首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
A triumph for scientific freedom This week’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine—Australians Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warr
A triumph for scientific freedom This week’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine—Australians Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warr
admin
2010-01-10
21
问题
A triumph for scientific freedom
This week’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine—Australians Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren— toppled the conventional wisdom in more ways than one. They proved that most ulcers were caused by a lowly bacterium, which was an outrageous idea at the time. But they also showed that if science is to advance, scientists need the freedom and the funding to let their imaginations roam.
Let’s start with the Nobel pair’s gut instincts. In the late 1970s, the accepted medical theory was that ulcers were caused by stress, smoking, and alcohol. But when pathologist Warren cranked up his microscope to a higher-than-usual magnification, he was surprised to find S-shaped bacteria in specimens taken from patients with gastritis. By 1982, Marshall, only 30 years old and still in training at Australia’s Royal Perth Hospital, and Warren, the more seasoned physician to whom he was assigned, were convinced that the bacteria were living brazenly in a sterile, acidic zone—the stomach—that medical texts had declared uninhabitable.
Marshall and Warren’s attempts to culture the bacteria repeatedly failed. But then they caught a lucky breaker rather, outbreak. Drug-resistant staph was sweeping through the hospital. Preoccupied with the infections, lab techs left Marshall’s and Warren’s petri dishes to languish in a dark, humid incubator over the long Easter holiday. Those five days were enough time to grow a crop of strange, translucent microbes.
Marshall later demonstrated that ulcer-afflicted patients harbored the same strain of bacteria. In 1983, he began successfully treating these sufferers with antibiotics and bismuth (the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol). That same year, at an infectious disease conference in Belgium, a questioner in the audience asked Marshall if he thought bacteria caused at least some stomach ulcers. Marshall shot back that he believed bacteria caused all stomach ulcers.
Those were fighting words. The young physician from Perth was telling the field’s academically pedigreed experts that they had it all wrong. "It was impossible to displace the dogma," Marshall explained to me in a jaunty, wide-ranging conversation several years ago. "Their agenda was to shut me up and get me out of gastroenterology and into general practice in the outback."
At first, Marshall couldn’t produce the crowning scientific proof of his claim: inducing ulcers in animals by feeding them the bacterium. So in 1984, as he later reported in the Medical Journal of Australia. "a 32-year-old man, a light smoker and social drinker who had no known gastrointestinal disease or family history of peptic ulceration"—a superb test subject, in other words—" swallowed the growth from’ a flourishing three-day culture of the isolate."
The volunteer was Marshall himself, Five days later, and for seven mornings in a row, he experienced the classic and unpretty symptoms of severe gastritis.
Helicobacter pylori have since been blamed not only for the seething inflammation ,of ulcers but also for virtually all stomach cancer. Marshall’s antibiotic treatment has replaced surgery as standard care. And the wise guy booed off the stage at scientific meetings has just won the Nobel Prize.
What does all this have to do with scientific freedom? Today, US government funding favors "hypothesis-driven" rather than "hypothesis-generating" research. In the former, a scientist starts with a safe supposition and conducts the experiment to prove or disprove the idea. "If you want to get research funding; you better make sure that you’ve got the experiment half done," Marshall told me. "You have to prove it works before they’ll fund you to test it out."
By contrast, in hypothesis-generating research, the scientist inches forward by hunch, gathering clues and speculating on their meaning. The payoff is never clear. With today’s crimped science budgets and intense competition for grants, such risky research rarely gets funded. Proceeding on intuition, Mar- shall told me, "is a luxury that not many researchers have."
It helps, he added, to be an outsider. "The people who have got a stake in the old technology arc never the ones to embrace the new technology. It’s always someone a bit on the periphery--who hasn’t got anything to gain by the status quo—who is interested in changing it."
At first, Marshall couldn’t produce the crowning scientific proof of his claim.
选项
A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案
A
解析
本题是第六段的第一句
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/xCt7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
【B1】【B10】
Underthecoverofdifferentbrands,______.Intheadvertisement,thepictureofamothertenderlykissinghersmallboyshows_
Inacompetitiveeconomy,theconsumerusuallyhasthechoiceofseveraldifferentbrandsofthesameproduct.Yetunderneathth
A、Knowwhattelevisionisbestforhim.B、Askforacheaperpriceonthetelevision.C、Changeastoretobuyadifferenttelevis
A、Itisimpossibleforustostopheartattacksandmanypeopledieforit.B、Advancesinmedicinehelpstopmanyheartattacks
Whatisthemainideaofthepassage?Whatistheauthor’sopinionoftheSanAntonioproject?
AfterWorldWarIImostAustralianswerecautiousaboutprospectsforthefuture.Fanningwasmademoredifficultduringthewa
Whenwetellothersinformation,wealsoexpressourfeelingsatthesametime.Someproductsthatmoviestarsrecommendsarer
Whenhearrived,hefound____________(只有老年人和生病的人)athome.
A、ProductionofTVsetswillbestoppedduetoitsbadeffects.B、ThenumberofTVsetswillremainthesameinthefuture.C、Te
随机试题
患者女,53岁。因“下楼时踩空致右踝部肿胀、疼痛1天”来诊。患者右足部不敢着地,下地后疼痛剧烈。查体:外踝部压痛(+),距腓前韧带处压痛(+),内外侧韧带应力试验(一)。X线片示:右踝关节未见明显异常。以下治疗方法错误的是
心脏的附壁血栓常属于()
女,25岁。心悸气短已数年,近2年加重。查体:心尖区听到舒张期隆隆样杂音,心律不齐。M型超声心动图示:二尖瓣前叶曲线EF斜率降低、A峰消失、后叶前向移动和瓣叶增厚,其诊断为
采用悬臂浇筑法施工时,预应力混凝土连续梁合龙顺序一般是()。
建筑防火措施有哪些?
账簿、收支凭证粘贴簿等资料,保管期满需要销毁时,应编造销毁清册,报()批准,然后在其监督下销毁。
在《幼儿园工作规程》所提出的教育目标中,“培养儿童活泼开朗的性格”属于()目标的范畴。
西周时期的中央司法官叫做()。
有如下程序:#includeusingnamespacestd;classsample{private:intx,y;public:sample(inti,intj
Theinfluenceofclimateonbehaviorappearsall-pervasive.Indeed,whocanclaimthatweatherfactorshavenoinfluenceonthei
最新回复
(
0
)