科技动态:让科学变得更简单?!（在线收听）

Any idea that science is running out of things to study. All you have to do is peel one layer off the onion and you'll find that is all unknown underneath. I'm George Whitesides. I'm a university professor at Harvard. I'm a chemist. And one of the things that chemists are interested in is order and disorder in general.

有的观点认为科学就是不断研究新生事物。你要做的只是一层层地拨开洋葱，而你会发现你对里面的内容一无所知。我是George Whitesides，哈佛的一名教授。我是一名化学家，化学研究者感兴趣的是一切规律和不成规律的规律。

The simplicity is an interesting subject. How do you make things as reliable, as workable as you possibly can. Almost everything ends ultimately in giving up because it's so complicated, so complex. And we're interested in the question of how do you make things simple. And it turns out that there's no good science space for simplicity and that's what we're interested in.

使科学变简单是一个有趣的课题。这关乎如何使科学尽可能地更可靠，更切合实际。世界上绝大部分以失败和放弃告终的事情多是因为太复杂太难了。而我们感兴趣的课题就是如何使事物变得简单，虽然在科学领域中似乎还没有这一课题。

We have a project to my own research group which is devoted to what we call the zero cost diagnostics. So our initial project in this effort is the idea of diagnostic chips. The way we do it is to use technology that is basically related to the technology that one uses for making comic books. We print these diagnostic chips on a piece of paper. Ideally, what you do is cut them out or tear them off. You put a drop of blood on one side and what appears then on the other side is a series of diagnostic colors and that pattern of colors gives you information that you'll use for diagnosis. That's the notion. And if that works, it will be very expensive. It will not completely replicate what's available in a first growth diagnostic clinical laboratory but it's a start for the world we're interested in.

我们的研究小组致力于零成本诊断学的科学项目。我们的努力方向就是一种名为“诊断芯片”的理念。运用我们制作连环画册的原理。把芯片图案印在纸上。理想的情况是将纸撕或剪成相应的形状，滴一滴血到纸上，图案就在纸的另一面显现出来了。而这显现出来的图案既能对你进行诊断。现在，这还只是一种理念。如果这一项目将来这能够运转起来，那将是一个昂贵的项目。在我们的实验室中，第一批临床的诊断还不能完全实现，但它开创了一个研究新领域。

The biggest problem that we need to put our efforts towards solving right now is probably how we make life on earth sustainable for some period of time. And I think of this problem as being a combination of resources available divided by the number of people. So you can increase the standard of living either by making the resources more available, using them more efficiently, conserving them or having fewer people. Probably the best strategy for having fewer people is to raise the educational level, since in every society it seems that as the education goes up, women have fewer children. There's no shortage of interesting problems to work on.

我们现在面临的最大问题就是如何在某些特定时期使地球上的人类可持续地生存下去。我认为这与人均资源的占有率有着很大关系。人类可以通过开发更多资源，更有效地使用资源，保护资源，控制人口来提高人均资源占有率。也许控制人口最有效的方法是提高人们受教育程度，因为，整个社会受教育程度越高，女性生孩子越少。提起这一点不得不说，我们仍需努力的课题还有很多。

cut sth. out 剪

tear sth. off 撕