万物简史 第536期:丰富多彩的生命(32)

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who became famous for his studies of human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. 在20世纪40-50年代，艾尔弗雷德·C·金西以研究人类的性活动出了名。

But before his mind became filled with sex, so to speak, Kinsey was an entomologist, and a dogged one at that. 可以说，在脑子里充满性问题之前，金西是一位昆虫学家，而且是一位执著昆虫学家。

In one expedition lasting² two years, he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection of 300,000 wasps³. 在一次历时两年的探险活动中，他跋涉了4000公里，采集了30万件黄蜂标本。

How many stings he collected along the way is not, alas⁴, recorded. 在此过程中他被螫过多少次，哎呀，没有记录下来。

Something that had been puzzling me was the question of how you assured a chain of succession in these arcane⁵ fields. 令我感到费解的是，在这种冷门的领域，你怎么能确保有接班人。

Clearly there cannot be many institutions in the world that require or are prepared to support specialists in barnacles or Pacific snails⁶. 显而易见，需要或愿意支持藤壶专家或太平洋蜗牛专家的机构并不多。

As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, 我们在伦敦自然史博物馆分手的时候，

I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place. 我问理查德·福泰，当一个人离去的时候，科学界是怎么确保有人来接他的班的。

He chuckled⁷ rather heartily⁸ at my naivete. 听了我幼稚的问题以后他纵情地格格一笑：

"I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. “恐怕不像是有替补队员坐在板凳儿上等着被叫上场的情况。

When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while." 要是有一名专家退休或不幸去世，那个领域的事情有可能中断，有时候要中断很长时间。”

And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new? “我想，正是由于这个原因，要是有人花了42年时间来研究一种植物，即使没有出什么很新的成果，你们也会觉得很宝贵，对吗？”

Precisely⁹, he said, "precisely." And he really seemed to mean it. “一点儿不错，”他说，“一点儿不错。”他说的确实好像是真话。

 

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