华盛顿邮报 什么是病毒猎人？(3)（在线收听）

    And is this also the perspective of, like, governments who are backing this sort of work?

    这也是支持这类工作的政府的观点吗?

    Well, United States government has backed this work.

    嗯，美国政府支持这项工作。

    The stated objective and hope of, let's say the United States Agency for International Development, for instance, is that we'll get out there, we'll be very proactive, and we will predict what is gonna happen and we will prevent a pandemic from occurring.

    以美国国际开发署为例，该机构宣称的目标与希望是，我们要走出去，我们要主动出击，我们要预测未来之事，我们要阻止疫情爆发。

    I wonder why you went on this journey to understand more about virus hunting, and was your investigation and the prompt for going down this road for you, did it have to do with or was it connected to the COVID-19 pandemic?

    我想知道你为什么走上了解病毒搜寻知识的这条路？是你的调查促使你走上这条路的吗？这与新冠肺炎疫情是否有关系？

    It certainly is connected because the pandemic is the demonstration of the danger of a pathogen on the loose, circling and racing around the world that tells us we need to learn lessons here and what aspects of policy can we tighten up?

    这当然有联系，因为这场疫情展示了病原体在世界各地肆虐、一轮轮快速传播的危险，这告诉我们，我们需要从中吸取教训，了解我们可以在哪些方面收紧政策。

    I was really shocked to hear the concerns of senior figures in the US scientific community -- I'm talking about people with deep governmental experience themselves -- tell me about their concerns with various forms of risky research, and so my colleague Joby Warrick and I got into this looking broadly at risky research.

    当听到美国科学界资深人士的担忧时，我深感震惊——我采访的是有着丰富政府工作经验的人——他们向我透露他们对各种形式的风险研究的担忧，因此，我和我的同事乔比·沃里克开始广泛关注风险研究。

    But virus hunting struck us as the most dangerous of all, this narrow niche of virus hunting where people are going out into remote areas and collecting specimens of genetic material from animals, principally bats, in search of viruses that are circulating only among animals.

    但我们认为搜寻病毒是最危险的风险研究，搜寻病毒是一种细分活动，人们前往偏远地区，从动物身上采集遗传物质样本，主要是蝙蝠身上，寻找只在动物间传播的病毒。

    And this, you discovered, is happening all over the world.

    你发现全世界都在开展这样的研究。

    The concerns that these scientists had, was it just about United States, or was it about what is happening around the world?

    这些科学家所担心的，仅仅是关于美国正在发生之事，还是关于世界各地的?

    Well, the most productive of these activities are in very subtropical areas, I mean, Southeast Asia, in China, it goes on in Africa, as well.

    嗯，这些活动中最有成效的是亚热带地区，比如，东南亚、中国、还有非洲。

    The course of the research and the interviews kept leading to new information and it was astonishing to me to learn that senior officials in the Biden White House had privately sought, because of their great concern over these ongoing US-funded virus hunting activities,研究和采访过程不断带来新信息，令我惊讶的是，拜登政府的高级官员私下寻求暂停，因为他们对美国资助的正在开展的病毒搜寻活动非常担忧，they had privately sought to halt a couple of projects that the United States Agency for International Development has just launched in the last couple of years and is still funding.

    他们曾私下试图停止美国国际开发署在过去几年刚刚启动且仍在资助的几个项目。

    And these two USAID programs have been carried out overseas with the work that has been ongoing in Southeast Asia in particular.

    这两个美国国际开发署的项目已在海外开展，特别是在东南亚正在开展的工作。