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  3. The award of the Nobel science prizes often brings blinking into the limelight people who have laboured unknown to the wider wor

The award of the Nobel science prizes often brings blinking into the limelight people who have laboured unknown to the wider wor

admin2009-06-24  56
问题     The award of the Nobel science prizes often brings blinking into the limelight people who have laboured unknown to the wider world. Seldom, though, is there such a compelling human story to go with the intellectual one as that of Mario Capecchi, one of the winners of the medicine prize. His father was an airman who was killed in North Africa during the Second World War. His mother was sent to Dachau concentration camp. He survived more than three years as a street kid in Italy before migrating to America after the war was over—and yet he ended up helping to develop one of the most important tools of modern biology, the knockout mouse.
    It is not quite a rags-to-riches story. In truth, his family was well connected in a bohemian sort of way, and his mother (the daughter of a painter and an archaeologist) was an American. But it does make great copy for reporters covering an event that has the true characteristics of celebrity. For, like many of those who populate the pages of celebrity magazines, the Nobel prizewinners are most famous for being famous. In most years, the prize-winning work itself makes dull copy.
    This year, however, the prize committees of the Karolinska Institute (Sweden’s main medical school) and the country’s Royal Academy of Science seem to have taken some lessons in public relations. Not only have they picked a researcher with an interesting back-story, but they have also cunningly disguised a deserved but possibly contentious award by bundling it in with something else. On top of that, one of the topics chosen for a prize has an obvious resonance with the public.
    The bundling was done in the medicine prize. Dr. Capecchi shares this with Oliver Smithies, another immigrant to America (he was born in Britain) and Sir Martin Evans, a Briton who stayed at home. Working independently, these three men provided the parts that, when put together, enable the elimination of one gene at a time from the genetic make-up of a mouse. That is of medical significance because it allows mouse "models" of human genetic diseases to be made—and most diseases have at least some genetic component.
    The physics prize, by contrast, has nothing but feel-good about it. It is for giant magnetoresistance—the basis of modern computer hard-drive memories. The phenomenon itself was discovered, independently, by Albert Fert, a Frenchman, and Peter Grunberg, a German, in 1988. Its significance is that a small magnetic field can induce a large change in the electrical conductivity of an appropriately designed material. The result has been that the amount of data computers can store has grown even faster than their ability to process it.
选项 A、was born in Italy.
B、was born into a poor family.
C、joined his family in America after the war.
D、had tough time during his childhood because of the war.
答案D
解析
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