'Clues' in the Chinese language is shien-suou, which literally means 'threads'. Used in my quest for the structure of the bacterial chromosomes, shien-suou turns out to have a double meaning. It describes the linear shape of the Streptomyces chromosomes. It also represents the clues that were revealed to us from time to time, leading us along to the final climax.

Throughout the whole undertaking, I often struggled with the best angles of approach to solve the mystery. I remember vividly a particular late night after a long day; I walked out of the Institute, lit up my pipe, and started towards the Hill House, feeling the soft and wet lawn under my pair of Clark shoes, watching the stars flickering in the moon-lit British sky, and the cozy orange-color lights coming out from our windows. My mind was still following the thoughts of our investigation. It might have something to do with the pipe and the Britishness, that I suddenly thought of Sherlock Holmes. The analogy was striking. Here was a suspect, whose crime was implicated with pieces of circumstantial evidence. Yet it was up to me and my collaborators to actively collect more shien-suou from the suspect himself by whatever measures available, blunt or sophisticated. The important difference was that in this kind of scientific investigation, we the investigators had to manage to bring the case to an air-tight conclusion ourselves, because the suspect absolutely would never confess.

In real life one does not expect to match Holmes' wits and other good qualities (including a little bit of good fortune now and then), but our investigation also had a happy ending. The suspect, having escaped from the law for decades, was finally apprehended. At the end of the one-and-a-half years long quest, I felt a burning desire inside and decide to follow it by putting down the adventure with all its thrills and challenges on paper.

Such is the joy of scientific investigation.