万物简史 第601期:生命的物质(27)（在线收听）

In the early 1990s, scientists made an even more profound discovery when they found they could knock out supposedly vital genes from embryonic mice, and the mice were not only often born healthy, but sometimes were actually fitter than their brothers and sisters who had not been tampered with. When certain important genes were destroyed, it turned out, others were stepping in to fill the breach. This was excellent news for us as organisms, but not so good for our understanding of how cells work since it introduced an extra layer of complexity to something that we had barely begun to understand anyway.

20世纪90年代初，科学家甚至作了更为深入的研究。他们发现，通过破坏胚胎阶段的老鼠的某种关键性基因，这些老鼠出生后不仅很健康，甚至有时比基因未受破坏的兄弟姐妹更健康。结果证明当某种重要的基因被破坏以后，其他的基因会进来填补空缺。对于作为生物的我们来说，这是一个再好不过的消息，但是对于我们了解细胞是怎样工作的却不太有利，因为它使我们才刚刚开始了解的问题又增加了一层复杂性。

It is largely because of these complicating factors that cracking the human genome became seen almost at once as only a beginning. The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work. What's needed now is the operating manual — instructions for how to make it go. We are not close to that point yet.

很大程度上正是这种极其复杂的因素，使得破译人类基因组的工作几乎马上被看成是仅仅处在起步阶段。基因组，正如麻省理工学院埃里克·兰德所指出的那样，就像是人体部位的排列表：它告诉我们我们是由什么构成的，但是却没有说它们是怎样工作的。现在所需要的是操作手册——怎样使它运转起来的指令。这对于我们来说，还是遥不可及的一件事。

So now the quest is to crack the human proteome — a concept so novel that the term proteome didn't even exist a decade ago. The proteome is the library of information that creates proteins. "Unfortunately," observed Scientific American in the spring of 2002, "the proteome is much more complicated than the genome."

因此，当务之急的是破解人类蛋白组——一个非常新的概念，仅仅在10年前，甚至连蛋白组这个词也不存在。蛋白组是储藏制造蛋白质信息的资料馆。“不幸的是，”《科学美国人》2002年春季刊认为，“蛋白组比基因组复杂得多。”

That's putting it mildly.

那个话说得比较婉转。