Chapter 100

Rejuvenate's marketing worked — particularly after a first-tier actress was engaged to film an evening skincare routine. Not an endorsement; the video never said it was advertising, and appeared as a covert one. The public at that point hadn't yet been ground down by short video, didn't know what a covert advertisement was, and between never having met one and some accomplished acting, when she called it a favourite they genuinely believed she used Rejuvenate at night. The assistant on the shoot watched the jar go straight onto a side table afterwards — that she went looking for it again not long after being a later matter.

The power of a covert advertisement is enormous. Sales rose noticeably after it went out, and a good many people commented that the actress's recommendation had brought them. The idea was Li Lan's, prompted by the early days of short video, when one person single-handedly made a great many products sell — usefulness aside, anything she recommended went out of stock, and she became a fixed point for the personal-shopper trade. She was later shelved over various things, and before that her influence was plain.

At the same time the word of mouth kept fermenting. Everybody who used Rejuvenate, allergies excepted, became a devotee, and a search returned reviews so uniformly positive that people wondered whether they'd been bought.

The industry, having settled in to watch, was startled by the heat and the sales. They hadn't expected people who to their minds found a few hundred yuan expensive for a whole routine to spend a thousand on one jar of cream — a domestic one. Some of them also recognised that the domestic cosmetics market might not be as small as they'd assumed. In fact only Li Lan knew how enormous its potential was, particularly once short video arrived and effectively doubled cosmetics sales.

Abroad, though, Rejuvenate's figures weren't encouraging. A good deal went into advertising and the buyers remained a small group. There was nothing much to be done. There was no domestic precedent to consult, and the luxury brands could be consulted, and after discussion the team decided to increase overseas marketing and to raise the brand's image.

Which begins with creating a brand story. Prompted by other products, in fact: every luxury skincare line on the market has one. The widely loved miracle essence, for instance, is said to have been discovered when somebody visiting a sake brewery noticed that elderly brewery workers had hands that didn't match their age, which led to Pitera, its principal ingredient. La Mer, the representative luxury cream, has its own: a scientist working to repair his own face after an accident, and from that came its miracle broth.

Set aside whether the stories are true; the purpose of a brand story isn't truth but transmitting a set of values and having the people who use the product accept them. Other brands had them, so Rejuvenate could — and China being a mysterious country in foreigners' minds, the mysterious power of the East offered a great deal to write. So Cerulean commissioned a number of writers specifically to design one.

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Li Lan followed it from England, and once the domestic figures were established turned back to her own work. She'd told Feng Jiang everything she knew about marketing; the overseas market she couldn't help with, not being a marketer and having nothing to draw on.

February came, and Cambridge's second term with it, and nothing much changed for her — except that term coincided with Spring Festival, and as the only Chinese person in the laboratory she'd told Auren something about it, and learning it was the most important festival of the year he approved her leave readily, and considerately said that if a week wasn't enough she could come back later.

Having only arrived in October, she didn't stay long at home and was back within the week. The second term suited her better than the first; Cambridge wasn't greatly different from Peking, and was freer, since apart from three elective modules her time was entirely her own, and she saw Auren James about once a month. That degree of freedom sent the insulin analogue work forward fast.

Two years passed. September 2015, two years exactly since she arrived.

Over those two years the work moved into its final stage. Hydroxychalcone extracted from cinnamon did produce insulin-like action, and having confirmed it she was in no hurry to publish, and carried on. She had no shortage of papers; if she was going to publish, she'd publish when the whole thing was done, which was worth more to her than several interim papers.

On the twenty-fifth of September, before her final year at Cambridge began, she completed the insulin analogue by the methods she had.

[L4 hydroxychalcone insulin analogue. Completion: 90%] [Value: 90 L4 points. Sell back?] [Yes] [No]

Two full years to finish L4. Nearly three times what L3 Rejuvenate had taken, which to Li Lan felt long — and to anybody else working on insulin, two years is a rocket.

The result confirmed, she settled down to grind out the paper. Two years of a doctorate with nothing published is unusual at Cambridge; even a bad student scrapes two papers out. Fortunately Auren James wasn't a supervisor who cared only about publications, and knowing the work was going well he hadn't pressed. For the past year he'd been travelling most of the time and, being increasingly old, came in rarely; she'd sometimes gone two or three months without seeing him, and the last time was, as she remembered it, six months ago. On that measure he was not an adequate supervisor.

Doing research she'd have lived in the laboratory twenty-four hours a day; writing, she wasn't in a hurry. After two years of tension she let herself relax over it, and with the data and the methods held firmly in her head the writing came easily — with the result that the laboratory's acknowledged obsessive hadn't appeared in nearly a week.

A week of unhurried writing, and before term began she sent it to Auren James.

So in early October 2015 he received an unexpected email, and his first reaction to the subject line was that she had compromised after all. A British doctorate has no time limit and does have publication requirements, and two years without a paper is considerable pressure.

Particularly with a goal that grand. Producing an insulin that cures diabetes is not possible without an enormous investment of time and effort. And a great many people work on insulin internationally — America alone has a dozen-odd insulin laboratories, all wanting to be a step ahead with a better one, and if a cure were possible, better still.

He had warned her, and she'd held to her own view. As her supervisor he thought, rationally, that she was overreaching; emotionally, as a Nobel laureate, he rather admired the persistence. Research should have its convictions, and he hadn't raised it again.

Seeing the paper, then, he assumed a compromise; completing an insulin analogue in two years is a tale from the Arabian Nights. He was interested in her work regardless, and her sending a paper meant something had come of it.

A novel insulin analogue — the glucose-lowering action of hydroxy insulin analogues.

The attachment opened on that plain, blunt title, and he skimmed it and went to the body, reading as a supervisor — and grew rather more attentive at her methods, because what she'd used was without precedent, and even to his knowledge unfamiliar. A singular method, he thought, complimenting her privately, and looked at the data.

At the data his expression turned serious, and reading the results he recognised that he might have made an error of assumption. Suspecting it, he went back to the beginning in a graver frame of mind — and this time properly, analysing the methods and the data closely before going to the conclusions.

Unlike what he'd expected, this wasn't an interim result. She had put the final answer in this paper. Hydroxychalcone compounds extracted from cinnamon, engineered so that asparagine at position 21 of the A chain is replaced by glycine, with a further recombination at the end of the B chain, produce a hydroxy insulin that minimises insulin's solubility, perfectly reproduces the properties of human insulin and simultaneously stimulates the production of new insulin — which means that in future the decline cycle of insulin will cease to exist, and a cure for diabetes becomes real.

That was the content of the paper.

Having finished, he grew calmer. If it held, his student had dropped a bomb into medicine.

He emailed her to arrange a meeting, and read it again — this time a great deal more coolly, and a great deal more critically; an academic scandal in Japan the previous year made him more careful still about methods and results. Unfortunately he wasn't at the university and couldn't verify anything, and decided to go in tomorrow and establish whether the theoretical methods and the data were real.

He also recognised that whether the hydroxy insulin genuinely cures diabetes remains an open question. On her data analysis there is no problem — and drugs are unlike other things: data provides only the elementary theoretical grounding, and whether something works depends on the pharmacology and the clinical work that follow, which is one reason new drugs are hard to develop, and which is not within their field. Which is why a great many things that hold in theory prove hard to realise. On this paper, though, the hydroxy insulin was rigorous in both theory and data.