万物简史 第591期:生命的物质(17)（在线收听）

Rosalind Franklin did not share in the Nobel Prize. She died of ovarian cancer at the age of just thirty-seven in 1958, four years before the award was granted. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. The cancer almost certainly arose as a result of chronic overexposure to X-rays through her work and needn't have happened. In her much-praised 2002 biography of Franklin, Brenda Maddox noted that Franklin rarely wore a lead apron and often stepped carelessly in front of a beam. Oswald Avery never won a Nobel Prize either and was also largely overlooked by posterity, though he did at least have the satisfaction of living just long enough to see his findings vindicated. He died in 1955.

罗萨林·富兰克林没有分享诺贝尔奖。1958年，诺贝尔奖须发4年之前，她因卵巢癌而去世，年仅37岁，她得这种癌症几乎肯定是由于在工作时长期接触X光射线所致，这本来是可以避免的。在2002年出版的一本颇受好评的富兰克林的传记里，布伦达·马克多斯说，富兰克林很少穿防辐射服，并且常常漫不经心地走到X光前。奥斯瓦尔德·埃弗雷也没有获得诺贝尔奖，而且在很大程度上被后人所忽视。他死前至少有一点是令他满意的，这就是他看到自己的发现被证明是正确的。他死于1955年。

Watson and Crick's discovery wasn't actually confirmed until the 1980s. As Crick said in one of his books: "It took over twenty-five years for our model of DNA to go from being only rather plausible, to being very plausible ... and from there to being virtually certainly correct."

沃森和克里克的发现实际上到了20世纪80年代才最终得到确认。正如克里克在他的一本书中所说的：“我们的DNA模型从被认为似乎是有道理的，到似乎是非常有道理的……再到最终被证明是完全正确的，用了25年的时间。

Even so, with the structure of DNA understood progress in genetics was swift, and by 1968 the journal Science could run an article titled "That Was the Molecular Biology That Was," suggesting — it hardly seems possible, but it is so — that the work of genetics was nearly at an end.

即便如此，随着对DNA的结构的了解，人们在遗传学方面的研究进展神速。1968年，《科学》杂志敢于发表一篇题为《生物学即分子生物学》的文章，认为——这似乎是不大可能的，但确实是这么看的——遗传学的研究已经接近终点了。

In fact, of course, it was only just beginning. Even now there is a great deal about DNA that we scarcely understand, not least why so much of it doesn't actually seem to do anything.

实际上，这当然仅仅是开始。即使到了今天，我们对于DNA仍有许多未解之谜。比如说，为什么这么多DNA似乎不做任何事情。