2020年MPA考试英语外刊阅读（三）

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You will die, sooner or later. We all will. For everything that has a beginning has an end, an ineluctable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Few of us like to think about this troubling fact. But once birthed, the thought of oblivion can’t be completely erased.

In 1968, the famous Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School introduced the concept of death as irreversible coma—that is, loss of brain function. Indeed, brain-dead bodies can continue to grow fingernails, to menstruate, with at least some working immune function that allows them to fight off infections. Despite technological advances, biology and medicine still lack a coherent and principled understanding of what precisely defines birth and death—the two bookends that delimit life.

In the absence of a precise conceptual formulation of when an organism is alive or dead, the concept of irreversibility depends on the technology du jour, which is constantly evolving. What at the beginning of the 20th century was irreversible—cessation of breathing—became reversible by the end of the century. Is it too difficult to contemplate that the same may be true for brain death?

文本选自：Scientific American(科学美国人)

作者：Christof Koch

原文标题：Is Death Reversible?

参考翻译

1968年，哈佛医学院特设委员会的一份著名报告提出了死亡是不可逆转的昏迷的概念，即大脑功能丧失 。的确，脑死亡的身体可以继续长指甲，来月经，至少一部分免疫系统还在工作，抵抗外部感染。尽管技术进步了，但生物学和医学仍然缺乏对出生和死亡的准确定义的一致和原则性的理解，而出生和死亡是界定生命的两端。

关于一个有机体是死是活，一直缺乏一个精确概念的表述方式。不可逆性的概念是根据不断发展的技术而发展的。20世纪初，呼吸停止被认为是无法改变的，可是到了本世纪末变成了“可逆的”。如果大脑死亡也是如此，这是不是太难以想象了?

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