To the Mesopotamians, the liver was the body’s premier organ, the seat of the human soul and emotions. The ancient Greeks linked the liver to pleasure: The words hepatic and hedonic are thought to share the same root.
对美索不达米亚人来说，肝脏是身体首要器官，是人类灵魂和情感的所在。古希腊人将肝脏与快乐联系在一起：肝脏的(hepatic)和快乐的(hedonic)这两个词被认为是同源的。
share the same root同根同源
The Elizabethans referred to their monarch not as the head of state but as its liver, and woe to any people saddled with a lily-livered leader, whose bloodless cowardice would surely prove their undoing.
伊丽莎白一世时代，英国人提到君主的时候不称元首，而称国家的肝脏，如果一个领导人是百合肝脏，人民就倒了霉，因为领导者的懦弱注定会给民众带来祸患。
lily-livered字面上理解为：百合肝脏，用来比喻一个人胆小怯懦。
Yet even the most ardent liverati of history may have underestimated the scope and complexity of the organ. Its powers are so profound that the old toss-away line, “What am I, chopped liver?” can be seen as a kind of humblebrag.
然而，就算是历史上最狂热的肝脏专家，可能也未充分意识到这个器官的作用范围和复杂性。它能力之强大，哪怕“我是什么，被切碎的肝脏？（意思是无足轻重的事物——译注）”这样感情深挚老话也可以被视为表面谦虚，实则自夸。
humblebrag以看似谦虚的方式自夸
After all, a healthy liver is the one organ in the adult body that, if chopped down to a fraction of its initial size, will rapidly regenerate and perform as if brand-new. Which is a lucky thing, for the liver’s to-do list is second only to that of the brain and numbers well over 300 items, including systematically reworking the food we eat into usable building blocks for our cells; neutralizing the many potentially harmful substances that we incidentally or deliberately ingest; generating a vast pharmacopoeia of hormones, enzymes, clotting factors and immune molecules; controlling blood chemistry; and really, we are just getting started.
总的来说，成年人体内的健康肝脏是这样的：被切碎到其初始尺寸的一小部分，也会快速再生，然后像全新肝脏一样发挥作用。这是一件幸事，肝脏要做的事情超过300种，仅次于大脑，比如肝脏有条不紊地将我们吃的食物重新加工成细胞成长的原料；中和我们偶然或故意摄入的多种可能有害的物质；产生多种激素、酶、凝血因子和免疫分子；控制血液化学成分；真的，这只是略举几例而已。
“We have mechanical ventilators to breathe for you if your lungs fail, dialysis machines if your kidneys fail, and the heart is mostly just a pump, so we have an artificial heart,” said Dr. Anna Lok, president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and director of clinical hepatology at the University of Michigan. “But if your liver fails, there’s no machine to replace all its different functions, and the best you can hope for is a transplant.”
美国肝病研究协会(American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases)会长、密歇根大学肝病研究与临床肝病学主任安娜·洛克(Anna Lok)博士说：“如果你的肺部有问题，我们有呼吸机帮你呼吸；如果你的肾脏有问题，我们有透析机；心脏主要就是一个泵，所以可以使用人造心脏。但如果你的肝脏出了问题，没有机器可以完全替代它，你就只能指望移植。”
In one recent study, researchers were astonished to discover that the liver grows and shrinks by up to 40 percent every 24 hours, while the organs around it barely budge.
在最近的一项研究中，研究人员惊奇地发现，肝脏每24小时最高可膨胀和收缩40%，而其周围的器官几乎纹丝不动。
Scientists have also discovered that hepatocytes, the metabolically active cells that constitute 80 percent of the liver, possess traits not seen in any other normal cells of the body. For example, whereas most cells have two sets of chromosomes — two sets of genetic instructions on how a cell should behave — hepatocytes can enfold and deftly manipulate up to eight sets of chromosomes, and all without falling apart or turning cancerous.
科学家们也发现，构成肝脏80%的代谢活性细胞，也就是肝细胞，具有人体内任何其他正常细胞没有的特征。例如，虽然大多数细胞都有两组染色体——两组关于细胞应如何行为的遗传指令——肝细胞却可以拥有最多八组染色体，并巧妙地对其施以控制，而且都不会分崩离析或转化为癌变。
That sort of composed chromosomal excess, said Dr. Markus Grompe, who studies the phenomenon at Oregon Health and Science University, is “superunique,” and most likely helps account for the liver’s regenerative prowess.
俄勒冈卫生科技大学(Oregon Health and Science University)的马库斯·葛鲁普(Markus Grompe)博士对这种沉着冷静的染色体过量现象进行了研究，他说该现象是“超级独一无二的”，很可能有助于解释肝脏的再生能力。
Scientists hope that the new insights into liver development and performance will yield novel therapies for the more than 100 disorders that afflict the organ, many of which are on the rise worldwide, in concert with soaring rates of obesity and diabetes.
科学家希望，对于肝脏发育和功能的新洞见将为100多种与该器官相关的疾病带来新疗法，其中很多疾病在全球范围内呈上升趋势，与肥胖和糖尿病患病率的飙升相吻合。
The liver is our largest internal organ, weighing 3 1/2 pounds and measuring 6 inches long. The reddish-brown mass of four unevenly sized lobes sprawls like a beached sea lion across the upper right side of the abdominal cavity, beneath the diaphragm and atop the stomach. The organ is always flush with blood, holding about 13 percent of the body’s supply at any given time. Many of the liver’s unusual features are linked to its intimate association with blood.
肝脏是我们最大的内脏器官，重3.5磅（约合1.6公斤），长6英寸（约合15厘米）。由四个大小不均匀的部分组成，呈红褐色，像匍匐的海狮一样，位于人体腹腔右上方、隔膜下方和胃的上方。因为血液的缘故，这个器官总是呈现红色，每时每刻，它都拥有身体血液供应的13%。肝脏很多不寻常的特征都与它跟血液的紧密联系相关。
As the master sampler of circulating blood, the liver keeps track of the body’s moment-to-moment energy demands, releasing glucose as needed from its stash of stored glycogen, along with any vitamins, minerals, lipids, amino acids or other micronutrients that might be required.
作为循环血液的取样能手，肝脏追踪着身体时时刻刻的能量需求，从自身储存的糖原里按需释放葡萄糖，还有各种维生素、矿物质、脂质、氨基酸或其他可能需要的微量营养素。
New research suggests the liver may take a proactive, as well as a reactive, role in the control of appetite and food choice. It makes sense that the liver could be a nexus of metabolic control,” Gillum said. “At some level it knows more than the brain does about energy availability, and whether you’re eating too many pears.
有新研究显示，肝脏可能在控制胃口和食物选择上扮演着一种积极主动且容易引起反应的角色。肝脏成为新陈代谢的中心是有道理的，从某种程度上讲，在有关可用能量的信息，以及你是否吃梨吃多了的问题上，它知道的比大脑还多。
“Everything you put in your mouth must go through the liver before it does anything useful elsewhere in the body,” Lok said.
“你吃到嘴里的东西都必须经过肝脏，才能为身体的其他部位带来好处，”洛克说。
本文转载自：卫报双语阅读
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