摘要：For centuries, we have been missing a vital ingredient in health and medicine—the body clock. Over the past few decades, researche

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今天还是健康医学文章，词汇和表达比较多，大家看看已经掌握了多少（考研、四六级）：

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New_Scientist_International_Edition_-_2_August_2025.

For centuries, we have been missing a vital ingredient in health and medicine—the body clock. Over the past few decades, researchers have discovered that our mood, metabolism, athletic performance and cognitive capabilities vary over the 24-hour period, while a disrupted body clock is implicated in an ever-growing list of health conditions, from type 2 diabetes to cancer.

数百年来，我们的健康和医学领域研究始终缺失一个关键要素——生物钟。过去几十年间，研究发现人类情绪、新陈代谢、运动能力和认知功能在24小时内持续波动，而生物钟紊乱与越来越多的健康问题相关，从2型糖尿病到癌症均在其列。

It has also become clear that giving medications or interventions at different times of day can profoundly alter their efficacy and side effects, with more than half of drugs influenced by these time-of-day, or circadian, rhythms. Yet, without a way to quickly and accurately read body clocks, our ability to capitalise on such insights is limited, which may even be harming us.

昼夜节律还显著影响着药物干预效果：过半药物疗效与副作用会随给药时间发生深刻变化。然而，由于缺乏快速精准监测生物钟的手段，我们难以充分利用这些发现，因此可能承受健康风险。

A raft of tests now in development should change that, promising to help us understand our body clocks from a sample of saliva or blood, or even from hair cells. One of these tests is already on the market. Together, they could lead to a revolution in medicine.

目前正在开发的一系列检测技术将改变这一现状——通过唾液、血液乃至毛囊样本即可解析个体生物钟模式，其中一款检测已投入市场6。这些突破或将引发医学革命。

Circadian rhythms are natural oscillations in the activity of our tissues that are driven by an internal clock—or rather trillions of clocks, ticking in every cell of our bodies.

昼夜节律是人体组织活动的自然振荡，由内部生物钟驱动（更准确地说，是万亿量级遍布全身细胞的生物钟协同作用）。

“If you look at the expression of genes in different tissues, they're all doing different things at different times of day, and what those genes are doing depends on the timing of the clocks in that tissue,” says Rosemary Braun at Northwestern University in Chicago.

"观察不同组织的基因表达会发现，它们全天候执行差异化任务，而这些任务取决于该组织生物钟的时序调控"，芝加哥西北大学的Rosemary Braun解释道。

These clocks are controlled by a set of clock genes that produce daily fluctuations in a handful of clock proteins, and these influence the activity of numerous other genes in turn. Indeed, in 2014, researchers led by John Hogenesch at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that 43 per cent of mice genes are expressed rhythmically.

这些生物钟由一组钟控基因调控，它们通过少数节律蛋白的日波动影响大量其他基因活性。2014年宾夕法尼亚大学John Hogenesch团队发现：小鼠43%的基因呈节律性表达。

Moreover, the study revealed that 56 of the 100 best-selling drugs in the US, and a similar proportion of the World Health Organization's essential medicines—the drugs that are supposed to be in every hospital in the world—target proteins whose rhythms fluctuate over 24 hours.

更关键的是，美国百大畅销药物中56%及世界卫生组织基本药物名录中近半数药品，其靶向蛋白均存在24小时节律波动。

These results support the idea of chronotherapy—giving drugs at the time of day they are most likely to be effective and least likely to trigger side effects. Some clinical evidence backs the approach too, with cancer medicine leading the way.

这些发现证实了"节律治疗"（chronotherapy）的价值——在药物最有效、副作用最低的时段给药。癌症治疗领域的临床证据已率先支持该策略。

来源：阿南爱讲