Nature’s Gift to Science

大自然献给科学的礼物

Sydney Brenner1

The title of my lecture is ??Nature?s Gift to Science.?? It is not a lecture about one scientific journal paying respects to another, but about how the great diversity of the living world can both inspire and serve innovation in biological research. Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring from the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one?s research is as important as finding the right problems to work on. In all of my research these two decisions have been closely intertwined. Without doubt the fourth winner of the Nobel Prize this year is

Caenohabditis elegans; it deserves all of the honor but, of course, it will not be able to share the monetary award.

我演讲的题目是《大自然献给科学的礼物》。这不是一个关于一本科学杂志向另一本科学杂志表示敬意的演讲（因为Nature和Science同时也是两本著名的科学杂志的名字），而是关于与我们生活在一起的这多种多样的生物，看它们是如何激发我们的潜能，为我们生物学研究领域的创新作贡献。现在很流行使用模式生物（作为研究对象）。使用模式生物的方法是从先辈们那里学来的。可以说，在研究中选择正确的模式生物就和选择正确的课题一样重要。这种观点贯穿于我的所有研究。毫无疑问，今年诺贝尔奖的“第四位”得主应该属于秀丽线虫，虽然它分不到奖金，但是它应该得到所有的荣誉。

（译注：诺贝尔奖一个奖项最多颁给三个人，所以文中会有 “第四位”获奖者一说）

I intend to tell you a little about the early work on the nematode to put it into an intellectual perspective. It bridges, both in time and concept, the biology we practice

today and the biology that was initiated some fifty years ago with the revolutionary discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. My colleagues who follow will tell you more about the worm and also recount their incisive research on the cell lineage and on the genetic control of all death.

为了本次演讲的知识连贯性，我会讲一些关于线虫的早期工作。这些工作从时间上和观念上为五十年前的一项重大发现和当今的生物学技术架起了桥梁。这项革命性的发现就是沃生和克里克两位科学家发现了DNA的双螺旋结构。我的同事会在之后的演讲中更详尽地讲述线虫，以及他们所做的关于线虫的细胞谱系、死亡的遗传调控等深入的工作。

To begin with, I can do no better than to quote from the paper I published in 1974 . The paper was unhesitatingly entitled: ??The genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans?? and the opening sentence reads: ??How genes might specify the complex structures found in higher organisms is a major unsolved problem of biology.?? This is still true today. The paper outlined how a genetic approach coupled with detailed studies at the cellular level might be a way of studying this important question. It introduced C. elegans as the organism of choice for this work.

引用我在19xx年发表的一篇论文作为开始最合适不过了。我当时毫不犹豫地给这篇文章命名为《秀丽线虫的遗传学》。我在论文的开头这样写道：“基因是如何决定高等生物的复杂结构的？这是生物学有待解决的重大难题。” 即使到了今天，这句话仍然适用。这篇论文为解决这个重大难题提供了一种可能的途径：那就是在细胞学水平上用遗传学方法进行详尽的研究。它同时还指出秀丽线虫是开展这项工作的良好材料。

This choice had a long history. Twenty years earlier, we had posed a different question. Then, the central problem in biology was how the one-dimensional

sequence of nucleotides in DNA specified the one-dimensional sequence of amino acids in proteins. Today, any student would give this question a very simple answer.

??All you have to do is to find a gene and have it sequenced and then make some protein using the gene and get someone to determine its amino acid sequence.??

选择秀丽线虫是有历史原因的。二十年前，我们所提的问题与现在的截然不同。因为在那时，生物学的主要疑问是：DNA的一级结构——核苷酸序列是如何决定蛋白质的一级结构——氨基酸序列的？而现在，每个学生都能简单明了地回答这个问题。他们会说：“你只需找出一个基因，给它测个序，然后得到一些这个基因编码的蛋白质，再找人把这个蛋白质的氨基酸序列测出来，就?OK?了”。

In those early days, the techniques for determining amino acid sequences of proteins were primitive and needed large amounts of proteins which had to be purified first. There were no methods to isolate genes and no techniques for the chemical determination of their sequences. Our analysis of genes was limited to genetics. Indeed, the only way we could assert that there was a gene in an organism was by finding a mutant allele for it.

在二十多年前，测定蛋白质氨基酸序列的方法还十分原始。我们得先纯化所需的蛋白质，而且需要的蛋白质非常多。当时既没有分离基因的方法，也没有测序基因的方法。我们只能用遗传学手段来研究基因。事实上，唯一能确定一个生物体内存在某一种基因的方法就是找到这个基因的突变等位基因。

Like Mendel, we could not say that there was a gene for the character of tallness until dwarf mutants were discovered suffering from a heritable lack of tallness. Genetic analysis of linkage used recombination to analyze the structure of chromosomes, to determine the locations of genes and their linear order along a chromosome.

就像在孟德尔的研究中，在找到可遗传的矮小突变之前，我们不能说有“高大基因”存在。遗传学的连锁分析是指通过遗传重组来研究染色体的结构，定位基因的位置，并确定基因在染色体上的排列顺序。

 

第二篇：名人事例之---John+Forbes+Nash

John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash is a renowned mathematician, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1994 as a result of the dissertation he produced in 1950 at the age of 21 for his PhD degree from Princeton University. This 27-page effort would come to be known as the Nash Equilibrium for non-cooperative games, a seminal and tremendously impacting work that, together with his other solution concepts such as the Nash Bargaining Solution and the Nash Programme, would come to be credited as a cornerstone of modern economics and an influence on areas as diverse as global trade negotiations, antitrust cases, national labor relations, and even breakthroughs in evolutionary biology.

For all his genius and potential, however, Nash became afflicted with the mental illness paranoid schizophrenia in 1958, shortly after he married Alicia Larde and became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (M.I.T.), and before the birth of his son John Charles Martin (who also became a mathematician and a schizophrenic). His illness derailed his career and left him highly susceptible to delusional thinking for many years, but thanks to his efforts, together with his wife and the Princeton community, he was able to gain enough control over the disease to return to his research and teaching in the 1980s.