2018年度科学突破公布

From at least the time of Hippocrates, biologists have been transfixed by the mystery of how a single cell develops into an adult animal with multiple organs and billions of cells. 

至少从希波克拉底时代起，生物学家就被一个细胞如何发育成拥有多个器官和数十亿细胞的成年动物这一谜团所迷惑。

The ancient Greek physician hypothesized that moisture from a mother’s breath helps shape a growing infant, but now we know it is DNA that ultimately orchestrates the processes by which cells multiply and specialize. 

这位古希腊医生曾假设，母亲的乳汁有助于婴儿的成长，但现在我们知道，最终是DNA协调了细胞增殖和分化的过程。

Now, just as a music score indicates when strings, brass, percussion, and woodwinds chime in to create a symphony, a combination of technologies is revealing when genes in individual cells switch on, cueing the cells to play their specialized parts. 

现在，正如乐谱显示出弦乐、铜管乐器、打击乐和木管乐器何时合奏出交响乐一样，多技术的结合揭示了单个细胞中的基因何时开启，提示细胞发挥它们的专门功能。

The result is the ability to track development of organisms and organs in stunning detail, cell by cell and through time. 

结果造就了这种能够以惊人的精细的方式，随时间，逐个细胞地追踪组织和器官发育的能力。

Science is recognizing that combination of technologies, and its potential for spurring advances in basic research and medicine, as the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year.

《科学》杂志非常认可这种多技术联合的技术以及它将来为基础研究和医学带来新发现的潜力，将其评选为2018年度科学突破。

Driving those advances are techniques for isolating thousands of intact cells from living organisms, efficiently sequencing expressed genetic material in each cell, and using computers, or labeling the cells, to reconstruct their relationships in space and time. 

推动这些进步的技术有从活的生物体中分离出数千个完整的细胞，对每个细胞中表达的遗传物质进行有效测序，以及使用计算机或对细胞进行标记，以重建它们在空间和时间上的关系。

That technical trifecta “will transform the next decade of research,” says Nikolaus Rajewsky, a systems biologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. 

柏林马克斯·德尔布吕克分子医学中心的系统生物学家尼古拉斯. 拉杰斯基说，这种技术上的三步走“将改变未来十年的研究”。

This year alone, papers detailed how a flatworm, a fish, a frog, and other organisms begin to make organs and appendages. 

仅在今年，论文就详细描述了扁虫、鱼、青蛙和其他生物是如何开始制造器官各种附件的。

And groups around the world are applying the techniques to study how human cells mature over a lifetime, how tissues regenerate, and how cells change in diseases.

世界各地的研究小组正在应用这些技术来研究人类细胞在一生中是如何成熟的，组织是如何再生的，以及细胞在疾病中是如何变化的。

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