《纽约时报》 娜塔莉·波特曼：从实验室到红地毯

原作者：
来源Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist - NYTimescom
译者Ricky1022

From Lab to Red Carpet

By NATALIE ANGIER

Published: February 28, 2011

  从实验室到红地毯

    娜塔莉·安吉尔（《纽约时报》科技记者）

    2011年2月28日

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

       “英特尔科技探索奖”被认为是全国最顶尖且最苛刻的高中生研究比赛，它吸引着许多有抱负的年轻科学家。在这个有着69年历史的比赛中，无论是获胜者还是未获胜者共获得了七个诺贝尔物理奖和化学奖，两个诺贝尔数学奖，在国家科技大赛中获得六个金牌，一长串人获得了麦克阿瑟基地授予的“天才”奖金——现在授予的是奥斯卡最佳女主角奖。

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

     周日晚，29岁的娜塔莉波特曼身穿华美的礼服捧走了因在惊悚电影《黑天鹅》中扮演精神分裂的女芭蕾舞演员妮娜而荣膺的奥斯卡最佳女主角奖。在所有波特曼不为人知的早年成中，依然会有一些细节给人留下深刻的印象。在上世纪九十年代后期，当她还是长岛西奥赛特中学的一名学生时，她就参加了“英特尔科技探索”比赛，一路过关斩将直至半决赛。

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

     对于那些知道参与一个有获奖价值的项目是多么的折磨人的人来说，当自己的同龄人正在尽情玩乐时，愿意投入数百小时的晚间、周末、春假和暑假的闲暇时间，去做真正的、独创性的科学研究就足以证明波特曼的自律能力与能动性。

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

     然而还不止这些。当她还在对一个关于变垃圾为可用能源的新的、“环境友好”的方法进行研究并能同时从小学开始就一直保持全A成绩时，她已经是一个冉冉升起的电影明星了。她在伍迪艾伦、蒂姆波顿和吕克贝松导演的电影中都有演出，与茱莉亚·罗伯茨、杰克·尼克尔森、马特·狄龙、乌玛·瑟曼、德鲁·巴里摩尔（还有许多明星我实在不想打了）演对手戏。在《星球大战前传》中她主演了阿米达拉女皇，这使她迅速获得了国际声誉。之后她进入哈佛大学学习心理学和人脑的进化。

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

   “我在哈佛大学教书，在达特茅斯和瓦萨学院，我有幸教过许多非常出色的孩子”，阿比盖尔·A·拜尔德，她是波特曼在哈佛的导师之一说，“很少有人像娜塔莉那样有着与生俱来的聪慧、思考力度与勤奋。她从来不小看任何一件事。”

Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials — awards, degrees, patents and theorems in their name.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as “The Wonder Years,” “The West Wing,” “NYPD Blue” and “Young Justice,” graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields — a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators. She also writes popular books about math with clever PG-13 titles like “Math Doesn’t Suck” and “Kiss My Math.”

    波特曼是为数不多的高素质演员中的一个。以获奖、学位、专利、理论研究之名，她获得了严肃著称的科学界的认可。

     海迪·拉玛，这个公认的“好莱坞最美丽的女人”同时还是一位火箭工程师。她发明了一种破坏性指挥技术：跳频技术，并将它申请专利。这项技术可以阻止敌方干扰我方信号，以保证导弹在既定轨道上正常飞行。

    曾经出演过《奇迹年代》、《白宫风云》、《纽约重案组》、《少年正义联盟》的丹尼卡·麦凯拉以优等生的身份从加州大学洛杉矶分校的数学系毕业。在那里，她参与设计了一个测试特定磁场性能的数学实验，与她的合作者一道，她的名字也被写在了得出的理论中。她还写给孩子们看的数学书籍，比如《数学一点也不恶心》、《亲吻我的数学》。

海迪·拉玛这位好莱坞公认的大美女居然还是一位火箭工程师。

（图片地址：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr）

      丹尼卡·麦凯拉，除了演戏还是个数学家。

（图片地址：http://www.2flashgames.com/photo/danica_mckellar/Danica_McKellar_0007.htm）

As a teenager in the 1990s, Mayim Bialik starred in the title role of the hit kid-com “Blossom.” Now she appears in another hit sitcom aimed at slightly older kids, “The Big Bang Theory,” playing the adorably frumpy-nerdy Amy Farrah Fowler, a neurobiologist and sometime love interest for the adorably nerdy germophobic physicist Sheldon Cooper. The actress is pleased with her new role. After all, Dr. Bialik has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in ... neurobiology. “I tell people, I am a neuroscientist, and I play one on TV,” said Dr. Bialik.

    在上世纪九十年代，当Mayim Bialik 主演了人们少儿剧《绽放》时，她还是个少女。现在她在另一部针对年轻人的热门情景喜剧《生活大爆炸》中出演一个惹人喜爱的书呆子Amy Farrah Flowler,她是一个精神系统科学家，有时与极具书呆子气质的理论物理学家谢尔顿·库伯发生了有趣的爱情故事。Mayim Bialik 对自己的新角色很满意。毕竟，Bialik博士在UCLA取得了神经系统学博士。“我告诉人们，我是一个神经学家，而且我在电视上演的也是。”她说。

That relatively few screen stars have a scientific back story may seem surprising, given the immense popularity of the science fiction genre and evergreen narrative devices like the mad scientist, not to mention all the doctor shows and “CSI” spinoffs. Yet most actors who take on techie parts, tackling scripts that may be written with the help of scientific consultants, freely admit they simply mouth the lines without necessarily understanding their sense.

                                    Mayim Bialik 在生活大爆炸中饰演Amy

（图片地址：http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/popwrap/mayim_bialik_WyfITeU51daUro5dRlQgMJ ）

   考虑到科幻小说的流行和长盛不衰的疯子科学家的叙事方式，更不用说那些医疗剧和探案剧，只有相当少的演员具有科学背景这个事实看起来真的有些令人吃惊。然而，大多数扮演科学家的演员，说着那些也许是在科学顾问帮助下写成的台词，都坦率地承认他们说出这些台词的时候并不理解它的意思。

Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”

    一直出演最为著名的科学家Spock先生的伦纳德·尼莫伊来自一个有着艺术和戏剧背景的家庭，他的真实生活与他扮演的角色一点也不像。他告诉我因为Spock先生和《星际迷航》影响了许多年轻的观者，甚至使他们成为科学家，当科学家们遇到他的时候，总是迫不及待地带他参观实验室并像对待同事一样向他介绍他们正在进行的计划。尼莫伊郑重地点点头，然后对他们说，“好吧，显然你们前进的方向是正确的。”

Acting and science may simply appeal to very different personalities. If you’re eager for attention, fans and face recognition, scientific research is not for you. With few exceptions, even the most illustrious researchers in the world are utterly unknown to the wider public, an obscurity captured brilliantly in an Onion spoof about “the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America’s top scientists.”

      表演和科学很显然会受到不同人的喜爱。如果你迫切地希望被关注，想有“粉丝”，想得到公认，科学研究就不适合你。洋葱新闻网曾经制作过一个很棒的冷门节目，叫做“鲁莽的摄影师如何蜂拥而至从而不停地打扰美国最优秀的科学家们”，这个节目告诉我们即使是世界上最著名的科学家也会不为人知，鲜有例外。

“Just because I’m a scientist,” one string theorist complained in the article, “doesn’t mean I have to completely surrender my privacy.” Moreover, if extreme good looks score you big points in a screen career, they can detract from being taken seriously in science.

    “不能因为我是一个科学家，”一位弦理论家在一篇文章中解释道，“就意味着我必须交出我的全部隐私。”除此之外，如果荧幕上的好形象给你加了分，这会使你不再专注于科学研究。

Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. “When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,” said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. “So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.”

      海迪·拉玛很痛苦抱怨说，人们因为看了她的面容而假定她是个绣花枕头。这也许是一种心理投射。“当你看到一张非常漂亮的面庞时，你会大吃一惊，接着你自己就变得呆若木鸡，”丽莎·海瑟曼·铂金斯说道，她完成了一本关于拉玛的传记。“所以，你把自己的糊涂投射到那个你所看到的人身上。”

For her part, Dr. Bialik doesn’t see science and show business as being entirely immiscible liquids. In both cases, she said, “a large ego is necessary.” Everybody’s a pastry chef serving up humble pie. It’s humbling to audition for parts, and, said Dr. Bialik, “there’s nothing like being a graduate student to bring you to tears.”

    对于Bialik博士来说，科学和表演行业并不是风马牛不相及的。她认为对两者来说，“一种重大的自我意识很必要。”每个人都会犯错。试镜会让人害羞，Bialik博士还说：“没有什么能像成为一名大学生那样让你落泪。”

Still, she loved the research, on the brain chemistry of patients with a genetic condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, and she loved being “hooded” for her doctorate while she was “very, very pregnant” with her second child. “Better pregnant and getting a doctorate,” she said, “than pregnant at your high school graduation.”

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

Whether as a student in her class or a research assistant in her lab, said Dr. Baird, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Vassar, “Natalie never once asked for an extension or to be excused from her responsibilities.”

    她依然热爱研究，,她正在研究的是普拉德威利综合症患者的脑部化学反应，这是一种罕见的遗传病。她深爱着当她挺着大肚子将要生她的第二个孩子时戴上自己的博士帽。“在怀孕的时候得到博士学位，”她说，“要比在怀孕的时候高中刚毕业要好吧。”

    如果有什么区别的话，波特曼告诉我们伟大的成功，就像DNA的绘制成功，是由一些基本的东西组成的：不屈不挠，专注，还有伍迪艾伦关于表演的老套路。

    哈佛大学瓦萨学院的拜尔德博士说：“无论是在班上的一个学生还是在实验室的一个助手，娜塔莉从来没有拖延过时间或者是逃避责任。”

If she was scheduled to appear on the Letterman show, for example, she would finish her paper early. “She’s sincerely confident and has a good grasp of her strengths and weaknesses,” said Dr. Baird, and she is wise beyond her years. “One of things she said was: ‘It’s weird that there are so many people at Harvard who do amazing things outside the classroom. It just so happens that people like to watch what I do.’ ”

     举个例子来说，如果她计划去参加“莱特曼秀”，她会提前完成自己的作业。“她非常自信而且她深知自己的强项和弱项，”拜尔德博士说，而且她的聪慧超过了她的同龄人。“她曾经说过：‘哈佛大学里有太多的人在学校以外做着令人不可思议的事，这多么叫人吃惊。正如此，人们喜欢看我所做的一切。”

You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV.

   你可以成为一个科学家，但是如果你想要你的名字出现在闪光灯下，你还是去演戏吧。

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