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All eyes on the Nobel Prizes for science next week
所有的目光都集中在下周的诺贝尔科学奖上
The coronavirus pandemic has focused attention on the role of science in society like never before — and the pace of scientific discovery has been blistering. The greatest minds in physics, chemistry and medicine will be honored when the Nobel Prizes, the pinnacle of scientific achievement, are announced next week. The winners (who aren't told beforehand) find themselves catapulted into instant celebrity, their discoveries thrust from academic obscurity, Googled and discussed.
新冠流行使人们前所未有地关注科学在社会中的作用——而科学发现的速度也是惊人的。下周公布的诺贝尔奖是科学成就的顶峰，物理学、化学和医学领域最伟大的人物将受到表彰。获奖者（事先未被告知）发现自己瞬间成了名人，他们的发现从学术界的默默无闻中被推到了谷歌上，并被讨论。
While predicting who will win a Nobel Prize is famously difficult — the short list is secret, as are the nominators, and documents revealing the juicy details are sealed from public view for 50 years, here are some Nobel-worthy candidates and the life-changing discoveries they have made. The Lasker Awards and Breakthrough Prizes (the latter founded by founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg), often seen as precursors to a Nobel Prize, were given in 2021 to the scientists whose work was crucial for the development of Covid-19 vaccines.
虽然预测谁将获得诺贝尔奖是出了名的困难——入围名单是秘密的，提名者也是秘密的，而且透露出细节的文件会被封存50年，不让公众看到，但这里有一些值得得诺贝尔奖的候选人和他们所做的改变人类生活的发现。拉斯克奖和突破奖（后者由谢尔盖·布林、普莉希拉·陈和马克·扎克伯格创立），通常被视为诺贝尔奖的前奏，在2021年被授予其工作对开发Covid-19疫苗至关重要的科学家。
The Lasker went to Katalin Karikó, a senior vice president at BioNTech based in Germany, and Drew Weissman, a professor in vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania, for developing a method of using synthetic messenger RNA to fight disease that involves changing the way the body produces virus-fighting material. While their paper received little attention when their research was first published in 2005, it is now the basis of two widely used Covid-19 vaccines.
拉斯克奖颁给了位于德国的BioNTech公司的高级副总裁Katalin Karikó和宾夕法尼亚大学的疫苗研究教授Drew Weissman，因为他们开发了一种使用合成信使RNA对抗疾病的方法，该方法涉及改变人体产生病毒对抗物质的方式。虽然他们的论文在2005年首次发表时很少受到关注，但现在它已成为两种广泛使用的Covid-19疫苗的基础。
