Модульна контрольна робота №2

з практичного курсу перекладу

для студентів 5 курсу, групи ______

факультету перекладачів

Варіант 9

Task 1. Comment grammatical specifics of translating medical texts.

Task 2. Summarise the article into Ukrainian. Write at least 200-250 words.

Bone in a bottle

March 5, 2009 The Economist

Tissue engineering: Attempts to grow artificial bone marrow in the laboratory have failed—but now a new approach is showing promise

GROWING human cells in a laboratory is easy. Making those cells arrange themselves into something that resembles human flesh is, alas, rather more difficult. So-called tissue engineers have mastered the arts of making artificial skin and bladders, and they recently managed to cook up a windpipe for a patient whose existing one was blocked. But more complicated organs elude them. Nor has anyone managed to grow bone marrow.

At first sight, that is surprising. The soft and squishy marrow inside bones does not look like a highly structured tissue, but apparently it is. This does not matter for transplants: if marrow cells are moved from one bone to another they quickly make themselves at home. But it matters for research. Bone marrow plays an important role in the immune system and in bodily rejuvenation. Stem cells that originate within the marrow generate various sorts of infection-fighting blood cells and help repair damaged organs. But many anticancer and antiviral drugs are toxic to marrow. That leaves patients taking them susceptible to disease and premature ageing. Experiments intended to investigate this toxicity using mice have proved unsatisfactory. Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues have therefore been trying to grow human marrow artificially.

When they started their research, Dr Kotov and his team knew that the stem cells from which marrow is derived grow naturally in specialised pores within bone. These pores are lined by a mixture of connective-tissue cells, bone cells and fat cells, which collaborate to nurture the stem cells. The researchers also knew that the cells in this lining send chemical signals to one another and to the stem cells they touch. This suggests that a stem cell’s fate may depend on its surroundings in three dimensions, rather than the two dimensions of the bottom of a Petri dish—the type of vessel in which cell cultures are traditionally grown. If correct, this would explain why attempts to grow marrow in Petri dishes have failed.

To test their idea, Dr Kotov and his colleagues tried to replicate the interior of a bone using a material, called a hydromel, that is similar in composition to a soft contact lens. To make the erzatz bone, liquid hydromel is densely seeded with tiny polystyrene spheres with diameters of 50-300 microns (millionths of a metre). When the hydromel has solidified, the spheres are dissolved using a solvent called tetrahydrofurane, leaving a porous matrix. The diameters of the pores in this matrix match those of natural bone. For added verisimilitude, the team coated the internal surfaces of the pores with a material similar to mother of pearl. Marrow cells do not like to attach themselves to squishy materials like hydromels, but the team’s new material has enough stiffness to pass for bone, and fooled the cells into setting up home.

Once the matrix was complete, the researchers seeded the pores with marrow harvested from donors. They recently reported in the journal Biomaterials that the transplanted cells behaved as if they were in real bone-marrow tissue, growing and dividing as they would normally. To test their artificial marrow further, they added influenza viruses, and found that it released antibodies to fight the viruses, just as natural marrow would.

The anticancer and antiviral drugs that damage natural marrow have not been studied in the artificial version yet, but that should happen soon. Dr Kotov’s new tool should also let researchers study marrow’s response to pathogens such as influenza in more detail than is now possible. It is an unusual application of tissue engineering, but a valuable one.

Task 3. Write the annotation of the article in English. Use up to 100 words.