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TED英文演讲：我们如何对抗下一种致命病毒？
新冠状病毒肺炎还在继续，对于这种新型冠状病毒，据说目前还没有特效药，因此无论对于政府、医护人员抑或者我们普通大众，都是需要共同度过的一道难关。在危机面前，我们应该如何应对？希望这篇演讲能带给你一些启发和希望！
2014年，当埃博拉病毒爆发时，Pardis Sabeti和她的团队着手测定病毒基因组序列，研究病毒变异和传播的方式。在这个演讲中，她向我们阐述了开放的交流对于遏制病毒传播的重要性，以及对于对抗未来种种病毒的不可或缺。“我们必须开放合作、共享信息、携手共进，” Sabeti如是说，“当灾难爆发时，我们都应该互相敞开心扉，一起进行这场战斗。”
演讲者：帕尔迪斯·萨贝提（Pardis Sabeti）
计算遗传学家，Sabeti研究了包括埃博拉病毒在内的微生物的基因组，以帮助了解如何减缓它们的速度。
You may never have heard of Kenema, Sierra Leone or Arua, Nigeria. But I know them as two of the most extraordinary places on earth.
In hospitals there, there's a community of nurses, physicians and scientists that have been quietly battling one of the deadliest threats to humanity for years: Lassa virus. Lassa virus is a lot like Ebola. It can cause a severe fever and can often be fatal. But these individuals, they risk their lives every day to protect the individuals in their communities, and by doing so, protect us all.在那里的医院，有一个由护士、外科医生和科学家组成的社区，多年来一直在默默对抗人类最致命的威胁之一——拉萨病毒。拉萨病毒十分像埃博拉病毒。它可以导致严重的发热症状，而且往往是致命的。但是这些人每天都冒着生命危险来保护社区中的每个成员，与此同时，也保护着我们所有人。
But one of the most extraordinary things I learned about them on one of my first visits out there many years ago was that they start each morning -- these challenging, extraordinary days on the front lines -- by singing. They gather together, and they show their joy. They show their spirit. And over the years, from year after year as I've visited them and they've visited me, I get to gather with them and I sing and we write and we love it, because it reminds us that we're not just there to pursue science together; we're bonded through a shared humanity.我从他们身上学到的最棒的一点，就是在很多年前我第一次去拜访的时候，那些充满挑战、在前线奋斗的日子里，他们每天早上都是这样开始的——唱歌。他们聚集在一起，尽情展现他们的愉悦。他们展现着一种精神。许多年过去了，当我们年复一年彼此相互拜访的时候，我都可以跟他们聚在一起唱歌，而且我们会把这些记录下来，我们很爱这样做，因为它了提醒我们，我们不只是要一起探寻科学真理，还有一条人性的纽带将我们紧密相连。
And that of course, as you can imagine, becomes extremely important, even essential, as things begin to change. And that changed a great deal in March of 2014, when the Ebola outbreak was declared in Guinea. This is the first outbreak in West Africa, near the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And it was frightening, frightening for us all. We had actually suspected for some time that Lassa and Ebola were more widespread than thought, and we thought it could one day come to Kenema.而且你们可以想象，当周遭发生变化时，这种联系就变得极其重要，甚至是不可或缺的。2014年的3月，巨变发生了。埃博拉疫情在几内亚爆发。这是在西非地区的第一次疫情爆发，发生在塞拉利昂和利比亚的交界处。情况非常可怕，我们每个人都震惊了。事实上，我们甚至一度怀疑拉萨和埃博拉疫情的散布范围比我们想象中更广，而且我们担心某天它会传播到凯内马。
And so members of my team immediately went out and joined Dr. Humarr Khan and his team there, and we set up diagnostics to be able to have sensitive molecular tests to pick up Ebola if it came across the border and into Sierra Leone. We'd already set up this kind of capacity for Lassa virus, we knew how to do it, the team is outstanding. We just had to give them the tools and place to survey for Ebola.于是我的团队成员立即出发，赶到那里并加入了胡马尔·汗医生和他的团队，我们搭建好了诊断设备，来做一些敏感的分子测试，当埃博拉病毒跨越塞拉利昂边境时，我们就可以探测得到。我们早已为拉萨病毒设置了这种规模的设备，我们知道如何去应对，这个团队极其出色。我们只需要给他们设备和场地，让他们去研究埃博拉。
And unfortunately, that day came. On May 23, 2014, a woman checked into the maternity ward at the hospital, and the team ran those important molecular tests and they identified the first confirmed case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. This was an exceptional work that was done. They were able to diagnose the case immediately, to safely treat the patient and to begin to do contact tracing to follow what was going on. It could've stopped something. But by the time that day came, the outbreak had already been breeding for months. With hundreds of cases, it had already eclipsed all previous outbreaks. And it came into Sierra Leone not as that singular case, but as a tidal wave.很不幸的是，那一天来临了。2014年5月23日，一位女子住进了医院里的产房，我们团队就进行了那些重要的分子测试，并确诊了塞拉利昂的第一例埃博拉病例。这其实是非常了不起的。他们可以在第一时间诊断出病情，安全地诊治病人，并且开始追踪接触者，跟进病情的扩散情况。它本可以阻止些什么的。但是当那天来临的时候，疫情的爆发已经酝酿了好几个月了。发现了成百个病例之后，它让所有之前的疫情爆发都相形见绌。而且病毒不是由那个单一病例攻进塞拉利昂的，这是一个巨大的冲击波。
We had to work with the international community, with the Ministry of Health, with Kenema, to begin to deal with the cases, as the next week brought 31, then 92, then 147 cases -- all coming to Kenema, one of the only places in Sierra Leone that could deal with this.我们得跟国际社会紧密合作，跟卫生部，跟凯内马当地，共同应对这些病例。接下来的一周来了31个病人，然后是92个，后来涨到147个——全部都涌到凯内马来，因为这是塞拉利昂能够应对疫情的少数几个地方之一。
And we worked around the clock trying to do everything we could, trying to help the individuals, trying to get attention, but we also did one other simple thing. From that specimen that we take from a patient's blood to detect Ebola, we can discard it, obviously. The other thing we can do is, actually, put in a chemical and deactivate it, so just place it into a box and ship it across the ocean, and that's what we did. We sent it to Boston, where my team works. And we also worked around the clock doing shift work, day after day, and we quickly generated 99 genomes of the Ebola virus. This is the blueprint -- the genome of a virus is the blueprint. We all have one. It says everything that makes up us, and it tells us so much information.我们日夜无休，拼尽全力地工作，希望去帮助每一个患者，希望获得大家的关注，但我们同时也做了另外一件简单的事。为了探测埃博拉病毒，我们从病人血液中提取了样品，我们当然可以直接丢掉它们。但是事实上，我们能做的另一件事，是在样品中加化学药品使其失活，然后把它封存在盒子里，把它运过大洋。而这正是我们所做的。我们把样品发到了波士顿，我的团队工作的地方，我们同样日夜无休，每天都在轮班工作，于是我们很快地整理出了埃博拉病毒的99个基因组。这就是一份蓝图——病毒的基因组就是一份蓝图。我们人类身上也有。它详述了构成我们身体的一切，告诉我们非常多的信息。
The results of this kind of work are simple and they're powerful. We could actually take these 99 different viruses, look at them and compare them, and we could see, actually, compared to three genomes that had been previously published from Guinea, we could show that the outbreak emerged in Guinea months before, once into the human population, and from there had been transmitting from human to human. Now, that's incredibly important when you're trying to figure out how to intervene, but the important thing is contact tracing. We also could see that as the virus was moving between humans, it was mutating. And each of those mutations are so important, because the diagnostics, the vaccines, the therapies that we're using, are all based on that genome sequence, fundamentally -- that's what drives it. And so global health experts would need to respond, would have to develop, to recalibrate everything that they were doing.这些工作的结果很简单，但也很强大。我们可以拿这99个不同的病毒变异，观察并且比较它们，我们可以清晰地看到，相比于几内亚方面发布的三个基因组，我们可以发现，病情在几个月前就已经开始在几内亚传播，一旦闯进了人群中，就会通过人与人之间的接触快速传递。这个信息其实至关重要，尤其当你在研究如何阻碍病毒传播的时刻。但是最重要的事情是接触者追踪。我们也可以看到病毒在人与人之间传播的时候，它也在不断变异。每一种变异都无比重要，因为所有的诊断、疫苗，还有我们用的治疗方式，基本全都是基于那种特定的基因组序列，这才是导致疫情传播的根源。于是全球的健康专家要快速应对，要改进研究方法，要把自己所做的一切都进行调整。
But the way that science works, the position I was in at that point is, I had the data, and I could have worked in a silo for many, many months, analyzed the data carefully, slowly, submitted the paper for publication, gone through a few back-and-forths, and then finally when the paper came out, might release that data. That's the way the status quo works.但是就当时我所处的位置来看，科学研究的方法是我拿到了数据，我可能要关在实验室里研究好几个月，细致谨慎地分析那些数据，写好论文投出去，再进行反复修改，最后论文公之于众，那些数据才能公开。这就是当时科学研究的现状。
Well, that was not going to work at this point, right? We had friends on the front lines and to us it was just obvious that what we needed is help, lots of help. So the first thing we did is, as soon as the sequences came off the machines, we published it to the web. We just released it to the whole world and said, "Help us." And help came.好吧，在那个特定时候这种方法肯定不管用，对吧？我们有些朋友在抗病前线工作，显然对于我们来说最需要的就是外界帮助，很多的帮助。所以我们所做的第一件事，基因测序结果从机器上一出来，我们就立即在网上发布了这些数据。我们向全世界公开，然后说：“帮帮我们！”于是帮助接踵而至。
Before we knew it, we were being contacted from people all over, surprised to see the data out there and released. Some of the greatest viral trackers in the world were suddenly part of our community. We were working together in this virtual way, sharing, regular calls, communications, trying to follow the virus minute by minute, to see ways that we could stop it.我们还没反应过来，全世界就有一大群人主动跟我们联系，他们惊喜地看到这些数据在网上公开了。世界上一些最出色的病毒追踪者突然就变成了我们团队的一员了！我们用这种虚拟的方式共同合作，我们共享信息，经常互通电话，一直保持联系，希望能够分秒跟踪病毒的扩散情况，然后找到遏制它的办法。
And there are so many ways that we can form communities like that. Everybody, particularly when the outbreak started to expand globally, was reaching out to learn, to participate, to engage. Everybody wants to play a part. The amount of human capacity out there is just amazing, and the Internet connects us all. And could you imagine that instead of being frightened of each other, that we all just said, "Let's do this. Let's work together, and let's make this happen."其实我们若要组建这样的团体有很多种方式。每个人，尤其是当疫情在世界范围爆发时，都在不断获取信息，都在参与、投入进来。每个人都想做一些贡献。世界上所有人的力量真的是太神奇了，而因特网将我们联系在一起。你们可以想象吗？我们不再害怕与他人交流，我们所有人都说，“开工吧。让我们齐心协力，我们一定做得到！”
But the problem is that the data that all of us are using, Googling on the web, is just too limited to do what we need to do. And so many opportunities get missed when that happens. So in the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we'd had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field.但是问题就是，我们所有人所用到的数据，在谷歌上搜到的数据，远不能满足我们工作的需求。当这种情况发生时，我们就会错失很多机会。所以在凯内马的疫情爆发初期，我们有106份病人的临床记录，我们再一次把这些都公之于众。在我们自己的实验室里，你拿给我们那106份记录，我们就可以让电脑来预测接下来的埃博拉患者，而且准确度接近100%。我们还做了个应用程序，专门发布这些预测，让全世界健康领域的工作者都能获得这些信息。
But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. So we were waiting for more data to release that. and the data has still not come. We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. And this just -- we can't accept that. Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. It's our lives on the line. And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately.但是106份报告远远不够，还无法让这种方法产生实效。所以我们在等待更多的临床报告，才能发布那个软件，而这些报告一直没有来。我们还在等待，还在不断修正软件，窝在实验室里而不是跟大家合作。这个真是……我们完全不能接受。对吧？你们，你们所有人都不能接受。现在正是命悬一线的时候。然而事实上，很多的人牺牲了，很多工作在医疗领域的人们，包括我所敬爱的同事们，有五个同事：姆巴鲁·冯尼、艾力克斯·穆比、胡马尔·汗医生、艾丽丝·科沃玛，还有穆罕默德·富勒。这只是千千万万医疗卫生工作者中的五人，他们在凯内马还有其他地方牺牲，而世界却一直在等待，我们一直在埋头工作，人与人都是独立的、毫无交流的。
See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it's fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we're actually all the same. We're all in this fight together. Ebola on one person's doorstep could soon be on ours. And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy.埃博拉病毒，就像其他种种对人类的威胁，都会因人与人之间的不信任、分散与隔阂而愈演愈烈。当我们互相建起隔障，互相争斗的时候，病毒的气焰就更嚣张了。但是埃博拉又不像其它的威胁，因为这一次，我们成为了一家人。我们都在同一条战线。一个人患上了埃博拉，我们可能就会是下一个。于是我们生活在世上，有着共同的弱点，共同的优势，共同的恐惧，共同的希望，我衷心希望我们能够带着喜悦一起工作。
A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word "Kenema," the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for "clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze." That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we'd always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. And we have to do that. We all have to demand that of ourselves and others -- to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. It could be something that's transmitted through the air. It could even be disseminated intentionally. And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy.我的一个已经毕业的学生读到了一本关于塞拉利昂的书，她发现“凯内马”这个词，我们在塞拉利昂工作时那个城市、那所医院的名字，在当地的门得语中意思是“像河流一样透明、澄净，并且所有人的目光都能触及”。这对我们有着非常深远的意义，我们自己并没意识到，但我们一直都觉得为了向凯内马，我们奋斗过的地方的所有人致敬，我们必须开放合作，我们必须共享信息，我们必须携手共进。我们必须这样做。所有人都应该这样要求自己和他人——当灾难爆发时，我们都应该互相敞开心扉，一起进行这场战斗。因为这不是埃博拉疫情的第一次爆发，也不会是最后一次，世上还有许多其它的微生物一直潜伏在我们身边，就像拉萨病毒还有其它的生物。下次当灾难发生的时候，可能会在一个百万人口级别的城市，可能就会在那里爆发。病毒可能会通过空气传播。病毒甚至可能会被人故意散播出去。我知道这很吓人，我能理解，但是我也知道，这次经历告诉我们，我们有足够的科技和能力，来打赢这场仗，不仅打赢这场仗，而且对所有的病毒都能道高一丈。但是只有当我们精诚合作时我们才能做到，而且我们要心怀喜悦。
So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity.所以对于汗医生，还有牺牲在抗病前线的所有人，永远与我们并肩作战的人，让我们也永远与他们一起战斗。我们的世界不应被一个病毒所造成的破坏而定义，我们要让数十亿颗心灵团结合作的光辉洒遍大地。
Thank you.谢谢大家。
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