國家地理:為了結(jié)束這場流行病 我們必須相信科學(6)

Sometimes science simply cannot be rushed, though. "There is some sort of serendipity to the scientific enterprise," Gonsalves told me. "The speed and scale of what is happening now could be just a prelude to the chance discoveries we're going to have to make over a longer period." Bottom line: "You can't scream a cure out of a test tube."

但有時科學是急不來的。貢薩爾維斯告訴我：“這是科學事業(yè)的一項意外收獲?，F(xiàn)在正在發(fā)生的事情的速度和規(guī)模可能只是一個前奏，我們將不得不在更長的一段時間里做出一些偶然的發(fā)現(xiàn)。”總之：“你不可能對著試管大叫就得到解藥。”

Next I called Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, to talk about another source of my anxiety: that the coronavirus seemed to shape-shift in a uniquely terrifying way. It felt like every day I opened the newspaper to read that a new organ system was subject to its ravages or a new age group was vulnerable. But Markel, who has made a career studying the history of epidemics, told me that was to be expected: The apparent explosion of new and varied symptoms happens with any highly contagious virus when it bursts on the scene.

接下來，我給密歇根大學醫(yī)學史研究中心主任霍華德·馬克爾打了電話，談了談另一個讓我焦慮的原因：冠狀病毒似乎以一種獨特而可怕的方式在變形。這感覺就像我每天打開報紙，就會讀到一個新的器官系統(tǒng)正在遭受破壞，或者一個新的年齡組正在受到傷害。但以研究流行病史為職業(yè)的馬克爾告訴我，這是意料之中的：任何高度傳染性的病毒在爆發(fā)時，都會出現(xiàn)明顯的新癥狀、不同的癥狀。

"The more clinical material you have, the more patients, the more chances you have to see this protean nature," he said. It's what happened in the early days of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, when Markel was just starting his career. At the dawn of any new disease, strange manifestations keep showing up and surprising doctors. Even if the odds of a rare symptom are, say, just one in a thousand, doctors are going to see a lot of it, Markel said, because a thousand patients can accumulate practically overnight with a crazily contagious new illness like this one.

他說：“你擁有的臨床資料越多，病人越多，你就越有機會看到這種千變?nèi)f化的本質(zhì)。”這就是20世紀80年代艾滋病流行初期發(fā)生的事情，當時馬克爾剛剛開啟他的職業(yè)生涯。馬克爾說，即使出現(xiàn)罕見癥狀的幾率只有千分之一，醫(yī)生也會看得到很多這樣的情況，因為患上這種瘋狂傳染的新疾病的病人數(shù)量，幾乎一夜之間就可以達到一千個。

So the U-turns and revised pronouncements about COVID-19 aren't signs that scientists are flummoxed; they're signs that scientists are generating a torrent of new information and are trying to make sense of it as they go.

因此，有關(guān)COVID-19的180度大轉(zhuǎn)彎和修正后的聲明，并不是科學家感到困惑的跡象；這些跡象恰恰表明，科學家們正在產(chǎn)生一股新信息的洪流，并試圖在他們前進的過程中理解這些信息。