45.The Nobel prize for medicine(594)

Passage Forty-Five

The Nobel prize for medicine

诺贝尔医学奖

【1】The Nobel prize for medicine, awarded on October 2nd to Katalin Karikó, a biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an immunologist, is a fitting capstone(peak) to a great underdog story. Dr Karikó’s unfashionable(outdated) insistence(persistence) on trying to get RNA into cells set back her career.

诺贝尔生理学或医学奖于10月2日颁给生物化学家卡塔林·卡里科和免疫学家德鲁·魏斯曼，这是一个伟大励志故事的完美高潮。卡里科博士坚持不懈地尝试将RNA注入细胞，这在当时有些过时，成为了她职业生涯的绊脚石。

【2】She persisted, and the two developed a technique(technology) which allowed the immune system to be primed against threats in an entirely new way. When the covid-19 pandemic hit, the mRNA vaccines they had made possible saved millions of lives—and freed billions more to live normally again.

但卡里科博士坚持了下来，卡里科和魏斯曼两人一起研发了一种技术，能够让免疫系统以全新的方式应对威胁。新冠爆发时，基于卡里科和魏斯曼研究成果的mRNA疫苗拯救了数百万生命，让数十亿人能再次正常生活。

【3】Their prize is unusual. The only previous scientist to have won a Nobel prize in the context of vaccination was Max Theiler, who discovered the attenuated strain of the yellow-fever virus which has been used as a vaccine since the 1930s. Neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin was rewarded for developing polio vaccines. The eradication of smallpox went uncelebrated, too.

卡里科和魏斯曼的获奖非比寻常。此前，因疫苗领域的成就而获诺贝尔奖的科学家，唯有马克斯·泰勒尔一人，泰勒尔发现了黄热病毒的减毒株，这种减毒株自上世纪30年代起就用于疫苗生产。乔纳斯·索尔克和阿尔伯特·沙宾成功研发了脊髓灰质炎疫苗，但没有获诺奖。灭绝天花的功绩同样未受诺奖青睐。

【4】Given that Alfred Nobel’s will calls for the prizes to go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on humankind, this poor record is undeserved(unearned).

But although they may have gone without trips to Stockholm, nice fat cheques and 175g gold medals portraying(painting) an entrepreneur in explosives, vaccine scientists can contemplate something even better.

根据阿尔弗雷德·诺贝尔的遗嘱，诺贝尔奖要授予那些为人类带来巨大利益的人。疫苗科学家为人类做出了巨大的贡献，但没有获诺奖，是不恰当的。尽管这些科学家并未踏上去斯德哥尔摩领奖的旅途，未领到丰厚的支票和175克描绘有爆炸物企业家阿尔弗雷德·诺贝尔的奖章，但这些疫苗科学家可以获得更好的认可。

【5】As the inscription to Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral puts it: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you seek his monument, look around you). The vaccine-makers’ work is commemorated in hundreds of millions of lives.

正如圣保罗大教堂里克里斯托弗·雷恩墓碑铭文所写：Si monumentum requiris, circumspice（若你想寻找他的纪念碑，就请环顾四周）。疫苗发明者的功绩在数亿人的生命中得到纪念。

【6】The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention. It is a hard claim to gainsay(deny). vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers. And their capacity to do so continues to grow. In 2021 the WHO approved a first vaccine against malaria; this week it approved a second.

世卫组织（WHO）称，相比其他医学发明，疫苗在拯救人们生命方面做出了最大的贡献。该论断有理有据，无法反驳。疫苗可以经济、有效、广泛地预防各种疾病。并且疫苗的效果在不断改进。2021年，世卫组织批准了第一种针对疟疾的疫苗；本周批准了第二种。

【7】Vaccines are not only immensely(vastly) useful; they also embody(reflect) something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication. vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it.

疫苗不仅有着极大的作用，还在关怀和沟通中，展现了人性的美好。有时候人们说，疫苗并非在欺骗免疫系统；而是在教育培训免疫系统。

【8】As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients. In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual’s immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat. But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.

作为一种良好的公共卫生资源，疫苗能让医生向患者的细胞传递警讯。在信任欠缺的时代，政府政策和个体免疫系统间的“亲密无间”极易被误解为威胁。但疫苗绝非阴谋或控制工具：它们是分子层面上的关爱。

【9】The best way to further honour this extraordinary(outstanding) set of technologies is to use it more and better. Gavi, a public-private global-health partnership, has made over 1bn doses of various vaccines available to children in poor and middle-income countries this century; it believes this has averted(avoid) over 17m deaths. Even so, millions of children receive no vaccinations at all.

进一步表彰这一系列卓越科技的最佳方式是更多更好地使用疫苗。全球疫苗免疫联盟（GAVI），一个公私合作的全球卫生合作组织，本世纪以来已向中低收入国家的孩子提供各类疫苗超10亿剂次；GAVI认为此举避免了1700多万死亡案列。即便如此，仍有数百万孩童完全没有接种过疫苗。

【10】It is often said that Nobel’s bequest was an atonement(offset) for the destruction(damage) his explosives made possible. His writings offer no evidence for that, but the sheer scale of the damage they did—the military use of explosives in 20th-century wars is reckoned(consider) to have claimed 100m-150m lives—is so great that the idea feels as if it should be true.

人们经常说诺贝尔的遗赠是为了弥补他发明的爆炸物可能造成的伤害。诺贝尔的著作并没有证明这一点，但考虑到炸药造成了大规模的伤亡，人们普遍认为这种说法有其合理之处，据估算，20世纪战争中使用了大量炸药，夺走了1亿至1.5亿人的生命。

【11】Vaccination is one of the few benefits(advantages) conferred on humankind that measures up to that task. It is as though the world were able to run one of the terrible wars of the 20th century in reverse, saving millions of lives a year, every year.

相比之下，疫苗是为数不多的能给人以好处的成果，能够弥补爆炸物可能带来的伤害。接种疫苗，可以每年挽救数百万人的生命，就好像扭转了20世纪的一场可怕战争。