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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Tick-tock, tick-tock. Is that your biological clock? And if it is, are you female? Most people think biological clocks are strictly1 female phenomena2, with infertility3 and the risk of certain diseases going up with a mother's age. But the biological clock is an equal opportunity timepiece--that's right, men have one too!
There's a common belief that men can sire children until they die, but that women need to be relatively4 young to conceive healthy children. But the father's age affects the child's health too. Psychiatrist5 Dolores Malaspina and her team found that the risk of schizophrenia triples for babies born to fathers over 50, compared with fathers under 25. Other diseases appearing more in offspring of older fathers are achondroplasia, or dwarfism, and some prostate cancers.
Despite the publicity6 given to women's biological clocks, medical geneticists recently have found that sperm9 are more likely than eggs to have genetic8 mutations. Here's why. By age 40, a man's sperm cells have divided over 600 times. That's over 600 chances for mistakes in copying genes10. A woman's eggs, on the other hand, don't go through that process of division, so there are fewer chances for mistakes in gene7 replication. When there is a genetic problem in an egg, though, it's often with a whole chromosome11, instead of a single gene. Down syndrome12, for example, occurs when there's an extra copy of chromosome 21. Most babies with older fathers, as with older mothers, are healthy. Still, biological clocks are real, and not just for women. His biological clock is ticking too!
1 strictly | |
adv.严厉地,严格地;严密地 | |
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2 phenomena | |
n.现象 | |
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3 infertility | |
n.不肥沃,不毛;不育 | |
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4 relatively | |
adv.比较...地,相对地 | |
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5 psychiatrist | |
n.精神病专家;精神病医师 | |
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6 publicity | |
n.众所周知,闻名;宣传,广告 | |
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7 gene | |
n.遗传因子,基因 | |
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8 genetic | |
adj.遗传的,遗传学的 | |
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9 sperm | |
n.精子,精液 | |
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10 genes | |
n.基因( gene的名词复数 ) | |
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11 chromosome | |
n.染色体 | |
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12 syndrome | |
n.综合病症;并存特性 | |
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