文章來源：《經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人》Oct 7th 2023 期 Leaders 欄目 The Nobel prize for medicine 諾貝爾醫(yī)學(xué)獎(jiǎng)

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The?Nobel?prize for medicine, awarded on October 2nd to Katalin Karikó, a biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an immunologist, is a fitting?capstone?to a great?underdog?story.?Dr Karikó’s unfashionable insistence on trying to get RNA into cells set back her career.?She persisted, and the two developed a technique which allowed the immune system to be primed against threats in an entirely new way.?When the covid-19 pandemic hit, the mRNA vaccines they had made possible saved millions of lives—and freed billions more to live normally again.

10 月 2 日，諾貝爾醫(yī)學(xué)獎(jiǎng)授予給了生物化學(xué)家卡塔琳·卡里科和免疫學(xué)家德魯·韋斯曼，這是一個(gè)偉大但不被看好的故事的巔峰時(shí)刻。卡里科博士堅(jiān)持將 RNA 注入細(xì)胞中，這一不合時(shí)宜的做法阻礙了她的職業(yè)發(fā)展。她堅(jiān)持不懈，兩人共同研發(fā)出一種技術(shù)，使免疫系統(tǒng)能夠以全新的方式應(yīng)對(duì)威脅。當(dāng)新冠來襲時(shí)，他們研制的 mRNA 疫苗挽救了數(shù)百萬人的生命，讓數(shù)十億人重新恢復(fù)了正常的生活。

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Their prize is unusual. The only previous scientist to have won a Nobel prize in the context of vaccination was Max Theiler, who discovered the?attenuated?strain of the yellow-fever virus which has been used as a vaccine since the 1930s.?Neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin was rewarded for developing?polio?vaccines. The?eradication?of smallpox went uncelebrated, too.

他們的獲獎(jiǎng)非同尋常。此前唯一一位因疫苗而獲得諾貝爾獎(jiǎng)的科學(xué)家是馬克斯·泰勒，他發(fā)現(xiàn)了黃熱病病毒的減毒株，該毒株自1930 年代以來一直被用作疫苗。喬納斯·索爾克和阿爾伯特·薩賓研發(fā)了脊髓灰質(zhì)炎疫苗，但都未獲獎(jiǎng)。消滅天花的貢獻(xiàn)也沒有得到表彰。

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Given that Alfred Nobel’s will calls for the prizes to go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on humankind, this poor record is undeserved.?But although they may have gone without trips to Stockholm, nice fat cheques and 175g gold medals portraying an entrepreneur in explosives, vaccine scientists can?contemplate?something even better.?As the?inscription?to Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral puts it: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you seek his monument, look around you).?The vaccine-makers’ work is commemorated in hundreds of millions of lives.

鑒于阿爾弗雷德·諾貝爾的遺囑要求，獎(jiǎng)項(xiàng)要頒給那些對(duì)人類做出最大貢獻(xiàn)的人，疫苗領(lǐng)域的獲獎(jiǎng)記錄不該如此稀少。不過，盡管疫苗科學(xué)家們可能沒有去斯德哥爾摩領(lǐng)獎(jiǎng)，沒有大額獎(jiǎng)金，沒有鑲有諾貝爾像的175克黃金獎(jiǎng)牌，但科學(xué)家們可以專注于更好的疫苗研究。正如圣保羅大教堂里克里斯托弗·雷恩的墓碑上刻的那樣：Si monumentum requiris, circumspice 。（如果你要尋找他的紀(jì)念館，看看四周吧。）疫苗挽救了數(shù)億人的生命，周圍都是紀(jì)念。

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention.?It is a hard claim to?gainsay. Vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers. And their capacity to do so continues to grow.?In 2021 the WHO approved a first vaccine against malaria; this week it approved a second.

世界衛(wèi)生組織稱，疫苗挽救的生命超過了其他任何醫(yī)學(xué)發(fā)明。這是一個(gè)難以反駁的說法。疫苗以廉價(jià)、可靠且驚人的數(shù)量保護(hù)著人類免受疾病侵襲。而且疫苗的作用仍在不斷增強(qiáng)。2021 年，世衛(wèi)組織批準(zhǔn)了第一種抗瘧疾疫苗；本周又批準(zhǔn)了第二種。

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Vaccines are not only immensely useful; they also embody something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication.?Vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it.?As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients.?In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual’s immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat.?But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.

疫苗不僅極其有用，而且在關(guān)懷與溝通的結(jié)合中體現(xiàn)了人性之美。疫苗并非如有些人所說的欺騙免疫系統(tǒng)，而是在教育和訓(xùn)練免疫系統(tǒng)。作為一種良好的公共衛(wèi)生資源，疫苗可以讓醫(yī)生在病人的細(xì)胞中悄悄傳遞警示語。在缺乏信任的時(shí)代，政府政策與個(gè)體免疫系統(tǒng)之間的這種親密關(guān)系很容易被誤解為一種威脅。但疫苗不是陰謀或操控工具：它們是愛的分子。

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The best way to further honour this extraordinary set of technologies is to use it more and better.?Gavi, a public-private global-health partnership, has made over 1bn doses of various vaccines available to children in poor and middle-income countries this century; it believes this has?averted?over 17m deaths.?Even so, millions of children receive no vaccinations at all.

進(jìn)一步弘揚(yáng)這套非凡技術(shù)的最佳方式就是更多更好地使用疫苗。本世紀(jì)以來，全球衛(wèi)生公私合作組織“加維”（Gavi）已向貧窮和中等收入國家的兒童提供了10多億劑各種疫苗；他們相信這已經(jīng)避免了1700多萬人死亡。即便如此，仍有數(shù)百萬兒童沒有接種任何疫苗。

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It is often said that Nobel’s?bequest?was an?atonement?for the destruction his explosives made possible.?His writings offer no evidence for that, but the sheer scale of the damage they did—the military use of explosives in 20th-century wars is reckoned to have claimed 100m-150m lives—is so great that the idea feels as if it should be true.?Vaccination is one of the few benefits conferred on humankind that measures up to that task.?It is as though the world were able to run one of the terrible wars of the 20th century in reverse, saving millions of lives a year, every year.?Si?expiationem?requiris, circumspice.

通常有人說，諾貝爾遺產(chǎn)是對(duì)他發(fā)明的炸藥所造成破壞的救贖補(bǔ)償。他的著作沒有提供這方面的證據(jù)，但炸藥所造成的破壞規(guī)模--據(jù)估計(jì)，20 世紀(jì)戰(zhàn)爭中軍用炸藥的使用奪去了 1 億至-1.5 億人的生命--是如此巨大，以至于這個(gè)觀點(diǎn)似乎應(yīng)該是真實(shí)的。疫苗接種是少數(shù)能夠與此任務(wù)相媲美，且造福人類的貢獻(xiàn)之一。這就好像世界能夠?qū)?0世紀(jì)可怕戰(zhàn)爭逆轉(zhuǎn)一樣，每年拯救數(shù)百萬人的生命。如果你尋找補(bǔ)償，看看四周吧。