In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was
very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partlybecause, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare inthe 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time,the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of
Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to workafter she got married, after she had kids, and even after she gotdivorced and was a single parent, she continued her medicalwork.
在20世纪50年代的牛津，有- -位很优秀,不寻常的医生，她叫Alice Stewart。Alice很不寻常，因为她是个女的医生，这对于在20世纪50年代很罕见了。她非常厉害，是当时最年轻的"皇家医师学院"最年轻的学员之一-。她很不寻常还因为在她结婚生子后，她还继续工作，甚至在她离婚成为单亲妈妈之后，她继续着她的医学工作。
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a newscience, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patternsin disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to makeher mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem andsolve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising
incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated withpoverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children whowere dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. So,what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?
她很不寻常还因为她对一一门]新的科学感兴趣，当时新出现的流行病学，对于疾病规律的研究。但跟每个科学家--样，她知道为了让她出众，她需要寻找到难题，然后解决它。Alice当时选择的难题是童年期癌症发生率的上升。大多数疾病都是跟贫穷有关的，不过在童年期癌症的问题上，这些垂死的孩子似乎大多数都从富裕家庭中而来。所以她想知道，怎样才能解释这样一种特殊现象呢?
Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the
end, she got just 1 ,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial
prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot at
collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for. This
really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked
everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled
sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish
and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? What
time of life had they started school?
当时,Alice很难为她的研究筹备到资金。最后，她只从Lady Tata纪念奖得到了造
1000英镑。这意味着她知道她对于收集数据只有--次机会。她完全不知道应
当寻找什么。这对于需要大量数据的研究来说是一一个沉重打击，因此她问了
所有她能想到的东西。这些孩子有没有吃煮沸的甜食?他们有没有喝花里胡
哨的饮料?他们是不是吃油炸鱼和薯片了?他们是不是使用过户内或者户外的
铅制品?他们什么时候开始上学的?
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come
back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical
clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate
of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who
had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the
face of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom held that
everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. It flew in the faceof conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool| n.热情; 热心new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it
flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as
people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.
而当她的抄写的调查问卷回来的时候，只有一一个明显的数据显示了出来，这是
大多数科学家都无法想象的。三分之二的这些由于癌症而死的孩子，他们的
母亲在怀孕的时候都做过X光检查。这个发现对于传统观念是一大冲击。 传
统观念认为任何事情在-种程度上都是安全的,像-一个门槛。 这对于这一-观念
是很大的冲击，尤其是对于当时新科技,X光机器的巨大热情。而且对于医生
对自己的看法也是巨大的冲击，因为他们都是帮助病人的，而不是害他们
的。
Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary
findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was preliminarytalk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try
to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before
they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried. It was fully
25 years before the British and medical -- British and American
medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying
pregnant women. The data was out there, it was open, it was
freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was
dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change.
不过呢，Alice Stewart还是很快的将她最初的发现在1956年的The Lancet杂志
中发表了。人们都很兴奋，有人还提到诺贝尔奖的可能，Alice也很着急，她
想去学习她能找到所有的儿童癌症的资料，在他们消失之前。事实上，她并
不需要那么急。过了25年之后，英国的医学建树--英国和美国医学建树，也
禁止了给怀孕女人的X光测验。数据都是开放的，很容易获得，但是没人想
知道这一一点。每周都有一一个小孩在垂死挣扎，但就跟啥都没发生一样。开
放性无法带来改变。
So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her
hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a
fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician
named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything
that Alice wasn't. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and
George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic
with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to
people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working
relationship. He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong."
25年来AliceStewart在做很大的斗争。所以说，她怎么知道她当时是对的?她
有一一个极佳的思考模型。她当时与- -位名叫George Kneale的统计学家合
作，而George刚好与Alice正互补。Alice非 常外向和社交化，而George是个
隐居者。Alice很热情，与她的病人有很多互动，而George相比之下更喜欢数
字，而不是人。不过他提到过他们工作关系的极大好处，他说"我的工作就是
证明Stewart博士是错的。"
