肉湯研究:意大利蔬菜通心粉可能是對抗瘧疾的秘密武器

肉湯研究:意大利蔬菜通心粉可能是對抗瘧疾的秘密武器

Bring in some soup.

拿些湯來。

The unusual homework assignment at London's Eden Primary School was for a science week project cooked up by parent Jake Baum. He's a professor of cell biology and infectious diseases at Imperial College London, and his lab's job is to find new ways to combat malaria, which kills half a million children each year.

倫敦伊甸小學(xué)這次不同尋常的家庭作業(yè)是為一個由家長杰克·鮑姆策劃的科學(xué)周項目準(zhǔn)備的。他是倫敦帝國理工學(xué)院細(xì)胞生物學(xué)和傳染病學(xué)的教授，他的實驗室的工作是尋找抗擊瘧疾的新方法。瘧疾每年導(dǎo)致50萬兒童死亡。

Baum figured he could teach young students about the process of medical research through something both tasty and understandable: the go-to soup recipes their families use when someone gets sick.

鮑姆認(rèn)為，他可以通過一些既有趣又通俗易懂的方式，向年輕的學(xué)生傳授醫(yī)學(xué)研究的過程:他們的家人在有人生病時使用的湯配方。

"What makes a good medicine versus hocus-pocus?" explains Baum, who regularly preps his own favorite home remedy, what he calls "Jewish grandmother's chicken soup."

鮑姆解釋道:“是什么讓一劑好藥與騙人的鬼把戲相對抗?”他經(jīng)常準(zhǔn)備自己最喜歡的家常藥，他稱之為“猶太祖母的雞湯”。

"It was not the plan to discover anything," he adds.

他補(bǔ)充道:“我們的計劃不是去發(fā)現(xiàn)任何東西。”

Sixty students transported their soup submissions to school in 15 milliliter plastic tubes – that's about 1 tablespoon. The soup was frozen, thawed (standard practice for samples) and then (much to the children's delight) centrifuged – spun in a machine to separate different substances.

60名學(xué)生用15毫升的塑料管——大約1湯匙——將他們提交的湯送到學(xué)校。湯被冷凍、解凍(樣品的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)做法)，然后(讓孩子們非常高興的是)在機(jī)器中離心，以分離不同的物質(zhì)。

At the next step, filtration, four samples were determined to be too dense or oily to test. Although they were likely delicious, they didn't make it to the lab stage, where the remaining 56 samples were tested in two ways against the P. falciparum parasite — the species responsible for 99 percent of malaria deaths.

在下一步的過濾中，四個樣品被確定為密度太大或太油而無法檢測。盡管它們看起來很美味，但它們并沒有進(jìn)入實驗室階段。在實驗室階段，科學(xué)家們用兩種方法對剩余的56份樣本進(jìn)行了抗惡性瘧原蟲的測試。惡性瘧原蟲導(dǎo)致99%的瘧疾死亡。

First, researchers checked what effect the soups had on asexual growth during the disease-causing stage. Or, to put it in primary school terms, they were looking through the microscope for the color green.

首先，研究人員檢查了在致病階段，湯對無性繁殖的影響。或者，用小學(xué)的話來說，他們通過顯微鏡尋找綠色。

"More green means [the parasites are] happy. With an inhibitor like a drug, it's less green," Baum says. They followed up by checking on male parasite sexual development, which is responsible for disease transmission. For that, they recorded the movement of the parasites because, as Baum notes, "sperm wiggle."

“更多的綠色意味著(寄生蟲)很高興。有了像藥物一樣的抑制劑，它就不那么綠了，”鮑姆說。他們隨后檢查了負(fù)責(zé)疾病傳播的雄性寄生蟲的性發(fā)育。為此，他們記錄了這些寄生蟲的運(yùn)動，正如鮑姆指出的那樣，這是因為“精子會擺動”。

To Baum's surprise, with five of the soups, the color green was much dimmer — five of them were able to suppress growth by over 50 percent (and two of these even did about as well as a leading antimalarial, dihydroartemisinin).

令鮑姆吃驚的是，五種湯的綠色調(diào)要暗淡得多——其中五種能夠抑制50%以上的生長(其中兩種甚至與一種主要的抗瘧藥雙氫青蒿素的效果差不多)。

"We just said, 'Wow, what do we do with this?'" Baum says.

“我們只是說，‘哇，我們該怎么做?”鮑姆說。

The answer turned out to be another teachable moment for the students, ages 4 to 11, who participated in the study. Although the results were collected within a few months, it took two years for the work to get published.

對于參與這項研究的4至11歲的學(xué)生來說，答案是另一個可以教的時刻。雖然研究結(jié)果是在幾個月內(nèi)收集到的，但花了兩年時間才得以發(fā)表。

Another Eden Primary parent, pediatric nephrologist Stephen Marks, helped pitch the study to journals and championed the idea that the children of the school should be listed as authors — which they were when the study was finally released in November in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

伊登小學(xué)的另一位家長、兒科腎病學(xué)家斯蒂芬•馬克斯(Stephen Marks)幫助將這項研究推廣到期刊上，并支持學(xué)校的孩子應(yīng)該被列為作者——去年11月，這項研究終于在《兒童疾病檔案》上發(fā)表。

"Every kid can say they've had their first scientific paper," says Baum,.

“每個孩子都可以說他們有了第一篇科學(xué)論文，”鮑姆說。