The promise and perils of synthetic biology
peril n. 严重危险
The country's economy is now in grave peril.
现在,这个国家的经济陷入了严重危机。
synthetic biology 合成生物学
合成生物学的潜力和危机
To understand them well, look to the past
要更好地理解合成生物学，得回望过去
By The Economist
For the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a sequence of dna—a gene—was by copying a sequence it already had to hand. Sometimes the gene would be damaged or scrambled, the copying imperfect or undertaken repeatedly. From that raw material arose the glories of natural selection. But beneath it all, gene begat gene.
scramble v. 艰难地(或仓促地)完成
beget v. 引发；导致: Violence begets violence.
在过去40亿年左右的时间里，对于地球上的生命来说，产生DNA序列——基因——的唯一方式就是通过复制它已有的序列，传给后代。有时，基因会被破坏或扰乱，复制的过程可能不完美，或反复进行。就是从这些基本的物质造就了自然选择的辉煌。但在这一切之下，都只是基因生成基因。
That is no longer true. Now genes can be written from scratch and edited repeatedly, like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things which this provides represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life.
from scratch从零开始; 从头开始
事实不再如此了。现在，基因可以像文字处理器里的文本一样，从头开始编写，并重复编辑。这种技术所提供的改变生物基因结构的能力，代表人类与地球生命互动的方式发生了根本性的变化。
It permits the manufacture of all manner of things which used to be hard, even impossible, to make: pharmaceuticals, fuels, fabrics, foods and fragrances can all be built molecule by molecule.
这种技术使得形形色色，过去很难生产，甚至不可能生产的东西成为可能，比如：药品，燃料，织物，食品和香料，可以被一个分子，一个分子地被建造出来。
What cells do and what they can become is engineerable, too. Immune cells can be told to follow doctors’ orders; stem cells better coaxed to turn into new tissues; fertilised eggs programmed to grow into creatures quite unlike their parents.
all manner of=all kinds of
pharmaceuticals 制药业
molecule n. 分子
细胞的一举一动，以及它们的潜在变化也都可以被设计。人们可以让免疫细胞听从医生的指令；引诱干细胞变成新的组织；预设好的受精卵长成和它们的父母一点都不一样的生物。
The earliest stages of such “synthetic biology” are already changing many industrial processes, transforming medicine and beginning to reach into the consumer world (see Technology Quarterly).
这种“合成生物”的最初阶段，已经在改变许多工业加工，改变着医学，并开始进入消费者的世界（参见Technology Quarterly）
Progress may be slow, but with the help of new tools and a big dollop of machine learning, biological manufacturing could eventually yield truly cornucopian technologies. Buildings may be grown from synthetic wood or coral. Mammoths produced from engineered elephant cells may yet stride across Siberia.
dollop n. 少量；些许；一点儿
cornucopian adj. 丰富的,丰饶的
Mammoth n. 长毛象；猛犸象
进展可能是缓慢的，但借助新工具和大量机器学习，生物制造最终可以产生真正 “用之不竭”的技术。 建筑材料可能产自合成木材或珊瑚。长毛象可能产于改变了基因的大象细胞，大步流星地穿过西伯利亚。
The scale of the potential changes seems hard to imagine. But look back through history, and humanity’s relations with the living world have seen three great transformations: the exploitation of fossil fuels, the globalisation of the world’s ecosystems after the European conquest of the Americas, and the domestication of crops and animals at the dawn of agriculture. All brought prosperity and progress, but with damaging side-effects. Synthetic biology promises similar transformation. To harness the promise and minimise the peril, it pays to learn the lessons of the past.
fossil fuel 矿物燃料(如煤或石油)
at the dawn of ......初始阶段
合成生物学带来的潜在的变化规模似乎难以想象。 但回顾历史，人类与生物世界的关系已经发生了三大转变：化石燃料的开采，欧洲征服美洲后世界生态系统的全球化，以及农业初期作物和动物的驯化。 所有这些都带来了繁荣和进步，但同时带来了破坏性的副作用。 合成生物学同样会带来相似的转变。 为了尽量发挥合成生物的可能性，将其危害降到最低，我们从过去吸取经验教育是值得的。
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