《2015考研英语阅读理解精读P2—医学.docVIP

2015考研英语阅读理解精读P2—医学 　　Passage 2 　　Dr. Wise Young has never met the hundreds of thousands of people he has helped in the past 10 years, and most of them have never heard of Wise Young. If they did meet him, however, theyd want to shake his hand--and the remarkable thing about that would be the simple fact that so many of them could. All the people Young has helped were victims of spinal injuries, and they owe much of the mobility they have today to his landmark work. 　　Young, 51, head of the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., was born on New Years Day at the precise midpoint of the 20th century. Back then, the thinking about spinal-cord injury was straightforward: When a cord is damaged, its damaged. Theres nothing that can be done after an injury to restore the function that was so suddenly lost. As a medical student at Stanford University and a neurosurgeon at New York University Medical Center, Young never had much reason to question that received wisdom, but in 1980 he began to have his doubts. Spinal cords, he knew, experience progressive damage after theyre injured, including swelling and inflammation, which may worsen the condition of the already damaged tissue. If that secondary insult could be relieved with drugs, might some function be preserved? 　　Young spent a decade looking into the question, and in 1990 he co-led a landmark study showing that when high doses of a steroid known as methylprednisolone are administered within eight hours of an injury, about 20% of function can be saved. Twenty percent is hardly everything, but it can often be the difference between breathing unassisted or relying on a respirator, walking or spending ones life in a wheelchair. This discovery led to a revolution in neuroprotective therapy, Young says. 　　A global revolution, actually. More than 50,000 people around the world suffer spinal injuries each year, and these days, methylprednisolone is the standard treatm