Robots are common in today's world. They manufacture cars, work in space, explore oceans, clean up oil spills and investigate dangerous environments. And now, scientists at the University of Manchester are using a robot as a laboratory partner.
在当今世界机器人非常普遍。它们可以制造汽车，从事太空工作，探索海洋，清理漏油以及调查危险环境。而现在，曼彻斯特大学的科学家把机器人作为实验室搭档。
The researchers at the university created the robot in 2009 and named it Adam. Despite the name, Adam is not a humanoid robot. It is about the size of a car.
该大学的研究人员于2009年创造了这台机器人并取名为亚当。名虽如此，亚当却不是一台人形机器人。它的大小和汽车差不多。
Adam was built to do science and make discoveries. Ross King is the leader of the University of Manchester research team. He says the robot made a discovery about yeast, a kind of fungus used in science as a model for human cells.
亚当被建造用于科学探索。罗斯·金（Ross King）是这个曼彻斯特大学研究小组的负责人。他说，这台机器人对酵母有了发现。酵母是一种在科学中作为人类细胞模型的真菌。
"Adam hypothesized certain functions of genes within yeast and experimentally tested these hypothesizes and confirmed them. So it both hypothesized and confirmed new scientific knowledge."
“亚当推测了酵母的某些基因功能，同时通过实验进行测试并最终证实了这些推测。因此，它推测并证实了新的科学知识。”
Adam's success as a scientist led to the creation of another robot scientist named Eve. Researchers developed Eve to design and test drugs for tropical and neglected diseases. These diseases kill and infect millions of people each year.
亚当作为科学家的成功促成了另一台名为夏娃的机器人科学家的诞生。研究人员开发夏娃用于未引起重视的热带疾病的药物设计和测试。这些疾病每年杀死和感染了数百万人。
Drug development is slow and costly. Experts say it can take more than 10 years and about $1 billion to discover and develop new medicines. Drug manufacturers are unlikely to get their investment money back.
药物开发非常缓慢和昂贵。专家表示，发现和开发新药物可能需要十多年时间和大约十亿美元资金。药品生产企业不太可能收回这些投资。
So the University of Manchester developed a low-cost test that shows whether or not a chemical is likely to be made into an effective medicine. Mr. King says that other drug testing methods were not very effective.
因此曼彻斯特大学开发了一种显示某种化学制品是否可能被制成有效药物的低成本测试。金先生表示，其它药品测试方法不是很有效。
"How it works conventionally is you use robotics as well and you have a large collection of possible drugs. You test every single compound. And you start at the beginning of your library and continue until the end, and stop. So it's not a very intelligent process. The robotics doesn't learn anything as it goes along, even if it's tested a million compounds, it still doesn't have any expectation of what will happen next when it tests a new compound."
“传统上大家是怎么利用机器人工作的呢？你收集到一大批可能的药物，然后逐一测试。这个过程不是非常智能化，机器人在此过程中没有学到任何东西。即使它测试了一百万种化合物，它也无法预期在测试一种新化合物时将会发生什么。”
Mr. King says that Eve is different because the robot learns as it tests different compounds. He says the robot is designed to ignore compounds that it thinks unlikely to be good. It will only test the compounds which have a good chance of working.
金先生表示夏娃则有所不同，因为这台机器人在测试不同化合物时会学习。他说，这台机器人被设计成忽略它认为不太可能有用的化合物。它只会测试很有可能有效的化合物。
Eve has discovered that a compound known to be effective against cancer might also be used to fight against malaria and other tropical diseases.
夏娃已经发现一种已知对癌症有效的药物可能也能用于防治疟疾和其它热带疾病。
Mr. King says he hopes to completely automate the drug testing process with robots like Eve to create and test new chemicals. But he says humans remain in control of the manufacturing process.
金先生表示，他希望借助夏娃之类的机器人使药物测试过程完全自动化来开发和测试新药物。但他表示，人类仍然控制着制造过程。
I'm Jonathan Evans.
我是乔纳森·埃文斯（Jonathan Evans）。(51VOA.COM对本文翻译保留全部权利，未经授权请勿转载，违者必究！)