4生物技术的世纪.pdfVIP

个人收集整理 仅供参考学习 4. The Biotech1 Century Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. Its time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids2 could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now were just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time: deciphering3 the human genome4, the 100,000 genes encoded by 3 billion chemical pairs in our DNA. 跟物理学的世纪说再见的时候到了。在那个世纪里，人类的成就之一是裂解了原子，并 把硅转变成有计算的能力。现在该是敲响生物技术世纪之门的时候了。正如1897 年电子的 发现是20 世纪里的惊人的事件一样，1953 年詹姆斯·沃森突发奇想，对弗朗西斯·克里克说 出了四种核酸如何能配对形成DNA(脱氧核糖核酸)分子能自复制的密码——这一事件为21 世纪播撒下了种子。现在，只要再过几年，我们距离揭开人类基因组( 由10 万个基因构成， 这些基因在人类DNA 中由30 亿个化学对编码)，这是人类有史以来最重要的突破之一。 〔绿色部分为编辑的话，无声音，但有注释，建议保留〕 5 6 Before 20th century, medicine consisted mainly of amputation saws , morphine and crude remedies that were about as effective as bloodletting. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed as many people (more than 20 million) in just a few months as perished in 7 8 four years of World War I. Since then, antibiotics and vaccines have allowed us to vanquish entire classes of diseases. As a result, life expectancy in the U.S. jumped from about 47 years at the beginning of the century to 76 now. But 20th century medicine did little to increase the natural life-span of healthy humans. The next medical revolution will change that, because genetic engineering has the potential to conquer cancer, grow new blood vessels in the heart, block the