Major original innovations often germinate from deep basic research and arise from interdisciplinary fields, and universities have a natural advantage in these two aspects. It is necessary to maintain continuous investment in basic research, and encourage free exploration, dare to question existing theories, and have the courage to open up new directions. 

——General Secretary Xi

Academician Dai Qionghai has lost a lot of weight recently. 

When the reporter met him in the Imaging and Intelligent Technology Laboratory of Tsinghua University, it was more than 9 o'clock in the morning, and he had been working in the laboratory for more than two hours.  

Doctoral students do not know what time the academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and dean of the School of Information Science and Technology of Tsinghua University goes to bed every day. “At 10:00 p.m., 12:00 p.m., 2:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., I have received Mr. Dai's WeChat messages, and when he had a wonderful idea, he immediately asked us, ‘Are you free?’ ”

The young people in the laboratory are also very hardworking, “working 80 hours a week”, “not going home during the Spring Festival” and “not willing to take a holiday” abound.

On April 19, 2021, when General Secretary Xi inspected Tsinghua University, he came here. “We must maintain continuous investment in basic research, encourage free exploration, dare to question existing theories, and have the courage to open up new directions.” The entrustment of the general secretary is the greatest motivation for all the scientific researchers in the laboratory.

"I volunteered to work overtime"

During the winter vacation, the corridor of the Imaging and Intelligent Technology Laboratory located in the main building of Tsinghua University has filled with the aroma of coffee from time to time.

Three notes are posted in the coffee room, two on the refrigerator, saying “Snacks are available; no winter vacation” and “Is the winter vacation coming? CNS Never Sleeps”. This “CNS” refers to the world-famous scientific journals “Cell”, “Nature” and “Science”.

Another note is posted under dozens of classic physics formulas with four words: “Welcome to correct”.

The stickers on the walls are not jokes. Dai Qionghai told reporters that the note “Welcome correction” was specially posted by him, reminding everyone in the laboratory to be mentally prepared to subvert the classical physical formula.

Basic research and original innovation are always the cornerstones of this team’s progress.

Dai Qionghai thought very clearly that in the past 10 decades, there are more than 20 Nobel Prize-winning studies related to brain science, and in the medical imaging field, optical nuclear magnetic resonance technology has spawned a number of Nobel Prize winners. In these areas, there are too many “disruptive studies” worth investing in.

“There are three criteria for the so-called ‘'subversive research’: whether it has changed the path of scientific research, whether it has changed the direction of industrial development, and whether it can be written into textbooks.” Dai Qionghai snapped his fingers and said. He asked the young teachers and students in the lab to think about the “Turno problem”—the Turing Prize and Nobel Prize level problems.

Doctoral student Li Xinyang bluntly said that these problems are common challenges faced by researchers around the world, and “some people bypass the problem, I want to solve the problem”.

Room 724 and 725 of the main building of Tsinghua University are the “base areas” of the laboratory. The two room numbers derive two inspirational interpretations: “724”, that is, to grasp the rotation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; “725” is that on this basis, the 24 hours as 25 hours to live.

“I volunteered to work overtime.” Born in 1994, Doctoral student Qiao Chang looks peaceful. In the lab, Qiao Chang has been in the lab for six or seven years. There is no mandatory time limit here, but over the years, Qiao Chang has spent an average of more than 80 hours a week in the laboratory — from 9 a.m. to around 10:30 p.m. – and is almost same routine every day.

On the wall of the conference room, there is a sentence that General Secretary Xi  said: “The new era belongs to everyone, and everyone is a witness, a pioneer and a builder of the new era.”

"To the vast and the best of subtle"

Blowing away the dust through the air shower chamber  entered a clean laboratory. Inside, there are large and small black instruments, some more than one person tall, full of lenses and dense lines, cooling and heat dissipation pipelines; some are only half a meter high, and the lenses refracted colored light. A glass room is connected to the laboratory, and the cluster of computer computing storage devices is buzzing...

Without being pointed out, it is difficult for the reporter to think that the unassuming equipment in front of him is actually the laboratory’s independent development and the world’s leading microscopic instrument “RUSH” - high-resolution light field intelligent imaging microscopy instrument.

“To the vast and the best of subtle”, Dai Qionghai felt that the old phrase quoted by General Secretary Xi in his 2022 New Year’s message could also be used to describe the research in the laboratory.

Take “RUSH” as example, the instrument developed by other countries shoots tens of millions of pixels per second, “RUSH” can reach tens of billions of pixels, is the first instrument in the world to achieve high-resolution imaging of neural activity in the whole cerebral cortex range of mice.

Fan Jingtao, a young associate researcher, introduced that through “RUSH”, researchers can observe the brains of living mice within a range of 1 square centimeter, study whether there is a relationship between brain function signals and cerebral vasodilation; observe the migration process of immune cells in the brain of mice to help doctors study the immunopathological response of the human body; can analyze the epilepsy waves generated by the lesion area of epilepsy patients and reveal the pathological mechanism.

“Mastering a tool is equivalent to mastering a weapon, and a breakthrough in a tool may bring a series of chain reactions.” Dai Qionghai said. At present, with the help of “RUSH”, explorers in the field of life sciences are successively achieving many important scientific research results.

On May 25, 2021, more than a month after General Secretary Xi inspected Tsinghua University, Cell magazine published the latest research results of the Imaging and Intelligent Technology Laboratory of Tsinghua University, introducing another self-developed new instrument “DAOSLIMIT” - scanning light field microscope.

This super microscope enables three-dimensional, long-term, high-resolution microscopic observation of living organisms, providing the possibility for the discovery of more organisms in the future. The metastasis process of tumor cells is also nowhere to be hidden under the lens, which opens up a new path for the early diagnosis and treatment of tumors, and provides a transformative tool for revealing breakthroughs in major life science issues such as nerves, tumors, new phenomena and new mechanisms of immunity.

The journal Nature Methods said of DAOSLIMIT: “Breaking down a series of barriers to in vivo imaging.”

“Be a ‘frog’ first, then a ‘bird’”

In this laboratory with the research and development of instruments as the main industry, most of the researchers hold biological experiment qualifications, operating on mice is the “basic skill” of everyone, and some people use fish tanks to seriously cultivate jellyfish.

During the laboratory inspection, General Secretary Xi stressed that major original innovation achievements often germinate from deep basic research and arise from interdisciplinary fields, and universities have natural advantages in these two aspects.

Researchers in the laboratory are increasingly appreciating the advantages of interdisciplinarity.

Previously, after the development of “RUSH”, researchers from Stanford University visited the lab four times to discuss cooperation matters, and they were surprised that the project actually combined the strength of the Department of Automation, the Department of Electronic Engineering, the Department of Precision Instruments, the School of Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, and the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University. The scope of cooperation in the laboratory is far beyond Tsinghua University, Qiao Chang said that many of the studies he involving have been done hand in hand with researchers from different universities and institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang University.

Interdisciplinarity is not about making researchers a “panacea”. Dai Qionghai likes to use the mathematician Freeman Dyson’s “birds and frogs” metaphor to teach doctoral students, “first be a ‘frog’, then be a ‘bird’” - in the first three years keep focused on one issue like a frog; and in the next few years concentrating on cultivating the ability to find cutting-edge problems, like a bird with a broad vision. Dai Qionghai hopes that the scientific researchers trained in this way “have a broad mind, a high realm, and a far-sighted vision” and “focus on the international frontier and the major needs of the country”.

In this laboratory, researchers are not only fighting for China’s scientific and technological innovation, but also exploring ways for the scientific cause of all mankind. The achievements of many young generations have won the attention and affirmation of the international academic community.

In August 2021, with Li Xinyang as the first author, the first paper proposed a method to successfully achieve calcium imaging denoising in the world, and Álvaro Krevenner, a microscopy expert at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, commented that it is “expected to change the rules of the game”.

Also in 2021, Zhou Tianyi, a fourth-year doctorate, as the first author of the paper, proposed and constructed a photoelectric intelligent diffraction computing processor, which was fully affirmed by Professor Dmitry Setis, dean of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, believing that “it proves that photonic neural networks can compete with similar electronic neural networks”

Both papers were published in a sub-journal of the journal Nature, and both first authors were only twenty-six or seven years old.

“We have a large number of top scientists who continue to publish their research in top journals, and the whole community of scientists is sprinting fast.” Dai Qionghai said, “The ‘post-90s’ and ‘post-00s’ we have cultivated will definitely shoulder the heavy responsibility of history”.

Every time she operates in front of the microscope, Wu Jiamin has a sense of novelty: “The phenomenon I have seen is the first time that the whole human society has seen it, and no matter how tired I am, I feel very happy.” This “post-90s” teacher just joined Tsinghua last year, and what she saw was the process of tumor metastasis, the process of lymphocytes playing a role, the process of brain neuronal movement...

“We're opening a door and can’t wait to get inside.” When she said this, Wu Jiamin’s eyes shone brightly.

Walking into the Imaging and Intelligent Technology Laboratory of Tsinghua University – “Some people bypass problems, I want to solve problems” (thriving China (10))

Source | People’s Daily Overseas Edition

Editor | Li Ran  

Responsible editor | Chen Zhu