Outstanding talents gathered together to jointly drive technological development.
Tips
usage
萃 is mostly found in compound words or literary/formal language. Common compounds: 出类拔萃 (to stand out from the crowd), 荟萃 (to gather; a gathering of talent), 萃取 (solvent extraction).
The grass radical caps 萃, originally tagging it as dense vegetation. The picture is of grass clustered tightly. From there the meaning generalised to any gathering or assembly, including human ones. It anchors 萃 in the vegetation family while the abstract use ('gather') came later.
卒 supplies the sound, zú drifting to cuì, an irregular shift. The semantic of 卒 (foot-soldiers) carries a faint flavour of crowd and gathering, which fits the lush-growth meaning. Same phonetic in 醉 drunk, 粹 pure-essence, 碎 shatter.
