2022年公共英语三级考试(PETS3)学习笔记3.pdfVIP

2022 年公共英语三级考试 (PETS3)学习笔记 3 Passage: The World Wide Lab The 20th century was the golden age of the laboratory. Answers to the great research questions were sought within sheltered chambers, where small groups of specialized experts scaled down (or up) phenomena in joyful isolation. Call it the era of trickle-down science: knowledge emerged from a confined center of rational enlightenment, then slowly became known to the rest of society. Science was what was made inside the walls where white coats were at work. Outside the laboratories boundaries began the realm of mere experience—not experiment. Today, all this is changing. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that soon nothing, absolutely nothing, will be left of this top-down model of scientific influence. First, the laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses, factories, and hospitals have become lab outposts. Think, for instance, of global positioning systems: thanks to satellite networks, geologists and biologists can now take measurements outside their laboratories with the same degree of precision they achieve inside. Meanwhile, a worldwide network of environmental sensors monitors the planet in real time. And research satellites observe it from above, as if the earth were under a microscope. The difference between outdoor science and lab science has slowly eroded. Second, you no longer need a white coat or a Ph.D. to research specific questions. Take the AFM, a French patient advocacy group that focuses on ignored genetic diseases. It has hired researchers, pushed for controversial procedures like genetic therapy, and built an entire industry, producing at once a new social identity and a new research agenda. In the U.S., the audacity to challenge the experts, to storm the labs, started with AIDS activists and breast cancer groups; not it has spread t