to such an extent that you can take a fragment of human genetic instruction,  到了最后，你甚至可以学上一点人类遗传的知识，

　　patch it into a faulty yeast cell, and the yeast cell will put it to work as if it were its own. 拼凑个错误百出的酵母细胞，真酵母细胞还会让它投入工作，仿佛它是自己的同类。

　　In a very real sense, it is its own. 在非常真实的意义上，它确实是它的同类。

　　The dawn of life—or something very like it, 生命的黎明——或者说是很像生命的东西，

　　sits on a shelf in the office of a friendly isotope geochemist named Victoria Bennett in the Earth Sciences building of the Australian National University in Canberra. 摆在一位友好的同位素地球化学家办公室的书架上。她的名字叫维多利亚·贝内特。她的办公室位于堪培拉澳大利亚国立大学的地球科学系大楼。

　　An American, Ms. Bennett came to the ANU from California on a two-year contract in 1989 and has been there ever since. 贝内特女士是美国人，根据一个为斯两年的合同于1989年从加利福尼亚来到澳大利亚国立大学，此后一直留在那里。

　　When I visited her, in late 2001, she handed me a modestly hefty hunk of rock composed of thin alternating stripes of white quartz and a gray-green material called clinopyroxene. 2001年底我去拜访她的时候，她递给我一块不起眼的又重又大的石头。它由带细条纹的白色石英和一种灰绿色的名叫斜辉石的材料组成。

　　The rock came from Akilia Island in Greenland, where unusually ancient rocks were found in 1997. 石头来自格陵兰的阿基利亚岛。1997年，那个岛上发现了极其古老的岩石。

　　The rocks are 3.85 billion years old and represent the oldest marine sediments ever found. 那些岩石的年代已达38.5亿年之久，代表了迄今为止发现过的最古老的海洋沉积物。

　　We can't be certain that what you are holding once contained living organisms because you'd have to pulverize it to find out, Bennett told me. “我们没有把握，你手里拿着的玩意儿里边去是不是存在微生物。你非得将它敲碎了才能搞明白。”贝内特对我说，

　　"But it comes from the same deposit where the oldest life was excavated, so it probably had life in it" “但是，它来自过去掘过最古老的生命的同一矿床，因此它里面很可能有过生命。”

　　Nor would you find actual fossilized microbes, however carefully you searched. 无论你怎么仔细搜寻，你也找不到真正的微生物化石。