【世界上最致命的生物恐
怖主义者】
Scientific freedom and curity
科学自由与安全
The world’s deadliest bioterrorist
世界上最致命的生物恐怖主义者
Nature likes biological weapons more than human villains do. The best defence is more rearch, not less
大自然比任何人渣都更喜欢生物武器。要最好地进行防御，人类应该更多而不是更少地研究自然
Apr 28th 2012 | from the print edition of The Economist
译者：悠悠万事97
道行
SOME things are best kept cret. It is hard, for instance, to argue that public interest dictates publishing the blueprints for an atom bomb. The matter is less clear-cut, however, when scientific information that has the potential to wreak havoc might also stop that havoc happening.
摩登家庭第二季下载有些事情最好保密。比如，因为公众有兴趣就该公布原子弹的设计图纸，这就没什么道理。然而, 如果具有造成大规模破坏潜力的科学知识或许也能阻止这种破坏，这时如何决定就不易抉择。
carry on
T ake bird flu. It has killed more than 330 people since 2003. That may not sound many, but it amounts to 60% of the 570 known cas of the dia. The only reason the death toll is not higher is that tho who succumbed caught the virus directly from a bird (usually a chicken). Fortunately for everyone el, it does not pass easily from person to person. 就拿禽流感来说吧。自2003年以来至少有330人死于该症。这一人数听上去并不多，但该症只有570例确诊患者，这就让死亡率高达60%。死亡人数仅限于此的唯一原因，是因为只有直接与病鸟（通常是鸡）接触的人才会感染病毒、罹患此症。对所有其他人来说很幸运的是，这种病不易在人与人之间传播。
But it might. That is the burden of rearch carried out last year by two teams of scientists, one in America and one in the Netherlands. They tweaked the bird-flu virus’s genes to produce a version which can travel through the air from ferret to ferret. And ferrets are, in this context, good proxies for people.
但这也不是不可能的。美国与荷兰的两个科学家团队去年研究了这一课题。他们略为改造了禽流感病毒的基因，产生了一种可通过空气在雪貂之间传播的新品种。而在这一类研究中，雪貂经常作为实验动物替代人类，效果良好。
The rearchers’motives were pure. The mutations they combined to produce their ferret-killing flu virus are all out there in the wild already. There is every chance tho mutations could get together naturally and unleash a pandemic. By anticipating that recombination the two teams highlighted the risk, gave vaccine rearchers a head start in thinking about how to counter it and, by fingering the mutations, spurred surveillance efforts, which have often been half-hearted.
这些科学家的研究目的很纯。他们结合采用多种基因突变方式，最后生成了可令雪貂死亡的病毒；但这些突变方式都是自然界中已有的，这一人工组合有可能天然产生，造成流行病。由于这一基因重组大有可能自然发生，其风险便会得到重视，因而疫苗研究专家就有了先手之利，可以考虑如何对症下药，预防新的病毒品种。而且，由于他们指出了造成新品种的突变方式，这就会推动病毒监控工作，而此前人们对之时常有些漫不经心。
Or, rather, they would have done had they been allowed to
publish their results. They weren’t. Both the American and the Dutch governments saw not a nsibl
英语语音学习e anticipation of a threat, but a threat in its own right. Their fear was that bad guys somewhere might repeat the experiment and weaponi the result. So in December they banned publication of the papers revealing the technical details of what the teams had done.
企望或者可以这样说：这些效果只有他们可以公开发表研究成果时才会有，但当局却没有允许他们发表。美国与荷兰政府都觉得发生这种威胁的可能性不大；威胁更大的是实验方法本身。他们担心有些坏人可能会重复这一实验来制造生物武器。因此，去年12月他们禁止这两个团队发表披露具体技术细节的论文。
The threat from influenza is real. So-called Spanish flu, which infected 500m people in 1918-19, claimed the lives of one in five of tho who caught it. Subquent flu epidemics, though not as bad, have still cut swathes through humanity whenever they have arin. But terrorism is real, too. Though there is no known ca of biological warfare in the past 100 years, many countries have experimented with the idea; and there is concern that some terrorist groups, motivated not by specific political grievances but by a
yanksown怎么读general hatred of the West, might unleash the uncontrollable mayhem of a viral epidemic purely out of spite. So who is right—the rearchers who want to publish their findings, or the governments that want to stop them?
2011年歌曲排行榜
流感的威胁是实实在在的。曾在1918-19年间肆虐的所谓西班牙流感传染了5亿人，五分之一的罹患者丧生。后来的大规模流感虽说没有这么严重，但每次都让人类社会元气大伤。而恐怖主义的威胁也是实实在在的。尽管过去100年并未发生过生物战，但许多国家曾就这一想法进行过试验。某些恐怖主义组织并非在政治上有什么特别的不满，而是笼统地憎恨西方；人们担心，他们可能会出于单纯的仇恨引发病毒传染病，造成对人类无法控制的残害。那么究竟谁对？是那些想要发表他们的研究成果的科学家，还是那些想要阻止他们的政府？
In this particular ca, probably the rearchers. And, to their credit, the authorities em to have recognid that. After months of fraught deliberation involving the world’s leading virologists, journal editors, curity experts, ethicists and policymakers, the Americans reverd their stance on April 20th (e article). The Dutch were reconsidering theirs as The Economist went to press.
whatisthematter
就这一特例来说，或许那些研究人员是正确的。而且当局同义句转换
