The dozens of scientists in the laboratory lost all track of time. They were completely absorbed in the next critical phase: synthesizing a permanent vaccine for the Martian virus.
Soon after, the massive reserve team of two hundred scientists was officially mobilized. With the immediate crisis stabilized, there was no longer a need to hold personnel back in quarantine. The full intellectual weight of the expedition was now focused on vaccine development.
Once a vaccine was successfully deployed, humanity would have definitively conquered the Martian pathogen. The fear of infection would be gone forever.
However, achieving this required cross-referencing vast amounts of data, gene sequencing, protein folding simulations, and extensive biological trials. It was a painstaking process that would likely take one to two months to complete.
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