VOA慢速英语2015 科学家使用机器人测试新药物

Robot Scientist Helps Design New Drugs 科学家使用机器人测试新药物

Robots are common in today’s world. They manufacture cars, work in space, explore oceans, clean up oil spills and investigate dangerous environments.  And now, scientists at the University of Manchester are using a robot as a laboratory partner.

在当今世界机器人很常见，它们能制造汽车、在太空工作、探索海洋、清洁漏油并调查危险环境。现在，曼彻斯特大学的科学家们使用机器人来做实验室助手。

The researchers at the university created the robot in 2009 and named it Adam. Despite the name, Adam is not a humanoid robot. It is about the size of a car. 

该大学的研究者们2009年制造了这台机器人，并给它取名亚当。尽管名叫亚当，它却不是类人机器人，它有汽车那般大小。

Adam was built to do science and make discoveries. Ross King is the leader of the University of Manchester research team. He says the robot made a discovery about yeast 1, a kind of fungus 2 used in science as a model for human cells. 

亚当被用来进行科学研究和探索，罗斯·金是曼彻斯特大学研究小组负责人，他说这台机器人对酵母有了发现，酵母是一种真菌，在科学上被用来作为人体细胞模型。

"Adam hypothesized certain functions of genes 3 within yeast and experimentally tested these hypothesizes and confirmed them. So it both hypothesized and confirmed new scientific knowledge."

“亚当推测了酵母基因的某些功能，并对这些假设进行实验，然后证实了假设。所以它推测并证实了新的科学知识。”

Adam's success as a scientist led to the creation of another robot scientist named Eve. Researchers developed Eve to design and test drugs for tropical and neglected diseases. These diseases kill and infect millions of people each year.

亚当作为科学家的成功促成了另一台名叫夏娃的机器人科学家的诞生，研究者开发出夏娃用于设计和测试药物，这些药物被用来治疗热带未被重视疾病。这些疾病每年导致数百万人感染和死亡。

Drug development is slow and costly 4. Experts say it can take more than 10 years and about $1 billion to discover and develop new medicines. Drug manufacturers are unlikely to get their investment money back.

药物开发过程缓慢且代价昂贵，专家们称发现并开发新药物需要花费10年以上时间，需要耗资近10亿美元，药品制造商不大可能收回投资成本。

So the University of Manchester developed a low-cost test that shows whether or not a chemical is likely to be made into an effective medicine. Mr. King says that other drug testing methods were not very effective.

因此曼彻斯特大学开发了一种低成本的测试方法，能显示一种化学品是否能被制成有效药物。金称其他的药物测试方法不是那么有效。

"How it works conventionally is you use robotics as well and you have a large collection of possible drugs. You test every single compound.  And you start at the beginning of your library and continue until the end, and stop. So it's not a very intelligent process. The robotics doesn't learn anything as it goes along, even if it's tested a million compounds, it still doesn't have any expectation of what will happen next when it tests a new compound."

“传统方法是使用机器人和大批可能的药物，要测试每种单一的药物，在实验室从头到尾做完，所以这不是很聪明的方法。这些机器人在整个过程中没有学到什么东西，即使是测试了一百万种药物，它仍不能期待在测试一种新药物时会遇到什么。”

Mr. King says that Eve is different because the robot learns as it tests different compounds. He says the robot is designed to ignore compounds that it thinks unlikely to be good. It will only test the compounds which have a good chance of working.

金说夏娃之所以与众不同，是因为这台机器人在测试不同药物时能进行学习，他说这台机器人被设计成能忽略那些它认为可能不好的药物，只测试那些有可能有效的药物。

Eve has discovered that a compound known to be effective against cancer might also be used to fight against malaria 5 and other tropical diseases.

夏娃发现，一种已知对癌症有效的药物也可用来治疗疟疾等热带疾病。

Mr. King says he hopes to completely automate 6 the drug testing process with robots like Eve to create and test new chemicals.  But he says humans remain in control of the manufacturing process.

金说他希望能使用夏娃这样的机器人来将药物测试过程彻底自动化，从而制造和测试新的药物，但他说人类仍控制着生产过程。

Words in This Story

automate – v. to run or operate something by using machines or computers instead of people to do the work

humanoid – adj. looking or acting 7 like a human

fungus – n. any one of a group of related plants such as molds, mushrooms, or yeasts 8 that have no flowers and that live on dead or decaying things

neglected – adj. not given enough attention or care

tropical – adj. relating to the part of the world near the equator where the weather is always warm

hypothesize – v. to suggest (an idea or theory); to make or suggest a hypothesis