鼠狐猴可能比小白鼠更适合“当小白鼠”(上)

Science and Technology

科技版块

Animal Research

动物研究

New model army

新模型大军

Might lemurs be better than mice when it comes to medical research

在医学研究方面，狐猴可能比小白鼠更好

Tree 2B, ranomafana, is not an address recognised by Madagascar's postal service.

拉努马法纳的Tree 2B，是一个不被马达加斯加邮政部门承认的地址。

It is, though, someone's home.

不过，这是某个人的家。

The someone in question is a mouse lemur called Judah, the 349th participant to be enrolled into a project run by Mark Krasnow, a biochemist at Stanford University, in California.

是一只叫做犹大的鼠狐猴，是加州斯坦福大学生物化学家马克·克拉斯诺主持的一个项目的第349名参与者。

Judah's involuntary membership of the project began when he found himself trapped inside a metal box.

当犹大发现自己被困在一个金属盒子里时，他开始了对该项目的非自愿加入。

He had been lured there by a bait of banana put there by Dr Krasnow's collaborators, Haja Ravelonjanahary and Mahery Razafindrakoto of the ValBio research centre on the edge of Ranomafana National Park, 260km south of Antananarivo.

他是被克拉斯诺博士的合作者哈贾·拉维隆贾纳哈里和马赫里·拉扎芬德拉科托放在那里的香蕉诱饵引诱过去的。他们是瓦尔比奥研究中心的成员，该研究中心位于塔那利佛以南260公里的拉诺马法纳国家公园边缘。

Judah's captivity was temporary, for he was released back into his home at 2b about six hours later.

犹大被囚禁是暂时的，因为大约六个小时后，他就会被释放回自己的家——Tree 2B。

But in the interim he was subjected to various indignities.

但在此期间，他受到了各种各样的“侮辱”。

He had his testes measured, a blood sample taken and he was made to do exercises to see how strong he was.

检测了睾丸，抽取了血样，并让他做运动，看看他有多强壮。

He also had a tiny transponder inserted under his skin so that he could be identified next time he was caught.

还在他皮肤下植入了一个微型应答器，这样下次被抓到时就可以辨认出他的身份。

Judah, and his 348 predecessors similarly trapped and released by biologists at ValBio, are among the first recruits to what is, on the face of it, an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking.

从表面上看，Judah和他的348位前辈都是这项雄心勃勃的事业的首批成员。

For Dr Krasnow's plan is to add mouse lemurs to the short and rather random list of so-called model organisms.

克拉斯诺博士的计划是将鼠狐猴添加到所谓模式生物的简短而随机的名单中。

These are species which, for various reasons, biologists know a lot about.

由于各种原因，生物学家对这些物种了解甚多。

And, since knowledge breeds knowledge, they tend to be the ones about which further knowledge accumulates.

而且，因为知识孕育知识，所以往往会积累更多的知识。

Model organisms assist all sorts of biological research, but a lot of it is medical.

“模型生物”有助于各种生物学研究，其中很多都是医学研究。

And here there is a problem.

这里有一个问题。

Ideally, medical research would be done on species that resemble Homo sapiens.

理想情况下，医学研究应该在类似智人的物种上进行。

But working on human beings' closest relatives—apes and monkeys—is increasingly hard to do.

但是，研究人类的近亲——猿和猴子，越来越难做到。

First, such large animals are expensive to keep.

首先，这样的大型动物饲养成本很高。

Second, that expense means they are often unavailable in the numbers needed for statistically significant work.

其次，费用高昂意味着他们往往无法获得统计意义重大的工作所需的数据。

Third, public opinion, at least in the West, is swinging against their use.

第三，公众舆论，至少在西方，正在反对它们的使用。

Mice, one common alternative to primates, are cheap, abundant and less prone to stir consciences.

老鼠是灵长类动物的一种常见替代品，价格低廉，数量众多，不太容易引起人们良知上的不安。

But they can only take you so far.

但他们也只能帮你这么多了。

Though mammals, they are not close relatives of people.

虽然是哺乳动物，但它们并不是人类的近亲。

Sometimes that lack of relatedness can be finessed by inserting human genes that are relevant to the matter under investigation.

有时，通过插入与被调查物质相关的人类基因，可以巧妙地解决这种缺乏关联性的问题。

But even then, the underlying platform is still a rodent, not a primate.

但即便如此，优先选择仍然是啮齿类动物，而不是灵长类动物。

By contrast, a mouse lemur, though it looks and behaves a bit like a mouse, and is not much bigger, is indeed a primate, and so is much more similar to a human being than a rodent is.

相比之下，尽管鼠狐猴的外表和行为有点像老鼠，个头也不大，但它确实是灵长类动物，因此比啮齿类动物更像人类。

Mice, moreover, have short lives, and thus high turnover.

此外，老鼠寿命短，因此流动率高。

But mouse lemurs can live for 14 years in captivity and maybe ten in the wild.

但是鼠狐猴在圈养环境中可以存活14年，在野外也可以活10年。

That is a nice compromise between a period brief enough to arrive at conclusions that are useful (and will result in career-enhancing research papers), and long enough to be more similar to a human being's life-history.

这是一个很好的折衷方案，既可以在足够短的时间内得出有用的结论（并将产生促进职业发展的研究论文），又可以在足够长的时间内更接近人类的生活史。