肉汤研究:意大利蔬菜通心粉可能是对抗疟疾的秘密武器

肉汤研究:意大利蔬菜通心粉可能是对抗疟疾的秘密武器

Bring in some soup.

拿些汤来。

The unusual homework assignment at London's Eden Primary School was for a science week project cooked up by parent Jake Baum. He's a professor of cell biology and infectious diseases at Imperial College London, and his lab's job is to find new ways to combat malaria, which kills half a million children each year.

伦敦伊甸小学这次不同寻常的家庭作业是为一个由家长杰克·鲍姆策划的科学周项目准备的。他是伦敦帝国理工学院细胞生物学和传染病学的教授，他的实验室的工作是寻找抗击疟疾的新方法。疟疾每年导致50万儿童死亡。

Baum figured he could teach young students about the process of medical research through something both tasty and understandable: the go-to soup recipes their families use when someone gets sick.

鲍姆认为，他可以通过一些既有趣又通俗易懂的方式，向年轻的学生传授医学研究的过程:他们的家人在有人生病时使用的汤配方。

"What makes a good medicine versus hocus-pocus?" explains Baum, who regularly preps his own favorite home remedy, what he calls "Jewish grandmother's chicken soup."

鲍姆解释道:“是什么让一剂好药与骗人的鬼把戏相对抗?”他经常准备自己最喜欢的家常药，他称之为“犹太祖母的鸡汤”。

"It was not the plan to discover anything," he adds.

他补充道:“我们的计划不是去发现任何东西。”

Sixty students transported their soup submissions to school in 15 milliliter plastic tubes – that's about 1 tablespoon. The soup was frozen, thawed (standard practice for samples) and then (much to the children's delight) centrifuged – spun in a machine to separate different substances.

60名学生用15毫升的塑料管——大约1汤匙——将他们提交的汤送到学校。汤被冷冻、解冻(样品的标准做法)，然后(让孩子们非常高兴的是)在机器中离心，以分离不同的物质。

At the next step, filtration, four samples were determined to be too dense or oily to test. Although they were likely delicious, they didn't make it to the lab stage, where the remaining 56 samples were tested in two ways against the P. falciparum parasite — the species responsible for 99 percent of malaria deaths.

在下一步的过滤中，四个样品被确定为密度太大或太油而无法检测。尽管它们看起来很美味，但它们并没有进入实验室阶段。在实验室阶段，科学家们用两种方法对剩余的56份样本进行了抗恶性疟原虫的测试。恶性疟原虫导致99%的疟疾死亡。

First, researchers checked what effect the soups had on asexual growth during the disease-causing stage. Or, to put it in primary school terms, they were looking through the microscope for the color green.

首先，研究人员检查了在致病阶段，汤对无性繁殖的影响。或者，用小学的话来说，他们通过显微镜寻找绿色。

"More green means [the parasites are] happy. With an inhibitor like a drug, it's less green," Baum says. They followed up by checking on male parasite sexual development, which is responsible for disease transmission. For that, they recorded the movement of the parasites because, as Baum notes, "sperm wiggle."

“更多的绿色意味着(寄生虫)很高兴。有了像药物一样的抑制剂，它就不那么绿了，”鲍姆说。他们随后检查了负责疾病传播的雄性寄生虫的性发育。为此，他们记录了这些寄生虫的运动，正如鲍姆指出的那样，这是因为“精子会摆动”。

To Baum's surprise, with five of the soups, the color green was much dimmer — five of them were able to suppress growth by over 50 percent (and two of these even did about as well as a leading antimalarial, dihydroartemisinin).

令鲍姆吃惊的是，五种汤的绿色调要暗淡得多——其中五种能够抑制50%以上的生长(其中两种甚至与一种主要的抗疟药双氢青蒿素的效果差不多)。

"We just said, 'Wow, what do we do with this?'" Baum says.

“我们只是说，‘哇，我们该怎么做?”鲍姆说。

The answer turned out to be another teachable moment for the students, ages 4 to 11, who participated in the study. Although the results were collected within a few months, it took two years for the work to get published.

对于参与这项研究的4至11岁的学生来说，答案是另一个可以教的时刻。虽然研究结果是在几个月内收集到的，但花了两年时间才得以发表。

Another Eden Primary parent, pediatric nephrologist Stephen Marks, helped pitch the study to journals and championed the idea that the children of the school should be listed as authors — which they were when the study was finally released in November in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

伊登小学的另一位家长、儿科肾病学家斯蒂芬•马克斯(Stephen Marks)帮助将这项研究推广到期刊上，并支持学校的孩子应该被列为作者——去年11月，这项研究终于在《儿童疾病档案》上发表。

"Every kid can say they've had their first scientific paper," says Baum,.

“每个孩子都可以说他们有了第一篇科学论文，”鲍姆说。