英汉双语 Closing in on cancer (2017年9月16日经济学人刊载)

Closing in on cancer

Saturday, September 16, 2017

9:10 AM

癌症将被攻克

Science will win the technical battle against cancer. But that is only half the fight

科学将要赢得抗癌的技术战争，但那只是整个战役的半场。

THE numbers are stark. Cancer claimed the lives of 8.8m people in 2015; only heart disease caused more deaths. Around 40% of Americans will be told they have cancer during their lifetimes. It is now a bigger killer of Africans than malaria. But the statistics do not begin to capture the fear inspired by cancer’s silent and implacable cellular mutiny. Only Alzheimer’s exerts a similar grip on the imagination.

数字是严酷的。在2015 年，880万人死于癌症。癌症引起的死亡仅次于心脏病。40%的美国人在一生中会得癌症。癌症取代疟疾成为非洲的头号杀手。尽管如此，统计数字并不能捕捉到癌症的安静且无情的细胞变异引起的恐慌。只有阿尔兹海默症引起了类似的恐怖想象。

Confronted with this sort of enemy, people understandably focus on the potential for scientific breakthroughs that will deliver a cure. Their hope is not misplaced. Cancer has become more and more survivable over recent decades owing to a host of advances, from genetic sequencing to targeted therapies. The five-year survival

rate for leukemia in America has almost doubled, from 34% in the mid-1970s to 63% in 2006-12. America is home to about 15.5m cancer survivors, a number that will grow to 20m in the next ten

years. Developing countries have made big gains, too: in parts of Central and South America, survival rates for prostate and breast cancer have jumped by as much as a fifth in only a decade.

在这种敌人面前，人类自然会注意在癌症治疗方面的科学突破的潜力。由于一系列的进步，从基因排序到靶向治疗，人类的癌症存活期在近几十年变得越来越长。在美国，白血病的5年存活率从上世纪七十年代中叶的34%增长到了2006至2012年的63%。美国有一千五百万癌症幸存者，这个数字在未来十年将会增长到两千万。在这方面发展中国家们也取得了不俗的成绩。中美洲和南美洲国家的前列腺癌和乳腺癌生存率，在10年间上跳了五分之一。

From a purely technical perspective, it is reasonable to expect that

science will one day turn most cancers into either chronic diseases or curable ones. But cancer is not fought only in the lab. It is also fought in doctors’ surgeries, in schools, in public-health systems and in government departments. The dispatches from these battlefields are much less encouraging.

从纯技术角度看，我们有理由认为迟早有一天我们会把癌症变成慢性病或者可治愈疾病。但是，与癌症的战争不只发生在实验室。它还发生在医生的手术、学校、公共卫生系统和政府机构中。从其它战场上传来的消息，并不那么乐观。Cell-side research

细胞级别上的研究

First, the good news. Caught early, many cancers are now highly treatable. Three out of four British men who received a prostate-cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s did not live for another ten years; today four out of five do. Other cancers, such as those of the lung, pancreas and brain, are harder to find and treat. But as our Technology Quarterly in this issue shows, progress is being made. Techniques to enable early diagnosis include a device designed to detect cancer on the breath; blood tests can track fragments of DNA shed from tumours. Genome sequencing makes it ever easier to identify new drug targets，

先说好消息。只要早发现，很多癌症可以被治疗。在上世纪七十年代的英国，

四分之三的被确诊的前列腺癌的人没有活过十年，而今五分之四的人能。其它

癌症，如肺癌，胰腺癌和脑癌，不好发现，难以治疗。但我们的技术季刊显示

在这些方面科技仍然有进步，如基于呼吸的对癌症的早查的设备的开发，从血

液中发现肿瘤DNA碎片的技术。基因组的测序让新药物的靶向定位变得更加

容易。