这位超酷的女科学家获诺奖：迫不及待地想回家告诉孩子们

10月3日，2018年诺贝尔化学奖揭晓。化学奖一半颁给(with one half to)美国科学家弗朗西斯·阿诺德(Frances H. Arnold)，奖励她实现了酶的定向演化(for the directed evolution of enzymes)；

另一半颁发给(and the other half jointly to)美国科学家乔治·史密斯(George P. Smith)和英国科学家格雷戈里·温特尔(Sir Gregory P. Winter)，奖励他们实现了多肽和抗体的噬菌体呈现技术(for the phage display of peptides and antibodies)。

据果壳网编辑@Ent_evo 介绍，

彪悍的人生 不需要解释 敬佩！

下面我们看看诺贝尔奖官方打电话通知她获奖时，她有多「淡定」。

Transcript of the interview

Frances Arnold: Hello.

Adam Smith: Oh, hello. Am I speaking with Frances Arnold?

FA: You are, hi.

AS: Hi. I’m Adam Smith from Nobelprize.org. Congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize.

FA: Thank you.

AS: You sound very calm and collected in the middle of the night in Texas.

此处作为形容词，表示“镇定的，泰然自若的”，英文解释为“in control of yourself and your thoughts, feelings etc”，举个🌰：

She wanted to arrive feeling cool, calm, and collected.

她想在到达时感觉平和冷静，泰然自若。

FA: I’m not the least – I’m bouncing off the walls but I’m trying to pretend to sound calm and collected.

短语表示“兴高采烈，非常高兴，欣喜若狂”，英文解释为：If someone is bouncing off the walls, they are acting in a very uncontrolled and excited way.

AS: I imagine … you’re away from home so perhaps somewhat protected from the immediate onslaught that’s going to happen today.

FA: Well, I’m annoyed because I can’t reach my sons. They’re sound asleep [Laughs]. So, yes, I’m protected but I’m also annoyed. They never answer the phone when mum calls.

“联系不上我的儿子们，他们睡着了...”

AS: Well not in the middle of the night at least, surely [Laughs]. You started as a mechanical engineer, and now I suppose you are a protein engineer. Do you think that is part of the secret of your success, that you came from a different field into biology and were able to see things differently?

“成功的秘诀是因为跨领域后看待事物的角度不一样吗？“

FA: I think there’s no doubt about that. I was able to look at the problem with a totally a fresh set of eyes. A problem that had challenged people since the techniques were – of site-directed mutagenesis for example, which won the Nobel Prize – were available. And I realised that the way that most people were going about protein engineering was doomed to failure.

定点突变（Site-directed mutagenesis），经由设计好的寡核苷酸，在任何一个基因片段上进行随意或设计好的突变。(维基百科)

AS: It’s a bold move though, to jump fields so radically.

“勇气可嘉”

FA: Oh, well, I have four brothers and I’ve jumped into all sorts of things over my life, so learning new things has always been fun for me. Changing fields has been fun, and I still feel that way many years later.

AS: Would it be fair to say that what you do is to sort of manipulate nature’s inventiveness for our human benefit?

FA: Well I think that what I do is copying nature’s design process. Right? Here … all this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about through this one simple, beautiful design algorithm, and what I do is use that algorithm to build new biological things. And to me it’s not … it’s obvious, it’s totally obvious that this is the way it should be done.

AS: Can you give me an example of one of your favourite things that you’ve been able to evolve?

FA: Well, what I work on now is … someone asked me ‘What’s the funniest thing or what’s the best thing that you’ve ever done?’ It’s always what I’m doing now. So what I’m going now is looking at this question of how do you evolve innovation. How does innovation happen? How do get a whole new chemical reactivity that you don’t know already exists in nature? How can I evolve a whole new species in essence, a whole new species of enzyme? And, so for example, making a carbon-silicon bond. Humans thought only they could do it, but we evolved an enzyme that does it better than humans do.

/'enzaɪm ;ˋɛnzaɪm /

a chemical substance that is produced in a plant or animal, and helps chemical changes to take place in the plant or animal 酶

AS: And, absolutely, and I suppose nature’s doing this all the time. It’s coming up with new enzymes itself.

FA: Of course she is! Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her – how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.

pesticide：a chemical substance used to kill insects and small animals that destroy crops 杀虫剂，农药

herbicide：a substance used to kill unwanted plants 除草剂

antibiotic：a drug that is used to kill bacteria and cure infections 抗生素，抗菌素

AS: And I suppose that should allay the fears of people who say that humans shouldn’t be tinkering with nature. Well nature’s tinkering with itself, so it’s not so different really is it?

allay (sb’s) fear/concern/suspicion意思是“减轻（某人的）恐惧/担忧/疑虑”，英文解释为“to make someone feel less afraid, worried etc”，举个🌰：

He made a statement to allay public anxiety.

他发表了一项声明以缓解公众的忧虑。

tinker作动词，意思是“做小改动，做小修补；摆弄”，英文解释为“to make small changes to something in order to repair it or make it work better”，后面通常跟with，举个🌰：

Congress has been tinkering with the legislation.

国会一直在对这项立法做些小修小补。

FA: Well we’ve been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years – look at a poodle! So we’ve created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn’t be here were it not for us.

AS: That’s true, and poodles haven’t done much damage to us so far.

FA: That’s right. And they solve all sorts of problems. Look at the agricultural revolution and food. Look at our farm animals. Look at our pets. These are human creations.

AS: Humanity needs science to get over the hurdles ahead.          

FA: That is really true. We need science and we need the smartest minds to work on these problems.

AS: You are already a member of all three National Academies of Sciences in the US; you have multiple awards. What do you think the Nobel Prize will mean to you?

FA: Oh my goodness! I don’t know yet. I haven’t had it very long.

AS: Let me rephrase the question. What does it mean to you at this moment?

表示“〔为使意思更清楚或更可接受而〕重新措辞”，英文解释为“to say or write something again using different words to express what you mean in a way that is clearer or more acceptable”，举个🌰：

OK. Let me rephrase the question.

好吧，让我换个说法来提这个问题。

FA: At this moment I’m absolutely thrilled and I can’t wait to get home and tell my sons.

AS: Really couldn’t be a better answer. Fantastic … well we very much look forward to seeing you in Stockholm in December, and thank you very much for talking to me.

FA: Thank you Adam. OK.

AS: Bye bye.

FA: Bye.

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