文章来源：《经济学人》Oct 7th 2023 期 Leaders 栏目 The Nobel prize for medicine 诺贝尔医学奖

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The Nobel prize for medicine, awarded on October 2nd to Katalin Karikó, a biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an immunologist, is a fitting capstone to a great underdog story. Dr Karikó’s unfashionable insistence on trying to get RNA into cells set back her career. She persisted, and the two developed a technique which allowed the immune system to be primed against threats in an entirely new way. When the covid-19 pandemic hit, the mRNA vaccines they had made possible saved millions of lives—and freed billions more to live normally again.

10 月 2 日，诺贝尔医学奖授予给了生物化学家卡塔琳·卡里科和免疫学家德鲁·韦斯曼，这是一个伟大但不被看好的故事的巅峰时刻。卡里科博士坚持将 RNA 注入细胞中，这一不合时宜的做法阻碍了她的职业发展。她坚持不懈，两人共同研发出一种技术，使免疫系统能够以全新的方式应对威胁。当新冠来袭时，他们研制的 mRNA 疫苗挽救了数百万人的生命，让数十亿人重新恢复了正常的生活。

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Their prize is unusual. The only previous scientist to have won a Nobel prize in the context of vaccination was Max Theiler, who discovered the attenuated strain of the yellow-fever virus which has been used as a vaccine since the 1930s. Neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin was rewarded for developing polio vaccines. The eradication of smallpox went uncelebrated, too.

他们的获奖非同寻常。此前唯一一位因疫苗而获得诺贝尔奖的科学家是马克斯·泰勒，他发现了黄热病病毒的减毒株，该毒株自1930 年代以来一直被用作疫苗。乔纳斯·索尔克和阿尔伯特·萨宾研发了脊髓灰质炎疫苗，但都未获奖。消灭天花的贡献也没有得到表彰。

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Given that Alfred Nobel’s will calls for the prizes to go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on humankind, this poor record is undeserved. But although they may have gone without trips to Stockholm, nice fat cheques and 175g gold medals portraying an entrepreneur in explosives, vaccine scientists can contemplate something even better. As the inscription to Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral puts it: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you seek his monument, look around you). The vaccine-makers’ work is commemorated in hundreds of millions of lives.

鉴于阿尔弗雷德·诺贝尔的遗嘱要求，奖项要颁给那些对人类做出最大贡献的人，疫苗领域的获奖记录不该如此稀少。不过，尽管疫苗科学家们可能没有去斯德哥尔摩领奖，没有大额奖金，没有镶有诺贝尔像的175克黄金奖牌，但科学家们可以专注于更好的疫苗研究。正如圣保罗大教堂里克里斯托弗·雷恩的墓碑上刻的那样：Si monumentum requiris, circumspice 。（如果你要寻找他的纪念馆，看看四周吧。）疫苗挽救了数亿人的生命，周围都是纪念。

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention. It is a hard claim to gainsay. Vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers. And their capacity to do so continues to grow. In 2021 the WHO approved a first vaccine against malaria; this week it approved a second.

世界卫生组织称，疫苗挽救的生命超过了其他任何医学发明。这是一个难以反驳的说法。疫苗以廉价、可靠且惊人的数量保护着人类免受疾病侵袭。而且疫苗的作用仍在不断增强。2021 年，世卫组织批准了第一种抗疟疾疫苗；本周又批准了第二种。

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Vaccines are not only immensely useful; they also embody something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication. Vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it. As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients. In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual’s immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat. But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.

疫苗不仅极其有用，而且在关怀与沟通的结合中体现了人性之美。疫苗并非如有些人所说的欺骗免疫系统，而是在教育和训练免疫系统。作为一种良好的公共卫生资源，疫苗可以让医生在病人的细胞中悄悄传递警示语。在缺乏信任的时代，政府政策与个体免疫系统之间的这种亲密关系很容易被误解为一种威胁。但疫苗不是阴谋或操控工具：它们是爱的分子。

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The best way to further honour this extraordinary set of technologies is to use it more and better. Gavi, a public-private global-health partnership, has made over 1bn doses of various vaccines available to children in poor and middle-income countries this century; it believes this has averted over 17m deaths. Even so, millions of children receive no vaccinations at all.

进一步弘扬这套非凡技术的最佳方式就是更多更好地使用疫苗。本世纪以来，全球卫生公私合作组织“加维”（Gavi）已向贫穷和中等收入国家的儿童提供了10多亿剂各种疫苗；他们相信这已经避免了1700多万人死亡。即便如此，仍有数百万儿童没有接种任何疫苗。

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It is often said that Nobel’s bequest was an atonement for the destruction his explosives made possible. His writings offer no evidence for that, but the sheer scale of the damage they did—the military use of explosives in 20th-century wars is reckoned to have claimed 100m-150m lives—is so great that the idea feels as if it should be true. Vaccination is one of the few benefits conferred on humankind that measures up to that task. It is as though the world were able to run one of the terrible wars of the 20th century in reverse, saving millions of lives a year, every year. Si expiationem requiris, circumspice.

通常有人说，诺贝尔遗产是对他发明的炸药所造成破坏的救赎补偿。他的著作没有提供这方面的证据，但炸药所造成的破坏规模--据估计，20 世纪战争中军用炸药的使用夺去了 1 亿至-1.5 亿人的生命--是如此巨大，以至于这个观点似乎应该是真实的。疫苗接种是少数能够与此任务相媲美，且造福人类的贡献之一。这就好像世界能够将20世纪可怕战争逆转一样，每年拯救数百万人的生命。如果你寻找补偿，看看四周吧。