results of this "brainoid" into the results, and she could continue to submit her article that had been rejected N times before.

So Qi Min sat on a pile of cardboard boxes that had not been cleared away in the office last night and spent five hours writing the code to build the "brain-like body". Then she connected to the Internet, opened a VPN, and downloaded the data from her previous laboratory to the new school's computing center.

At twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, Qi Min finally hung up her code and tried it out with a temporarily divided test data set. Unsurprisingly, a BUG was found. So she started to DEBUG with difficulty again, during which she drank countless cups of coffee.

It wasn't until dawn, after seeing that the test set finally passed debugging smoothly, that she lay down on her desk with peace of mind and finally fell asleep among a pile of empty coffee cups.

This article (original plan) is a hard science fiction article in the direction of biology. However, since the Qidian contract requires at least 2,000 daily updates, I have to do about 12 hours of experiments every day. I really can’t write so many words about dry stuff, so I can only talk about the daily routine of scientific research. And the romance line...

For the convenience of reading, this article is marked with # after the chapter names related to the science fiction line. Science fiction readers should choose to watch according to the chapter names. Thank you everyone_(:з　∠)_