Osa is an athletic yet stubborn 62-pound German shepherd(德国牧羊犬). The six-year-old dog has mastered the art of sniffing(嗅) out cancer and is key to a research project that has the potential to change oncology(肿瘤学).
Osa is part of an ambitious effort launched five years ago at the University of Pennsylvania that aims to develop one of the most powerful scent-detection machines in the world: the canine nose. She is able to distinguish between blood samples taken from cancer patients and their healthy peers simply by sniffing them.
In fact,Osa is one of five cancer-detection dogs trained by Annmarie DeAngelo and her co-workers at the university’s Penn Vet Working Dog Center. The most important goal is to develop an “electronic sniffer” that can approach the cancer-sniffing superpowers of Osa and her partners. Osa arrived at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center from a breeder at two months of age. Ever since, she has taken training. The process is demanding,challenging and repeated until the dog has mastered the most essential task of all. Finally, she has succeeded in sniffing out cancer. To transform Osa’s remarkable abilities into an electronic nose, researchers use a similar approach to train the machine.
An electronic nose prototype(雏形)has been built, and it’s successful in sniffing out cancer 90 to 95 per cent of the time. That team has also correctly detected different types of cancer, and is building a cancer-detecting device for the National Institutes of Health. One objective is to be able to distinguish between early- and late-stage cancer.“It would be incredible to identify people at an early stage and really have an impact on saving lives,”says a researcher.“The dogs have been able to detect that. With that ability, a blood test could be sent to a central lab, or ideally performed in a doctor’s office, making some hidden cancers a thing of the past. We expect that the cancer-sniffer device will be complete in a short time.”
【小题1】What can we learn about Osa from the first two paragraphs?| A．She used to be a strong German dog. |
| B．She was hard to deal with in the research. |
| C．She uses her nose to know the presence of cancer. |
| D．She can change the development of the oncology. |
| A．Strict. | B．Complex. | C．Unstable. | D．Endless. |
| A．Blood tests will be more difficult in the future. |
| B．There will be more dogs used for detecting cancer. |
| C．Distinguishing cancers is important in early experiments. |
| D．Hidden cancers may be detected by an electronic nose soon. |
| A．The Results of a Study on Special Dogs |
| B．The Importance of Dogs in Detecting Cancers |
| C．The Approaches to Distinguishing Cancers |
| D．The Problem of Having a Cancer Blood Test |
