What If You Could Read the DNA of Your Future Child? | Noor Siddiqui | TED · TED
Noor Siddiqui分享基因筛查技术如何改变人类对遗传病的认知，帮助父母提前了解并减少孩子的健康风险。适合练习科技、健康、成长类词汇。
For 300,000 years, every parent in human history handed their child a genetic hand they'd never seen.
在长达 30 万年的时间里，人类历史上的每一位父母都将自己从未见过的“遗传遗产”传递给了自己的孩子。
There was no way to know what was in it.
根本无从知道里面装的是什么。
No way to prepare and no way to choose health.
根本无法做好准备，也无法自主选择自己的健康状况。
The genetic lottery ran, and you got what you got.
基因“彩票”已经抽中了，你得到的就是这样的结果。
That era is over.
那个时代已经过去了。
And the way that we have babies is changing forever.
我们生育孩子的方式正在发生永久性的变化。
But before we get into that, I want to start with you and how you got here.
但在我们讨论这个话题之前，我想先了解一下你本人，以及你是如何走到今天这一步的。
You began as two cells, an egg and a sperm, each carrying 23 chromosomes.
生命始于两个细胞：一个卵细胞和一个精子，每个细胞都含有23条染色体。
When that egg and sperm met, sparks literally flew.
当那个卵子和精子结合在一起时，真的仿佛迸发出了火花。
A burst of zinc emerged to start your life.
首先，是一小块锌从母体中分离出来，从而开启了你的生命旅程。
And this specific moment locked in your entire genetic destiny.
而这个特定的时刻，决定了你整个基因命运的走向。
Your mother produced two million eggs.
你的母亲产生了两百万个卵子。
Your father produced over 500 billion sperm.
你的父亲产生了超过5000亿个精子。
And the specific combination of egg and sperm that make up you is a one in a trillion chance.
构成你的那个特定的卵子与精子的组合，其出现的概率仅为万亿分之一。
The odds of you existing at all
你能够存在于这个世界上本身的概率
are about the same as picking one specific grain of sand out of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on the entire planet.
这几乎相当于从地球上所有海滩上的所有沙粒中，挑出其中一粒特定的沙粒。
You are wildly unlikely to exist at all.
你根本就不可能存在。
A different night, a different day, and it wouldn't have been you.
不同的夜晚，不同的日子……换作别人，也许也不会是这种情况。
Yet tucked inside that miracle for hundreds of millions of people is a genetic disease, waiting to take something from them.
然而，在这个对数十亿人来说堪称奇迹的成果背后，隐藏着一种遗传性疾病——这种疾病随时可能夺走他们的健康或生命。
Their heart, their sight, their child.
他们的心、他们的视力，还有他们的孩子。
Something that will arrive regardless of how loved they are or how hard they fight.
无论他们多么受人爱戴，无论他们如何努力抗争，这件事终究还是会发生。
I grew up watching my mom go blind.
我在看着母亲逐渐失明的过程中长大。
It took years just to get the diagnosis, and after all the testing and all the office visits and all the uncertainty,
仅仅确诊这一个过程就花了好几年的时间。经历了所有的检查、无数次门诊就诊，以及种种不确定性之后……
the answer was, “There’s nothing we can do.”
答案是：“我们无能为力。
She lost her night vision first, then her peripheral vision, and then finally and slowly, her central vision too.
她的夜视能力首先丧失了，接着是周边视觉，最后，她的中央视觉也慢慢消失了。
It sucks to be powerless.
感到自己无能为力，实在是一件糟糕的事情。
It sucks to watch someone you love so much lose something so precious.
看着你深爱的人失去如此珍贵的东西，真的让人感到非常难受。
And unfortunately, she's not alone.
不幸的是，她并不是个例。
Four hundred million people around the world suffer from genetic disease.
全球有四亿人患有遗传性疾病。
That's more than the entire population of the United States.
这个数字甚至超过了美国全国的总人口。
Half of those people that are affected are children.
受影响的人中有一半是儿童。
Ninety-five percent of those don't have an FDA-approved treatment.
其中95%的患者没有获得美国食品药品监督管理局（FDA）批准的治疗方法。
Scientists have now catalogued over 3,000 genetic diseases.
科学家们目前已经记录了超过3000种遗传性疾病。
You can’t pronounce most of them.
你根本无法正确发音其中的大多数单词。
You don’t know their names, but the people who are affected, who are living it day in and day out --
你不知道他们的名字，但那些真正受到影响的、日复一日地生活在困境中的人们……
they wouldn't wish it on their worst enemies.
他们甚至都不希望自己的最坏敌人遭遇这种事情。
I started Orchid because of my mom.
我之所以创办了 Orchid 公司，是因为我的母亲。
I still can't accept the fact that
我还是无法接受这个事实……
she's not going to be able to see her grandkids' faces because of a random genetic typo in her DNA.
由于她DNA中存在一个偶然的基因突变，她将无法看到自己孙辈们的面孔。
I built this because I don't want my own kids to be stuck with their life getting hijacked by a random genetic typo.
我制作了这个工具，是因为我不希望自己的孩子们的生活被某些偶然出现的基因突变所扰乱（即他们的成长过程被这些基因突变所“劫持”）。