國家地理:為什么病毒讓我們措手不及(3)

The late Edwin Kilbourne might have had something to say about that. A leading influenza vaccine researcher, Kilbourne was gaunt and goateed; in my book I described him as a cross between Pete Seeger and Jonas Salk. At a conference in the mid-1980s, Kilbourne invented a scenario about a fictitious nightmare virus with qualities that would make it the most contagious, most lethal, and most difficult to control. He called it "maximally malignant (monster) virus," or MMMV. As Kilbourne described it, among MMMV's other nefarious attributes, it would be transmitted through the air like influenza, would be environmentally stable like polio, and would insert its own genes directly into the host's nucleus like HIV.

對此，埃德溫·基爾波恩如果還在世，可能會(huì)有話要說。他是首屈一指的流感疫苗研究者，瘦骨嶙峋、蓄著山羊胡；在20世紀(jì)80年代中期的一次研討會(huì)上，基爾波恩在他假想的情況中虛構(gòu)出了一種惡夢般的病毒，這種病毒的特性讓它具有最強(qiáng)傳染力、最致命、也最難以控制。他稱之為最大惡性（怪物）病毒（MMMV）?；鶢柌ǘ髅枋?，MMMV其他的邪惡特質(zhì)還包括它會(huì)像流感一樣藉由空氣傳播，還會(huì)像HIV病毒那樣把本身的基因直接嵌入宿主細(xì)胞核里。

The novel coronavirus isn't Kilbourne's ghoulish MMMV, but it does have a lot of its scariest properties. It's transmitted through the air, replicates in the lower respiratory tract, and is thought to last for days on countertops. In addition, people can have mild or asymptomatic cases, meaning that even though they are infectious, they often feel healthy enough to walk around, go to work, and cough on us. In that way it's even worse than influenza and even harder to contain.

COVID-19并不是基爾波恩所描述的恐怖MMMV，但確實(shí)擁有它最可怕的許多特性。它能透過空氣傳播，在下呼吸道中自我復(fù)制，并被認(rèn)為可以在一般桌面上存活數(shù)日。除此之外，感染者可能癥狀輕微或無癥狀，這表示即使他們具有傳染力，也往往會(huì)覺得自己相當(dāng)健康、可以四處走動(dòng)、去上班，還會(huì)朝著其他人咳嗽。如此一來，它甚至比流感還可怕，并且更難防堵。

But just as Morse said he's never liked "Most Likely to Endanger Us" lists, Kilbourne told me 30 years ago that he'd conjured MMMV for illustrative rather than predictive purposes. "With viruses, in which only a few changes can make a huge difference in the way the microbes behave, trying to predict the paths of evolution and emergence can be a treacherous affair," he warned.

但正如莫爾斯說他從來不喜歡列“最有可能危害我們的病毒”這類列表一樣，基爾波恩也曾在30年前告訴我，他想象出MMMV為的是用于說明可能的危險(xiǎn)，而不是預(yù)測。他警告稱：“病毒的情況是這樣的，少數(shù)變異就能對微生物的行為產(chǎn)生巨大影響，因此試圖預(yù)測演化和出現(xiàn)途徑可能是件充滿陷阱的事。”