On a wing and a prayer_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

On a wing and a prayer

I have spent the last five years researching these studies, and carried out well over 150 interviews with scientists, science administrators and cohort members along the way. (The identity of people in the studies is confidential, but I was able to talk to a few.) I discovered that this is a gloriously British endeavour - run by a cast of eccentric English men and women, often on a wing and a prayer. I came to believe that remarkable things happen when scientists do something as simple as watch people live their lives, and try to work out why we follow different paths.

The birth cohort studies have amassed mountains of information – including rooms stuffed with paper questionnaires, terabytes of computer data, freezers full of DNA, and boxes packed with fingernails, baby teeth and slices of umbilical cords, all carefully preserved. There is even a secure storage barn in Bristol containing around 9,000 placentas, pickled in plastic buckets. Together, these records chart the lives of ordinary British people in painstaking detail as they have lived through the tumultuous decades since the war. The findings from them have been both prolific and far-reaching, generating more than 6,000 academic papers and books. They have fed into policies regarding pregnancy, birth, schooling, social mobility, adult education and more, and have shaped scientists' understanding of issues ranging through foetal development, chronic disease, ageing and death. They have touched the lives of almost every person in Britain today.