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Apr 9th 2016 | From the print editionThe Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives. By Helen Pearson. Allen Lane; 399 pages; ￡20. To be published in America by Soft Skull Press in May; $17.95.人生项目：平凡生活中的不凡故事。作者Helen Pearson。Allen Lane出版社；399页；售价20欧元；美国代理商Soft Skull Press 预计3月上市；17.98美元UNKNOWN to the vast majority of the population, a small group of British 70-year-olds has shaped the health and well-being of everyone in Britain for their whole lives. They are not policymakers or professors, but a random nationwide sample linked only by the week of their birth in 1946. Recruited barely out of the womb, they have been followed by researchers and an army of data-gatherers asking about their lives and behaviours. These have yielded profound insights into the causes of health and illness in Britain from the cradle to the grave. 为绝大多数人所不知道的是，一小群70岁的英国人已经用自己的生活塑造了所有英吉利人的健康与幸福。他们不是政策制定者或者专业人士，他们只是由于出生于1946年的某一周而成为了全国范围内随机抽中的样本。招募来的他们刚从母体降生，一群调查员和数据收集员就跟进询问他们生活和行为方面的事情。从摇篮到坟墓，他们已经提出了很多关于英吉利生老病死问题的真知灼见。
Recruitn.(c)新成员
Vt. 招募，聘用 Womb n.(c) 摇篮，发源地 barely out of 几乎看不出 from the cradle to the grave. 从摇篮到坟墓 profound insight 真知灼见
Helen Pearson, a geneticist and journalist, has written “The Life Project”, a fascinating book charting the 1946 cohort and four that followed. They are a peculiarly British undertaking, and despite perhaps not being championed enough in the country—their funding has frequently been in peril—within epidemiological fields they are looked on with envy and admiration by the rest of the world.Helen Pearson是一位基因学家和记者，出版了<人生项目>>一书，这本充满吸引力的书描绘了1946年及随后4年的出生队列。他们是由英吉利人单独研究的序列，尽管这个研究在国家里算不上第一——他们的资金常常不够用——但是在流行病毒领域他们还是为世界其他国家所嫉妒和羡慕的。
peculiarly adv. 异常地，尤其地，单独地
The five cohorts, begun in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1991 and 2000, total about 70,000 Britons, providing data ranging from punch-cards in the earliest cases to fully sequenced genomes today. The 1946 cohort revealed that working-class women suffered high rates of stillbirth due to lack of medical care during pregnancy; when the National Health Service was launched shortly after in 1948, those findings led to prenatal care being provided free. Findings from the 1958 cohort were the first to reveal the impact of smoking during pregnancy on the risk of stillbirth, which led to a change in advice to pregnant women. Free adult-education courses launched in the early 2000s were offered as a result of cohort studies revealing that around one in five adults in the early 1990s struggled with reading, and even more, around one in three, with basic mathematics.分别在1946，1958，1970和2000年成立的五个队列，总共大约七万英国人，提供了从早期的穿孔卡片到到如今完整的基因组测序的数据。1946年队列显示，由于怀孕期间缺乏医疗护理，工薪阶层的妇女遭受死胎率较高；1948年，在英国国名医疗保障制度颁布不久之后，这些发现使孕妇们得到了免费的产前护理。1948年的军团的发现首先揭露了在怀孕期间吸烟导致的死产的影响，这改变了（医生）对孕妇的建议。在21世纪初，英国推出了免费成人教育课程，其原因是列队研究显示在二十世纪九十年代的时候，大约五分之一有阅读障碍，更可怕的是，三分之一的人连基本的数学都不会。But the sad message that has emerged from the studies, from the birth of the 1946 cohort to the present day, is that being born poor remains a huge source of risk to health and well-being. While it is possible to triumph over adversity (reading for pleasure as a child, for example, predicts better outcomes later in life, whatever the socioeconomic status of your parents) the odds are stacked against some people from before they are even born. For all the subjects’ influence on public policy, this has hardly changed in the half-century since the first published study from the 1946 group.但从1946列队出生到现在的研究中得出的不幸消息是：贫穷的出生大大地威胁着人的健康幸福。尽管战胜由在他们出生前一代代人堆积起来的逆境是可能的（例如在孩童时候就培养阅读的兴趣，无论你的父母社会地位如何，都对未来生活有一个更好的憧憬，就所有研究对象的影响力而言，自从1946年以来公开研究的组，在长达半个世纪的时间内对公共政策几乎没什么改变。Despite this bad news (and Ms Pearson’s passion about it) the book is often a delight, interspersed with vignettes about individual members of the different cohorts, as well as the researchers. (One research-team leader kept falling asleep during the making of a video about the project, after two days without sleep. Another liked to joke of his own birth “at an early age”, head “the wrong way round”.)除了这个坏消息（和皮尔逊女士对此消息的热忱），这本书点缀着关于不同人群的个人团体和研究者的简介，通常让人感觉愉悦（一个研究团队的队长两天未眠之后，在制作关于这个项目视频的过程之中一直在睡觉。另一个队长喜欢自嘲自己出生“太早”，一直朝着“错误的方向打转”）。It’s hard to believe something as simple as observing a group of babies follow their path through the world can provide such a huge amount of knowledge about the human condition. “The Life Project” makes the case for why they should be a jewel in the crown of British science.译心期待您的翻译，您可以将翻译留言到文章底部，第二天会有答案解析哦。“生命工程”解释了为什么他们在英国科学王冕之中应被视为珍宝的原因。
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