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SusanSolomon_2012G-_干细胞研究蕴涵的希望_
So, embryonic stem cells are really incredible cells. 胚胎干细胞 非常神奇,
embryonic:adj.[胚]胚胎的;似胚胎的; stem:n.花草的茎或梗;高脚酒杯的脚;烟斗柄;词干;v.阻止;封堵;遏止; incredible:adj.难以置信的,惊人的;
They are our body's own repair kits , and they're pluripotent , which means they can morph into all of the cells in our bodies. 它们像是人体自带的修理包。 胚胎干细胞具有多向分化的特性,也就是说,
repair:v.修理;修补;修缮;补救;n.修理;修补;修缮; kits:n.装备;小桶;锦囊(kit的复数); pluripotent:adj.多能(性)的; morph:n.词态;语素;变体;vt.在屏幕上变换图像;改变;
Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells to replace cells that are damaged or diseased . 替代坏死或发生病变的细胞,
diseased:adj.不健全的;患病的;病态的;v.使生病;传染;(disease的过去式和过去分词)
But that's not what I want to talk to you about, because right now there are some really extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells that are completely changing the way we look and model disease, our ability to understand why we get sick, and even develop drugs. 但这不是我今天演讲的内容。 我们正在就干细胞开展 我们对于疾病的看法、建模的方式、
extraordinary:adj.非凡的;特别的;离奇的;临时的;特派的;
I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes and other major diseases the way we view polio today, which is as a preventable disease. 应对老年痴呆症、糖尿病等重大疾病 就像我们现在应对小儿麻痹症一样, 可以找到预防之道。
stem cell:干细胞; diabetes:n.糖尿病;多尿症; diseases:n.[医]病(disease的复数);[医]疾病;[植保]病害;疾病种类; polio:n.小儿麻痹症(等于poliomyelitis);脊髓灰质炎; preventable:adj.可预防的;可阻止的;可防止的;
So here we have this incredible field, which has enormous hope for humanity , but much like IVF over 35 years ago, until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise, this field has been under siege politically and financially . 对人类而言,蕴涵着无限的希望。
enormous:adj.庞大的,巨大的;凶暴的,极恶的; humanity:n.人类;人道;仁慈;人文学科; siege:n.围攻;包围;围城;不断袭击;长期努力;vt.围攻;包围; politically:adv.政治上; financially:adv.财政上;金融上;
Critical research is being challenged instead of supported, and we saw that it was really essential to have private safe haven laboratories where this work could be advanced without interference . 我们意识到必须建立私密安全的实验室 使之不受干扰。
Critical:adj.鉴定的;[核]临界的;批评的,爱挑剔的;危险的;决定性的;评论的; essential:n.要点;要素;实质;必需品;adj.完全必要的;必不可少的;极其重要的;本质的; safe haven:n.安全的地方;避难所; laboratories:n.实验室;(laboratory的复数) advanced:adj.先进的; v.前进; (advance的过去式和过去分词形式) interference:n.干扰,冲突;干涉;
And so, in 2005, we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory so that we would have a small organization that could do this work and support it. 因此,我们在2005年 建立了纽约干细胞基金会实验室, 进行相关研究,对其提供支持。
Foundation:n.基础;地基;基金会;根据;创立; Laboratory:n.实验室,研究室; organization:n.组织;机构;体制;团体;
What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical research, but also developing drugs and treatments , is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations , but in a new field, sometimes large organizations really have trouble getting out of their own way, and sometimes they can't ask the right questions, 我们很快意识到,医学研究 有时很难跳出其固有模式, 因而看不清事情的重点。
treatments:n.治疗;疗法;对待;处理;讨论;(treatment的复数) dominated:v.支配;控制;左右;影响;(dominate的过去式和过去分词) organizations:n.组织,构造,有机体(organization的复数);组织机构;
and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger between academic research on the one hand and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs and many of our treatments, and so we knew that 却仍在扩大。
gap:n.差距;间隙;缺口;间隔;v.使豁裂;豁开; academic:adj.学术的;理论的;学院的;n.大学生,大学教师;学者; on the one hand:一方面; pharmaceutical:adj.制药(学)的;n.药物; responsible:adj.负责的,可靠的;有责任的;
to really accelerate cures and therapies , we were going to have to address this with two things: new technologies and also a new research model. 要想加快疾病的治愈和治疗, 我们必须解决两个问题:
accelerate:v.加快;加速;n.接受速成教育的学生; therapies:n.治疗方法(therapy复数形式); technologies:n.技术;科技(technology的复数);
Because if you don't close that gap, you really are exactly where we are today. 因为如果不填补这一鸿沟,
And that's what I want to focus on. 这是我今天要讲的内容。
We've spent the last couple of years pondering this, making a list of the different things that we had to do, and so we developed a new technology , 几年来,我们一直都在思考这一问题, 还发展了一项新技术,
pondering:v.沉思;考虑;琢磨;(ponder的现在分词) technology:n.技术;工艺;术语;
It's software and hardware , that actually can generate thousands and thousands of genetically diverse stem cell lines to create a global array , essentially avatars of ourselves.
hardware:n.计算机硬件;五金器具; generate:v.产生;引起; genetically:adv.从遗传学角度;从基因方面; diverse:adj.不同的;多种多样的;变化多的; global:adj.全球的;总体的;球形的; array:n.数组,阵列;排列,列阵;大批,一系列;衣服;v.排列,部署;打扮; essentially:adv.本质上;本来; avatars:n.神使;头像;形象化符号;(avatar的复数)
And we did this because we think that it's actually going to allow us to realize the potential , the promise, of all of the sequencing of the human genome , but it's going to allow us, in doing that,
potential:n.潜能;可能性;[电]电势;adj.潜在的;可能的;势的; sequencing:n.[计]排序; v.[计]定序(sequence的ing形式); genome:n.基因组;染色体组;
to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells, not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments that are much more effective , much safer, much faster, and at a much lower cost. 从而使我们开发的药物和疗法 效果更好、安全性更高、
clinical:adj.临床的;诊所的; effective:adj.有效的,起作用的;实际的,实在的;给人深刻印象;
So let me put that in perspective for you and give you some context .
perspective:n.观点;远景;透视图;adj.透视的; context:n.环境;上下文;来龙去脉;
This is an extremely new field. 这是一个非常前沿的领域。
extremely:adv.非常,极其;极端地;
In 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first identified , and just nine years later, a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells and reprogram them with very powerful viruses to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or what we refer to as an IPS cell. 1998年,人类首次发现胚胎干细胞。 植入强力病毒,对其进行基因重组, 这种干细胞被称为诱导性多能干细胞, 也就是俗称的IPS干细胞。
identified:v.确认;认出;找到;发现;说明身份;(identify的过去式和过去分词) reprogram:vt.改编程序;程序重调; induced:adj.感应的;诱发型;v.引诱;说服(induce的过去分词); refer:v.参考;涉及;提到;查阅;
This was really an extraordinary advance, because although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells, which still remain the gold standard , they are terrific to use for modeling disease and potentially for drug discovery. 因为这种干细胞虽然达不到 人类胚胎干细胞的“金本位”标准, 但是对疾病建模有极大帮助, 对药物发现可能也会有很大意义。
gold standard:n.金本位制;黄金标准;典范; terrific:adj.极好的;极其的,非常的;可怕的; potentially:adv.可能地,潜在地;
So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists built on that research. He took skin biopsies , this time from people who had a disease, 于是,几个月之后,在2008年, 我们的一位科学家在此基础上, 采集了渐冻人症,也就是英国所说的
biopsies:活组织检查;
ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease .
motor neuron disease:n.运动神经元病(神经和肌肉逐渐萎缩,直到死亡);
He turned them into the IPS cells that I've just told you about, and then he turned those 将其变成了IPS干细胞, 也就是我刚才说过的那种干细胞,
IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually were dying in the disease. 随后,他将这些IPS干细胞变成了运动神经元, 也就是在渐冻人症中逐渐死亡的细胞。
So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell and turn it into a sick cell, and he recapitulated the disease over and over again in the dish, and this was extraordinary, because it was the first time that we had a model of a disease from a living patient in living human cells. 对疾病进行建模。
basically:adv.主要地,基本上; recapitulated:vi.概括;重述要点;摘要;vt.概括;重述要点;摘要; over and over again:adv.一再地;反复不断地; patient:adj.有耐心的,能容忍的;n.病人;患者;
And as he watched the disease unfold , he was able to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying in the disease in a different way than the field 而且,这位科学家在观察病变过程时发现, 在这种疾病中,运动神经元的死亡过程 与此前学术界推想的情况并不相同。
unfold:v.(使)展开;打开;展示;透露;
had previously thought. There was another kind of cell that actually was sending out a toxin and contributing to the death of these motor neurons, and you simply couldn't see it until you had the human model. 释放出一种毒素, 之前无法发现这一点, 是因为还没有使用人体细胞建模。
previously:adv.先前;以前; toxin:n.毒素;毒质; contributing:v.捐献,捐赠(尤指款或物);捐助;增加;增进;(contribute的现在分词)
So you could really say that researchers trying to understand the cause of disease without being able to have human stem cell models were much like investigators trying to figure out what had gone terribly wrong in a plane crash without having a black box , or a flight recorder . 研究人员试图理解疾病起因、 就像是调查人员试图查明
investigators:n.研究者,调查者(investigator的复数形式); black box:黑箱;(装在飞机上记录飞行情况等的)密封仪器; flight recorder:na.飞行自动记录仪;
They could hypothesize about what had gone wrong, but they really had no way of knowing what led to the terrible events. 他们可以就事故原因提出假设, 但真的没有办法断定
hypothesize:vt.假设,假定;vi.假设,假定;
And stem cells really have given us the black box for diseases, and it's an unprecedented window. 而干细胞就像是一个研究疾病的黑匣子, 它也创造了空前的机遇。
unprecedented:adj.空前的;无前例的;
It really is extraordinary, because you can recapitulate many, many diseases in a dish, you can see what begins to go wrong in the cellular conversation well before you would ever see symptoms appear in a patient. 因为我们可以在培养皿中再现多种疾病, 可以看到细胞互相接触时出现问题的过程, 其时点可以远远早于 患者出现症状。
cellular:adj.细胞的;多孔的;由细胞组成的;n.移动电话;单元; symptoms:n.症状;征候;征兆;(symptom的复数)
And this opens up the ability, which hopefully will become something that is routine in the near term, of using human cells to test for drugs. 发展成为常规操作的能力, 那就是在药物测试中使用人体细胞。
Right now, the way we test for drugs is pretty problematic . 现在的药物测试法相当麻烦,
problematic:adj.问题的;有疑问的;不确定的;
To bring a successful drug to market, it takes, on average, 13 years — that's one drug — with a sunk cost of 4 billion dollars, and only one percent of the drugs that start down that road are actually going to get there. 要想将一种成功开发的药物推向市场, 此外还会产生40亿美元的沉没成本。 而且计划通过这一流程投放市场的药物中,
You can't imagine other businesses that you would think of going into that have these kind of numbers. 你很难想像还有哪个行业, 是你愿意涉足的,
It's a terrible business model.
But it is really a worse social model because of what's involved and the cost to all of us. 但它作为一个社会模式的危害可能更大, 因为它牵涉面广,给所有各方都带来很大成本。
involved:adj.有关的; v.涉及; (involve的过去式和过去分词)
So the way we develop drugs now is by testing promising compounds on -- 因为,我们现在开发药物时, 测试有望成功的合成物时是使用??
compounds:n.混合物,化合物;大院(compound的复数形式);
We didn't have disease modeling with human cells, so we'd been testing them on cells of mice or other creatures or cells that we engineer, but they don't have the characteristics of the diseases that we're actually trying to cure. 我们以前没有使用人体细胞建模, 因此我们一直使用老鼠细胞进行测试, 或者使用其它生物细胞,或者是我们改造的细胞。 但是我们想要治愈的疾病 在这些细胞上未必会显现出来。
creatures:n.生物;动物;(具有某种特征的)人(creature的复数) characteristics:n.特征;特点;品质;(characteristic的复数)
You know, we're not mice, and you can't go into a living person with an illness and just pull out a few brain cells or cardiac cells and then start fooling around in a lab to test for, you know, a promising drug. 大家知道,我们不是老鼠,
cardiac:n.强心剂;强胃剂;adj.心脏的;心脏病的;贲门的;
But what you can do with human stem cells, now, is actually create avatars, and you can create the cells, whether it's the live motor neurons or the beating cardiac cells or liver cells 但是现在有了人类干细胞, 不管是活态的运动神经元细胞, 是跳动着的心脏细胞,还是肝细胞,
liver:n.肝;(动物供食用的)肝;
or other kinds of cells, and you can test for drugs, promising compounds, on the actual cells that you're trying to affect, and this is now, and it's absolutely extraordinary, and you're going to know at the beginning , 或者其他类型的细胞, 都可以造来测试药物或有希望的复合物, 而且你从一开始,
absolutely:adv.绝对地;完全地; at the beginning:首先;从一开始;起初;从头开始;
the very early stages of doing your assay development and your testing, you're not going to have to wait 13 years until you've brought a drug to market, only to find out that actually it doesn't work, or even worse, harms people. 从检测的非常早期的阶段就能知道结果, 不会出现等了13年, 这种药物根本没用,甚至对人体有害的情况。
assay:n.化验;试验;vt.分析;化验;尝试;vi.鉴定;经检验证明内含成分;
But it isn't really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people, because we have to step back. 但是仅仅观察 几个人或者一小组人的细胞还不够,
We've got to look at the big picture.
Look around this room. We are all different, and a disease that I might have, if I had Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease, and if we both had Parkinson's disease, and we took the same medication , but we had different genetic makeup , we probably would have a different result, 环顾四周,大家就会发现,我们各不相同, 我可能患上的疾病, 对我的影响很可能不同于同一疾病 对你的影响。 况且,如果我们都患上了帕金森氏症, 我们的治疗结果很可能也不相同。
medication:n.药;药物; makeup:n.化妆品;组成;补充;补考;
and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you, and similarly , it could be that a drug that is harmful for you 对你却毫无效果,反过来,
wonderfully:adv.精彩地;惊人地;极好地; ineffective:adj.无效的,失效的;不起作用的; similarly:adv.同样地;类似于;
is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious , but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn't had the tools. 这一点似乎显而易见, 制药行业一贯用以开发药物的指导思想。
obvious:adj.明显的;显著的;平淡无奇的; unfortunately:adv.不幸地;
And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model. 因此,我们需要跳出
one-size-fits-all:一刀切;一体适用;万全之策;
The way we've been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store, no one asks you what size you are, or if you're going dancing or hiking. 就像是走进一家鞋店时, 没有人问我们穿多大号, 买鞋是为了跳舞还是爬山,
They just say, "Well, you have feet, here are your shoes."
It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet.
complicated:adj.复杂的;难懂的;v.使复杂化;(complicate的过去分词和过去式)
So we really have to change this. 所以我们必须改变这一做法。
There was a very sad example of this in the last decade.
There's a wonderful drug, and a class of drugs actually, but the particular drug was Vioxx, and for people who were suffering from severe arthritis pain, the drug was an absolute lifesaver , 这种药物绝对是根救命稻草,
severe:adj.极为恶劣的;十分严重的;严厉的;苛刻的; arthritis:n.[外科]关节炎; lifesaver:n.救助物;救命物;
but unfortunately, for another subset of those people, they suffered pretty severe heart side effects, and for a subset of those people, the side effects were so severe, the cardiac side effects, that they were fatal . 这种药物却会引起心脏方面的严重副作用, 有些患者的副作用非常严重, 并最终死于这种副作用。
subset:n.[数]子集;子设备;小团体; fatal:adj.致命的;灾难性的;毁灭性的;导致失败的;
But imagine a different scenario , where we could have had an array, a genetically diverse array, of cardiac cells, and we could have actually tested that drug, Vioxx, in petri dishes, and figured out, 如果我们之前能有心脏细胞的各种基因阵列, 在培养皿中实际测试过Vioxx,
scenario:n.方案;情节;剧本;
well, okay, people with this genetic type are going to have cardiac side effects, people with these genetic subgroups or genetic shoes sizes, about 25,000 of them, are not going to have any problems. 知道某一种遗传类型的人会出现
subgroups:n.亚组,[数]子组(subgroup的复数形式);副全宗;
The people for whom it was a lifesaver could have still taken their medicine. 本可以继续使用,
The people for whom it was a disaster , or fatal, would never have been given it, and you can imagine a very different outcome for the company, who had to withdraw the drug. 永远也不会拿到Vioxx的药方。 不难想像,制药公司本来也可以有很不一样的结局, 不需要将Vioxx撤出市场。
disaster:n.灾难,灾祸;不幸; outcome:n.结果,结局;成果; withdraw:v.撤回;提;撤离;停止提供;
So that is terrific, and we thought, all right, as we're trying to solve this problem, clearly we have to think about genetics , we have to think about human testing, but there's a fundamental problem, because right now, stem cell lines, as extraordinary as they are, and lines are just groups of cells, they are made by hand, one at a time , and it takes a couple of months. 由此可见,干细胞技术真的意义非凡, 我们觉得,好吧, 显然需要考虑遗传学的问题, 需要考虑人体细胞测试。 究其实质仍然只是成组的细胞, 是靠手工逐个完成的, 每个干细胞系都会耗时好几个月,
genetics:n.遗传学; fundamental:n.基础; adj.十分重大的; one at a time:每次一个;一次一个;
This is not scalable , and also when you do things by hand, even in the best laboratories, you have variations in techniques , and you need to know, if you're making a drug, 无法批量操作,而且由于是靠手工完成,
scalable:adj.可攀登的;可去鳞的;可称量的; variations:n.变奏曲,变更;[生物]变种(variation的复数形式); techniques:n.技巧;技艺;工艺;技术;(technique的复数)
that the Aspirin you're going to take out of the bottle on Monday is the same as the Aspirin that's going to come out of the bottle on Wednesday. 预备周一从瓶子中取出来的阿司匹林 必须是一样的。
Aspirin:n.阿司匹林(解热镇痛药);
So we looked at this, and we thought, okay, artisanal is wonderful in, you know, your clothing and your bread and crafts , but artisanal really isn't going to work in stem cells, so we have to deal with this. 我们明白这一点,我们想,好吧, 手工制作有时候是件好事, 例如在制作服装、面包和工艺品的时候, 但对于干细胞来说,手工制作实在不适合,
artisanal:手工艺性的; crafts:n.工艺品,手艺(craft的复数形式);
But even with that, there still was another big hurdle , and that actually brings us back to the mapping of the human genome, because we're all different. 这就还得说回到 人类基因组测序这一话题,
hurdle:n.障碍;栏;跳栏;vt.克服;vi.克服;跳过;
We know from the sequencing of the human genome that it's shown us all of the A's, C's, G's and T's that make up our genetic code , but that code, by itself, our DNA, 而人类基因组测序工作 已经揭示出构成人类基因代码的 A、C、G、T全部四种碱基序列。 但是这种代码本身,也就是我们的DNA,
genetic code:n.遗传密码;
is like looking at the ones and zeroes of the computer code without having a computer that can read it. 必须使用电脑加以识别,
It's like having an app without having a smartphone .
smartphone:n.智能手机;
We needed to have a way of bringing the biology to that incredible data, and the way to do that was to find a stand-in , a biological stand-in, that could contain all of the genetic information, but have it be arrayed in such a way as it could be read together and actually create this incredible avatar. 而其方法就是 找一个替身,一个生物替身,
biology:n.(一个地区全部的)生物;生物学; a stand-in:临时代替者,替身; biological:adj.生物学的;生物的;与生命过程有关的;加酶的;n.[药]生物制品;
We need to have stem cells from all the genetic sub-types that represent who we are.
represent:v.代表;表现;描绘;回忆;再赠送;
So this is what we've built. 这就是我们迄今的工作成果,
It's an automated robotic technology.
automated:adj.自动化的;v.(使)自动化;(automate的过去式和过去分词) robotic:adj.机器人的,像机器人的;自动的;n.机器人学;
It has the capacity to produce thousands and thousands of stem cell lines. It's genetically arrayed. 能够生成数以百万计的干细胞系。
capacity:n.能力;容量;资格,地位;生产力;
It has massively parallel processing capability , and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered, we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs, on arrays like this, that already exist, all of the drugs that currently exist, and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs 具备强大的平行处理能力。 我们希望这将改变我们发现药物的方式,
massively:adv.大量地;沉重地;庄严地; parallel processing:n.并行处理; capability:n.才能,能力;性能,容量; eventually:adv.最后,终于; currently:adv.当前;一般地;
and treatments that have been tested for side effects on all of the relevant cells, on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells.
relevant:adj.相关的;切题的;中肯的;有重大关系的;有意义的,目的明确的;
It really has brought us to the threshold of personalized medicine.
threshold:n.入口;门槛;开始;极限;临界值; personalized:v.在…上标明主人姓名; (personalize的过去分词和过去式)
It's here now, and in our family, my son has type 1 diabetes, which is still an incurable disease, and I lost my parents to heart disease and cancer , but I think that my story probably sounds familiar to you, because probably a version of it is your story. 这种技术已经进入了我们的生活。 我的父母死于心脏病与癌症, 可是我想,你们可能会觉得我的遭遇听起来有些耳熟, 因为你可能也有过类似的经历。
incurable:adj.不能治愈的;无可救药的;n.患不治之症者,不能治愈的人; cancer:n.癌症;恶性肿瘤; familiar:adj.熟悉的;常见的;亲近的;n.常客;密友;
At some point in our lives, all of us, or people we care about, become patients , and that's why I think that stem cell research is incredibly important for all of us. 或者我们所关心的人,都会患上疾病, 正是因为如此,我认为,干细胞研究 对我们所有人来说都极其重要。
patients:n.接受治疗者,病人;(patient的复数) incredibly:adv.难以置信地;非常地;
Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause) （掌声）