1、第四单元文本第四单元文本 Chinese scientist wins 2015 Nobel Prize By Dina Conner 11 December 2015 Tu Youyou has become the first female scientist of the Peoples Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize, awarded for her contribution to the fight against malaria, one of the deadliest diseases in human history. T
2、hanks to her discovery of qinghaosu, malaria patients all over the world now have had a greatly increased chance of survival. Born in 1930, in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, Tu studied medicine at university in Beijing between 1951 and 1955. After graduation, she worked at the Academy of Traditional Chi
3、nese Medicine. She completed further training courses in traditional Chinese medicine, acquiring a broad knowledge of both traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Tus education was soon to prove very useful. In the 1960s, many people were dying of malaria, and in 1969 Tu became head of a
4、team that intended to find a cure for the disease. She collected over 2,000 traditional Chinese medical recipes for malaria treatment and made hundreds of extracts from different herbs. When they failed to produce any promising results, Tu referred to the ancient books of traditional Chinese medicin
5、e again. Inspired by an over 1,600-year-old text about preparing qinghao extract with cold water, lu redesigned the experiments and tried extracting the herb at a low temperature in order not to damage its effective part. On 4 October 1971, after 190 failures, she succeeded in making qinghao extract
6、 that could treat malaria in mice. However, it was hard to produce enough qinghao extract for large trials because research resources were limited. Tu and her team managed to find solutions to the problem. When there was no research equipment, they had to extract herbs using household water containe
7、rs. They worked day and night and their health began to suffer because of the poor conditions, but they never gave up. Even with large amounts of qinghao extract produced, however, they still faced another problem. The trials onpatients were likely tobepostponed because they did not have sufficient
8、safety data. To speed up the process and ensure its safety, Tu and her team volunteered to test qinghao extract on themselves first. The efforts of Tu and her team finally paid off. In November 1972, through trial and error, they successfully discovered qinghaosuthe most effective part of the qingha
9、o extract. As a key part of many malaria medicines, qinghaosu has since benefited about 200 million malaria patients. More than 40 years after its discovery, Tu was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize for her work. In her Nobel Lecture, she encouraged scientists to further explore the treasure house of
10、 traditional Chinese medicine and raise it to a higher level. Perhaps the next generation of scientists, drawing on the wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine, will indeed discover more medicines beneficial to global health care. Science Festival gets off with a bang! By Victor Wang 20 April Our ann
11、ual school Science Festival finished on Friday and once again it was amazing fun. This years “Space theme was truly excellent and showed off all of the students creative talent. On Wednesday morning, Dr Li arrived to talk about whether life can exist on other planets. Everyone loved his lecture abou
12、t conditions on different planets. He also answered students questions on outer space. In Thursdays Science Workshop, students tried different experiments with great interest. The most popular experiment was Planets in a bottle, in which students tried to create the conditions of different planets i
13、nside glass bottles. The experiment allowed students to get a taste of what it was like to live in outer space. The Science Fair also attracted much interest from students. Every class decorated their classroom and designed activities according to the theme of space. The most amazing decoration was
14、from Class 3A, who made their classroom look like a space station. Possibly the standout activity of the fair was Class 2Cs Big Bang. It was certainly noisy! The Science Festival has proved to be a huge success due to all of the students hard workit was a real team effort. Everyone is looking forwar
15、d to next years Science Festival! The value of science When I was younger, I thought science would make good things for everybody. It was obviously useful; it was good. But then during the war I worked on the atomic bomb. This result of science was obviously very seriousit represented the destructio
16、n of people and it put our future at risk. I had to ask myself, Is there some evil involved in science? Put another way, what is the value of the science I had long devoted myself tothe thing I had lovedwhen I saw what terrible things it could do? It was a question I had to answer. I thought long an
17、d hard about this question, and I will try to answer it in this talk. The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone: scientific knowledge enables us to do and make all kinds of things. Of course, if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the
18、credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or badbut it does not carry instructions onhow toapply it. Such power has obvious valueeven though the power may be negated by what one does with it. Another value of science is the inte
19、llectual enjoyment it can provide us with. When we look at any question deeply enough, we feel the excitement and mystery coming to us again and again. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, inspiring one to look deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may let us down, wit
20、h pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions andmysteries. Thanks to thescientific effort, we have been led to imagine all sorts of things more fantastic than poets and dreamers of the past ever could. 1 would now like to
21、 turn to a third value that science has. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance. When a scientist doesnt know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has an idea as towhat theresult is, he is uncertain.
22、 And when he is pretty sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. Now, we scientists take it for granted that it is perfectly possible to live and not know. But our freedom to doubt was born out of a deep and strong struggle against authority in the early days of science. In
23、order to progress, we must not forget the importance of this struggle; we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Permit us to question to doubtto not be sure. It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to declare the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but to be welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations. (Adapted from a public lecture by Richard Feynman, an American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965)
