Two or three times a month, Leslie B. Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, at the Rockefeller University, is required to feed the subjects under inquiry in her lab. In order to do so, she rolls up her sleeve and inserts her arm into the netting cage in which the creatures in question, mosquitoes, are kept. It’s not unusual for her to get two hundred and fifty bites in a few minutes, she explained the other day, with blasé good humor.
每个月都会有这么两三次，来自于Rockfeller大学神经以及行为学研究实验室的Lesile B. Vosshall教授就要喂她的研究对象食物。她会怎么做呢？她会卷起他的袖子把自己的手伸进一个箱子里，这个箱子里养满了他们的研究对象，蚊子。她事后毫无感情色彩的解释说，对于她来说几分钟之内被咬250次其实很正常。
Vosshall is attempting to discover why some people seem more attractive to mosquitoes than others. “Some people are mosquito magnets—I think this has been reported anecdotally ever since there have been people,” she said. Vosshall herself is not particularly attractive to mosquitoes, unless she is sticking her arm into a cage of them. But last week, with mosquito season well under way, she visited Brooklyn to discuss the implications of her research for those New Yorkers for whom being made a meal of is an annual blight rather than a professional obligation.
Vosshall的研究目的在于探索为什么有些人就是更容易吸引蚊子一些。她说有些人就像蚊子磁铁一样，这个说法在有人的时候就已经被传开了。但是Vosshall本人其实并不是一个非常惹蚊子的人，除非她把手伸进养着蚊子的箱子里。就在上周，Vosshall在蚊子盛行的季节来到美国的布鲁克林和纽约客的编辑们一起探讨他的研究内容，当然对于这些纽约客们，被蚊子饕餮是一年一次的倒霉日子而不是研究必须。
First stop: the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. Vosshall, who is a tall forty-six-year-old with long light-brown hair, was dressed boldly, under the circumstances, in a short black-and-white shift that covered her arms but exposed her legs. Native mosquitoes, Culex pipiens, are more likely to go for the face and the neck, she explained; it’s the mosquitoes that carry malaria, Anopheles gambiae, that like biting the feet. For illustrative purposes, Vosshall had brought along a test tube containing fetid water in which centimetre-long larvae frantically squiggled.
第一站就是位于Gowanus运河之上的联合街大桥。Vosshall这位46岁有着一头棕发的高个科学家穿着非常醒目，她穿着黑白相见的上衣，但是穿着夏季的短裤，因此她的腿是路在外面的。他说美国本地的Culex popiens蚊子更倾向于叮咬脸和脖子；而传播疟疾的Anopheles gambiae则更喜欢叮咬脚部。为了进一步讲清楚事情，Vosshall从英国带来了一个有大概1厘米左右长的蚊子幼虫装载一个实验盒子里，这些虫在污秽的水里快速的蠕动着。