【正文】 voc might also stop that havoc happening.Take bird flu. It has killed more than 330 people since 2003. That may not sound many, but itamounts to 60% of the 570 known cases of the disease. The only reason the death toll is not higheris that those who succumbed caught the virus directly from a bird (usually a chicken). Fortunatelyfor everyone else, it does not pass easily from person to person.But it might. That is the burden of research carried out last year by two teams of scientists, one inAmerica and one in the Netherlands. They tweaked the birdflu virus39。s genes to produce a versionwhich can travel through the air from ferret to ferret. And ferrets are, in this context, good proxiesfor people.The researchers39。 motives were pure. The mutations they bined to produce their ferretkillingflu virus are all out there in the wild already. There is every chance those mutations could gettogether naturally and unleash a pandemic. By anticipating that rebination the two teamshighlighted the risk, gave vaccine researchers a head start in thinking about how to counter it and,by fingering the mutations, spurred surveillance efforts, which have often been halfhearted.Or, rather, they would have done had they been allowed to publish their results. They weren39。t.Both the American and the Dutch governments saw not a sensible anticipation of a threat, but athreat in its own right. Their fear was that bad guys somewhere might repeat the experiment andweaponise the result. So in December they banned publication of the papers revealing thetechnical details of what the teams had done.The threat from influenza is real. Socalled Spanish flu, which infected 500m people in 191819,claimed the lives of one in five of those who caught it. Subsequent flu epidemics, though not asbad, have still cut swathes through humanity whenever they have arisen. But terrorism is real, too.Though there is no known case of biological warfare in the past 100 years, many countries haveexperimented with the idea。 and there is concern that some terrorist groups, motivated not byspecific political grievances but by a general hatred of the West, might unleash the uncontrollablemayhem of a viral epidemic purely out of spite. So who is right—the researchers who want topublish their findings, or the governments that want to stop them?In this particular case, probably the researchers. And, to their credit, the authorities seem to haverecognised that. After months of fraught deliberation involving the world39。s leading virologists,journal editors, security experts, ethicists and policymakers, the Americans reversed their stanceon April 20th. The Dutch were reconsidering theirs as The Economistwent to press.The reason is that, as bioterrorists go, humans pale in parison with nature. Even America39。ssecurity services, which might be expected to err on the side of caution, seem to agree that theodds of a bioterror attack are long. Biological weapons require skilled scientists working instateoftheart facilities. Even then, they are unpredictable—and therefore difficult to control. Adeadly bug might e back to bite its maker, possibly before it had been made into a weapon.Aum Shinrikyo, a sect with sophisticated scientific capability, toyed with anthrax in 1993. But forits most brazen attack, when it killed 13 people in the Tokyo metro two years later, it preferrednerve gas. In September 2001 alQaeda plumped for aeroplanes.Nature, by contrast, has form. in this area. From the Black Death via Spanish flu to AIDS, bacteriaand viruses have killed on a scale that terrorists and dictators can only dream of. The more yougag scientists or hide data, the harder it is for them to look for cures。 you also probably drivebright young researchers away towards less fraught, blander areas.Naturalborn killersAt the moment, then, the natural threat seems greater than the artificial one. And it is brave ofAmerica39。s authorities to recognise that. If a terrorist outrage does happen, they will surely get theblame. By contrast, “acts of nature” are more easily shrugged off as, as it were, acts of God.This case does, however, highlight a problem that is only going to grow. The atom bomb is a childof physics. Nerve gas is a child of chemistry. These are both old, mature sciences. Biotechnologyis new. Its potential and limits are obscure. This time America has made the right decision. It is tobe hoped that the Dutch will soon follow suit. But it behoves everyone—politicians and scientistsalike—to keep a close eye on a fastchanging technology and on any shift in the balance of risks.【簡(jiǎn)析】科學(xué)家們研制出了一種新型病毒，可以迅速傳播危害巨大，但是政府卻不允許他們的科學(xué)成果予以發(fā)表。究竟是誰(shuí)在理呢？經(jīng)過(guò)激烈討論，美國(guó)最終選擇允許科研結(jié)果發(fā)表，荷蘭可能也會(huì)改變立場(chǎng)。與其掩藏危險(xiǎn)，不如主動(dòng)尋找解決辦法。文章最后提問(wèn)，原子彈是物理科學(xué)的產(chǎn)物，神經(jīng)毒氣是化學(xué)科學(xué)的產(chǎn)物，如今新的生物科技又帶來(lái)了新的挑戰(zhàn)。我們，我們的科學(xué)家，政府，政客，又應(yīng)該如何應(yīng)對(duì)？【閱讀上半場(chǎng) MC第三篇】Four ways to relieve overcrowded prisons 出自：Finally, America is beginning to tackle overcrowded prisons, prompted by financially strappedstates that can no longer afford them. The road to prison reform, and less crowding, includesrevamping 39。three strikes39。 laws, as in California, and limiting pretrial detention.Necessity can spur novelty. Even political novelty. As the need for fiscal austerity grows, anunlikely alliance has emerged between policymakers and public advocates who have long soughtcriminal justice reform. These policymakers are realizing what advocates have reiterated for years:The nation’s addiction to incarceration as a curb on crime must end. The evidence is staggering.In California, 54 prisoners may share a single toilet and 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasiumsupervised by two or three officers. Suicidal inmates may be held for protracted periods in cageswithout toilets and the wait times for mental health care sometimes reach 12 months.Citing these conditions and more, the Supreme Court ruled in May that California prisoners were