Chapter 228

Translator: Dreamscribe

“Ahem!”

Ben casually slid a tissue toward her as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

Clara buried her face in both hands, her shoulders trembling as she cried for quite some time. She did not care about other people watching her. It felt as though the heavy, cold boulder that had been weighing on the depths of her heart was melting away completely.

‘Your twenty years were not wasted.’

After all, the most formidable intellect in the world had just assured her of that.

Only after several minutes did she finally manage to calm down. Sniffling through reddened eyes, she adjusted her glasses.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let you see me like this.”

“Not at all. Building a long-term tracking dataset of this scale entirely on your own, especially when you had no way of knowing whether it would ever yield meaningful results.... Just looking at the data, I can imagine how much you must have suffered all these years.”

Theo, who had entered the conference room at some point, nodded as he flipped through the materials.

“Professor, you’re not an ordinary researcher. Most people would have discarded some of the variables and treated values they couldn’t explain as noise. That’s what they would have needed to do to turn it into a paper.

But you kept every value. You didn’t carelessly discard even the parts you couldn’t understand.”

Clara bit down hard on her lip. She looked at Seo-ha with desperate eyes and asked.

“Tell me. Can you see the answer to this problem?”

Seo-ha fell silent for a moment as though choosing his words. At last, he gave a small but definite nod.

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean we can conquer every form of cancer.”

“Huh? Why?”

Su-jeong asked with a puzzled expression.

“I think it would be better if the Professor explained this. I do know a little about the subject, but I’m not a doctor.”

At Seo-ha’s request, Clara adjusted her glasses and stepped forward.

“Cancer isn’t a single disease.”

“What does that mean? Isn’t cancer just cancer?”

Clara smiled at Su-jeong’s question.

“They share the same name, but you could practically consider them completely different diseases. The only thing Lung Cancer and Pancreatic Cancer have in common is that their cells grow uncontrollably. The mechanisms involved are entirely different.”

Su-jeong clicked her tongue in astonishment.

“Wow.... I had absolutely no idea.”

“What I’ve been tracking all this time is Pancreatic Cancer. It’s particularly distinct. In most cases, treatments that are effective against other cancers simply don’t work at all on Pancreatic Cancer.”

“So ultimately, if we want to conquer cancer as a whole, we have to solve each one as a separate problem.”

Clara nodded at Theo’s words.

“Exactly. The fact that they’ve all been grouped together under the name ‘cancer’ actually caused confusion for a long time. Plenty of researchers in academia wasted years trying to find a common mechanism.”

Seo-ha looked at Clara with warm eyes.

“That’s why this data is so valuable. You’ve spent twenty years researching Pancreatic Cancer and nothing else. But ultimately, Professor, you’re the one who has to complete the treatment. All mathematicians can do is find the optimal solution. And in the process, I may end up making some unreasonable demands of you.”

Her expression hardened as she nodded.

“That’s enough. If we can describe the critical conditions mathematically, we’ll be able to predict the moment cancer cells switch pathways.”

The reason the medical community had failed time and time again until now.

It was because they had been unable to determine the underlying structure of which pathways cancer cells chose under which conditions. If that could be analyzed mathematically, everything that remained would fall within the realm of what modern medicine could solve.

Thump.

Her heart raced with excitement.

Just like the moment she had first stepped into a laboratory at the age of twenty-one.

She looked at Seo-ha and the team members standing beside him, then spoke with a solemn expression.

“I’ll set everything in motion. I’ll show you what Johns Hopkins can do to conquer cancer.”

Perhaps everything she had done to build her reputation over the years had been for this very moment.

She intended to seize this opportunity even if she had to burn herself out completely.

***

Clara remained in Daejeon for several more days studying Seo-ha’s Computation Theory.

However, it was not an easy time for someone who had left mathematics behind after finishing her undergraduate degree. Even so, it was more than enough to give her certainty.

‘Seo-ha’s Computation Theory has no limits.’

Clara left for the United States to prepare the project.

Seo-ha sat in his chair and stared out the window. He could not get the words she had left him with out of his head.

“Seo-ha, the market for Pancreatic Cancer treatments is worth billions of dollars. If the treatment is completed, what are you planning to do?”

Clara had looked deeply troubled.

In other words, Seo-ha would be the holder of the core technology behind the eventual patent. He, too, would end up with a substantial stake in it.

“What? Wouldn’t it be better to make it available as cheaply as possible?”

He had already accumulated more than enough wealth.

Even if his future plans required more money, he had no intention of making that money from a cancer treatment. Clara nodded as though she had expected that answer.

“You think that would allow more people to benefit from it, don’t you?”

“Wouldn’t it?”

She shook her head.

“Seo-ha. As a scholar and a doctor, no! As an adult who helped shape the world we live in today, I’m deeply ashamed that I even have to say this.”

“What do you...?”

“The pharmaceutical industry is ugly. Far uglier than you can imagine.”

She sighed.

“Let’s take insulin as an example. In 1923, Frederick Banting sold the insulin patent for just one dollar. It was a patent that could save countless lives, so he refused to claim ownership over it. But that peace didn’t last long. Pharmaceutical companies found a way around it.”

He remembered something Dean Whitman had once told him.

“They worked around the patent.”

“That’s right. Today, the United States has the highest insulin prices in the world. I wanted you to understand beforehand that good intentions don’t always lead to the best outcome.”

The materials Clara had left behind were piled on the table. Seo-ha pulled his chair closer, sat down, and typed a phrase into the search bar.

‘Pancreatic Cancer treatment prices.’

As he scrolled down, articles poured onto the screen.

[Controversy Over First-Line Pancreatic Cancer Treatment Prices, Patients Dying Because They Can’t Afford Them.]

[No Insurance Coverage. A New Drug Exists, But Patients Can’t Use It. Seven Out of Ten Patients Say It Is ‘Beyond Their Reach’]

[Pharmaceutical Company Slightly Alters Drug Composition Again Ahead of Patent Expiration. Generic Release Delayed by 20 Years.]

His expression hardened.

But for now, proving the hypothesis came first.

‘Good thing I found out beforehand. I’ll think about it later.’

Daisy on the laptop screen kept blinking, as though she had something to say about the matter.

***

A few days later, Johns Hopkins University Hospital was thrown into chaos.

Bang!

“Professor Wyss! Are you out of your mind?”

The door flew open hard enough to seem ready to break as Dr. Stern, the Center Director of the Johns Hopkins Cancer Center and an authority in Oncology, stormed inside. In his hand was a freshly printed project proposal.

“Would it kill you to knock?”

Stern ignored Clara completely and spread the report across her desk.

“Is this for real? A model that can predict the Protein Expression Pathway of Pancreatic Cancer cells with nearly one hundred percent accuracy? Do you seriously think that makes any sense? Oh, our poor Clara! Twenty years shut away in a laboratory, and you’ve finally gone mad.”

Professor Stern was a good man. The reason she had been able to devote herself to her research without much interference was because he had always stepped forward and acted as her shield.

She chuckled and rose from her seat. Then she slowly approached him and said.

“Center Director. You need to look at the very bottom.”

Stern’s gaze traveled down the page. Then his eyes widened in shock.

[Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine]

[Team Apex Korea]

He slowly raised his head and stared at Clara.

“...Yu Seo-ha?”

“Yes. That Yu Seo-ha.”

He asked again, his expression full of disbelief.

“Not someone else with the same name?”

Clara leaned close to his ear and whispered smugly.

“Stern, I did it. Seo-ha told me himself that he can calculate every variable. Johns Hopkins is going to become the first institution in history to conquer Pancreatic Cancer.”

“Gasp!”

“And who was the Center Director here again? I’m sure that person will receive an absolutely staggering amount of glory.”

“Ghk!”

A massive storm was sweeping through the world of mathematics.

Every scientist regarded Seo-ha, the man who had solved the Riemann Hypothesis and the RSA hacking crisis, with awe. At the same time, it was also true that they envied MIT for having him all to itself.

Even when they sent collaboration proposals, they had never received a proper response.... Stern suddenly grabbed Clara’s hand and showered her with praise.

“You’re the Joan of Arc of medicine! No, you’re the goddess of Hopkins! Tell me! How in the world did you win over that stuck-up genius?”

“Hahaha! Those were all just rumors.”

Clara clutched her stomach as she laughed.

Seo-ha himself did not know it, but his public image was that of the very embodiment of an arrogant genius. Even the most prestigious institutions had found it difficult to secure a meeting with him.

“He was incredibly kind, actually. Where should I start?” “Everything!”

Clara sat down and began explaining the entire process from the beginning.

Throughout the story, Stern’s mouth hung open. And when she reached the part where Seo-ha had corrected her equation, his eyes grew moist.

“This is the equation.”

“...So that’s what happened.”

Clara nodded.

“Center Director. I want to stake the rest of my life on this.”

“....”

Stern stared at her without a word.

Twenty years.

She had lived all those years focused on a single field.

Even when her funding was cut and her colleagues left for more promising research, even when she had been offered excellent positions where she could have achieved great success.

He slowly opened his mouth.

“Even if it’s Seo-ha, this won’t be easy. Getting the budget approved will be difficult, and even if it passes, someone will have to take responsibility if the project fails. I’m already getting a headache thinking about what the press will say. They’ll probably call us insane, won’t they?”

Clara giggled.

“Center Director. I’ve always been insane.”

“Ah! That is certainly true as well. So that’s why you said you were staking your life on it.”

She had even considered the worst-case scenario.

No matter how flawless the theory might be, clinical trials failing to go as planned happened far too often in this field.

“Still....”

He gave her a playful look.

“The moment medicine starts accepting patients’ deaths as inevitable, medicine is finished. Let me be part of this too.”

Johns Hopkins, unquestionably one of the finest medical schools in the world.

Even the man who had risen all the way to the top there was hardly what anyone would call normal.

Clara spoke with a serious expression.

“Center Director. This project cannot be allowed to collapse halfway through. Absolutely not.”

Stern let out a deep breath.

“Clara.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s build a team. Oncology, molecular biology, immunology, bioinformatics, clinical statistics. The very best people in every field.

I’ll convince the board somehow. I’ll need some time if I have to persuade the Dean, the hospital president, and the CEO as well.”

It was a project that would require an enormous budget and a massive amount of manpower.

As expected, the CEO and the rest of the management vehemently opposed it. Their reaction was understandable. No matter how much of a genius Seo-ha might be, he was a mathematician with no medical background. It was difficult to believe that his involvement alone could allow them to conquer the most notorious form of cancer.

But then an unexpected development left them deep in thought.

Harvard Medical School, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Mayo Clinic.

Institutions at the forefront of global medicine had all offered Clara positions at the same time. Naturally, they wanted the proposal she held as well.

*****

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