Often, Christian missionaries were among the first to make inroads into new lands. Inspired by the belief that they must convert as many Indigenous people to Christianity as possible, they imported both religious and cultural customs and a paternalistic attitude toward the colonies’ Native inhabitants.

通常，基督教传教士是最先进入新领地的人之一。他们坚信必须使尽可能多的土著人民皈依基督教，因此他们引进了宗教和文化习俗，并对殖民地的土著居民采取了家长式的态度。

Vaccines, Past and Present

疫苗的过去和现在

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This is a nice overview in Cell on vaccine history and new areas that are being explored. For sheer public health benefit, once you establish a clean water supply it's very hard to beat effective vaccines. We have wiped out smallpox as a disease, one that had been dreaded all the way back to prehistory. We are tantilizingly close to doing the same with polio. Other diseases that used to be a common feature of life (especially for children) are now rare and hardly thought of, because of broad vaccination programs starting in infancy. The amount of disability and outright premature death that has been avoided by these efforts over the last century is nearly beyond calculation: we live in a different and far better world because of them.

That's what makes anti-vaccine activism so frustrating. People have been suspicious of the whole idea of vaccination ever since the beginning, but the toxic skepticism really seems to have increased in recent years, reaching a crescendo during the coronavirus pandemic. The first outright anti-vaxxer I ever encountered was in about 1992, and I was baffled - I thought I was talking to someone through some kind of time portal that opened up to a hundred years before. The populations of the industrialized nations have forgotten (or never known at all) what all these diseases used to do, and imagine things like measles, pertussis, and rubella to be breezy little fevers that used to make kids miss a day or two of school before they were all good as new. (You really can find anti-vaccine folks talking exactly like that). And to avoid these wholesome natural rites of childhood, you want to let evil drug companies inject horrible concoctions into perfect little babies? Defiling them forever? Get those toxin-laden syringes out of here!

Out here in reality, though, progress in vaccines has gone from Edward Jenner's pioneering cowpox vaccination against smallpox (which replaced the effective but more dangerous technique of variolation), through Koch and Pasteur in the 1800s and the realization that microorganisms were the cause of these disease. Viral cultures became more feasible in the 1930s and 40s, and the later improvements in cell culture techniques led to the vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella and many more. These were generally killed-microorganism or live-attenenuated vaccines, but later work developed the idea of polysaccharides and polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines, which is where we get the vaccines against Pneumococcus and H. influenzae, among others.

Molecular biology's greater and great ability to provide recombinant proteins has led to vaccines against hepatitis B, shingles, HPV and replaced the older pertussis vaccine entirely. The HPV vaccination campaign was the subject of a dramatic recent report from Scotland, showing that not one single case of cervical cancer has been diagnosed so far in women who got the shots at a young enough age. We have also learned how to sequence genomes faster and more accurately than anyone could have imagined, and genomics has let the way to a number of new vaccines by identifying antigen sequences to test. Outright protein structure and protein design work led to the RSV vaccine (a disease that had eluded all other attempts for decades), and all the techniques of modern analytical chemistry, molecular biology, and chemical biology are being enlisted simultaneously.

That was certainly displayed during the coronavirus vaccine efforts. We have entered the mRNA vaccine era, which was coming on anyway but was profoundly accelerated by the pandemic, and nothing could have gone anywhere near as quickly if we didn't have our modern abilities in these areas. And these are provided a huge boost to two other fields outside infectious disease: immune tolerance and cancer treatment. We are moving toward being able to treat hypersensitivity to environmental antigens (peanut, stinging insects, etc.) which are life-threatening for those who suffer from them, and finally (after decades of work) the idea of direct vaccination therapy against some forms of cancer seems really possible, through targeting "neoantigens" present on tumor cells. 

Journal：science

Title：Vaccines, Past and Present(4 Oct 2024)

Category：Vaccine

As the article shows, we're also making real strides in predicting what sorts of antigens will produce better responses (fewer side effects and greater duration, even up to lifelong protection). 

正如文章所示，我们在预测哪种抗原会产生更好的反应（副作用更少，持续时间更长，甚至达到终身保护）方面也取得了实质性的进步。

I was glad to see that the authors also addressed what's often an overlooked area that's shown great improvement, adjuvants.

翻译练习，欢迎大家文末留言打卡，下期推送文章公布答案哟，一起阅外刊学英语吧！

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