英国“经度奖”聚焦细菌抗药性

huangli89327

英国政府打算出资100万英镑（约合人民币963万元）寻找能够解决世界最大难题的人，而至于什么才是世界当前面临的最大难题，则由民众来决定。而投票的结果显示，这个难题是细菌的抗药性。参与竞争的团队将有5年的时间来创造一种高效、迅速、简单的方法来检测细菌的入侵，并希望这种检测能够帮助医学工作者更好的使用抗生素，并减少抗药性菌株的形成。

这一做法其实是在效仿英国议会在1714年推出的"经度奖"。当时，人们已经能够测定南北航行的位置，但一直没有找到测定东西向位置的方法。议会悬赏2万英镑寻找能够测定船只在东西向航行时所处位置的人，后来，一位普通的钟表匠设计了一台时钟，解决了这个问题。

该奖项在去年推出，而投票则是在上个月进行的。项目的具体的实施准则将在秋天公布，而项目的竞争者们将在2015年的秋季开始进行项目启动。

详细英文报道：

The people have spoken. Antibiotic resistance has been voted by the British public as the subject of the UK government's ?10 million ($17 million) Longitude Prize - an initiative aimed at tackling society's greatest issues.

Competing teams will now have five years to create a cost-effective, accurate, rapid, and easy-to-use test for bacterial infections in order to win the prize. The organizers hope that such a test will help health workers to better target the use of antibiotics, which will prevent the rise of drug-resistant strains.

Bacteria's growing resistance to life-saving antibiotics was the subject of a stark warning by the World Health Organization, leading to calls (including by Nature) to create an intergovernmental panel to tackle the issue.

In the public vote, collected on the webpage of the BBC2 television show Horizon, the issue beat challenges within food, water scarcity, climate change, paralysis and dementia to become the focus of the prize.

This autumn the prize organizers, the Longitude Committee and  innovation charity Nesta, will publish the criteria entrants must fulfill, following consultation with the scientific community. Groups with "creditable ideas" will be invited to review sessions throughout the five years, starting in autumn 2015.

Launched by UK Prime Minister David Cameron last year and opened for public voting last month, the initiative is named after a competition the British government launched 300 years ago, and has parallels with modern 'challenge prizes', such as those administered by the California-based X-Prize Foundation.

Writing in Nature last month, chairman of the Longitude Committee, Lord Martin Rees, said he hoped that both the prize fund and publicity generated by a well-designed prize would "unleash investment from many quarters, amounting to much more than the prize itself". (Philip Campbell, Nature's editor-in-chief, is also a member of the prize committee.)