万物简史 第418期:生命的起源(12)

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　　to such an extent that you can take a fragment of human genetic instruction,  到了最后，你甚至可以学上一点人类遗传的知识，

　　patch it into a faulty yeast² cell, and the yeast cell will put it to work as if it were its own. 拼凑个错误百出的酵母细胞，真酵母细胞还会让它投入工作，仿佛它是自己的同类。

　　In a very real sense, it is its own. 在非常真实的意义上，它确实是它的同类。

　　The dawn of life—or something very like it, 生命的黎明——或者说是很像生命的东西，

　　sits on a shelf in the office of a friendly isotope³ geochemist named Victoria Bennett in the Earth Sciences building of the Australian National University in Canberra. 摆在一位友好的同位素地球化学家办公室的书架上。她的名字叫维多利亚·贝内特。她的办公室位于堪培拉澳大利亚国立大学的地球科学系大楼。

　　An American, Ms. Bennett came to the ANU from California on a two-year contract in 1989 and has been there ever since. 贝内特女士是美国人，根据一个为斯两年的合同于1989年从加利福尼亚来到澳大利亚国立大学，此后一直留在那里。

　　When I visited her, in late 2001, she handed me a modestly hefty hunk of rock composed of thin alternating stripes of white quartz⁴ and a gray-green material called clinopyroxene. 2001年底我去拜访她的时候，她递给我一块不起眼的又重又大的石头。它由带细条纹的白色石英和一种灰绿色的名叫斜辉石的材料组成。

　　The rock came from Akilia Island in Greenland, where unusually ancient rocks were found in 1997. 石头来自格陵兰的阿基利亚岛。1997年，那个岛上发现了极其古老的岩石。

　　The rocks are 3.85 billion years old and represent the oldest marine⁵ sediments⁶ ever found. 那些岩石的年代已达38.5亿年之久，代表了迄今为止发现过的最古老的海洋沉积物。

　　We can't be certain that what you are holding once contained living organisms because you'd have to pulverize⁷ it to find out, Bennett told me. “我们没有把握，你手里拿着的玩意儿里边去是不是存在微生物。你非得将它敲碎了才能搞明白。”贝内特对我说，

　　"But it comes from the same deposit where the oldest life was excavated⁸, so it probably had life in it" “但是，它来自过去掘过最古老的生命的同一矿床，因此它里面很可能有过生命。”

　　Nor would you find actual fossilized microbes, however carefully you searched. 无论你怎么仔细搜寻，你也找不到真正的微生物化石。

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