Nature news：诺贝尔桂冠获得者失去一只手臂仍然返回实验室 Nobel laureate triumphs overloss of arm and returns to lab

生物谷

生物谷报道：Eric Cornell是2001年诺贝尔物理学奖桂冠获得者，虽然去年十月由于重病失去了他的左臂，甚至几乎他的生命，但他依然进入实验室继续他的科研，这是我们需要学习的科研精神和敬业精神。详见：

Eric Cornell has experienced life’s extremes.He won the physics Nobel prize in 2001, but last October he lost his left arm and shoulder— and nearly his life — to a fleshkilling bacterial infection. He has, however,bounced back and was in playful mood last week as he announced his return to the scientific fray.

“Losing an arm is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe,” Cornell told a 12 April press conference organized by the University of Colorado at Boulder.“I should emphasize that I was right-handed before. And here it is.”He waved at the assembled reporters. Cornell will be fitted for a prosthetic arm,and hopes to have an attachment that will allow him to play pool. “The bets will go down, and then I’ll put on the arm,”he joked.

Doctors say Cornell is lucky to be alive after contracting necrotizing fasciitis, a rare and
invasive streptococcal infection. Although he cannot recall injuring himself, the bacteria
probably entered through a scratch or cut.On 24 October 2004, he developed flulike symptoms. The next day he felt a pain in his shoulder that steadily worsened, and within three days he was in the emergency room. Doctors surgically removed his left arm and shoulder and placed skin grafts on his torso. In a medically induced coma until late November,Cornell returned home from
the hospital in mid-December.Still undergoing physical therapy for his skin grafts, Cornell has phantom sensations of the missing arm:he feels as if it’s behind his back.And he is taking medication for phantom pain, a common problem for amputees.Cornell has already returned part-time to his lab at JILA, the institute run jointly by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology where he and his colleague Carl Weiman created a
new form of matter called a Bose–Einstein condensate. That achievement won the duo the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which they shared with Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Wolfgang Ketterle.

“Before I got sick, I thought I had one of the best jobs in the world,” Cornell said.Thrilled to be back, he has been adjusting to using voice-recognition software instead of typing, and he won’t be operating lathes or lasers. But he will continue to supervise students,which was taking up most of his time before his illness anyway. “It has to be said that it’s been a little while since I’ve done very many fine adjustments on a laser,” he said.“I usually offer helpful advice to my students and I’m as much a motormouth as ever.”That advice was much missed by lab members during his absence, says Aaron Leanhardt, a postdoc who arrived at Cornell’s lab the week after he went into the hospital.

“It will certainly be nice to be able to walk into his office and have a spontaneous
discussion,”Leanhardt says.Cornell is now embarking on several studies involving Bose–Einstein condensates,as well as searching for an elusive property of the electron known as its permanent dipole moment. Physicists usually think of electrons as tiny, negatively charged spheres,but the charge might be asymmetrically distributed across the particle.That makes electrons a bit like people,Cornell told reporters:“Not one of us is really symmetrical.”
His wife, Celeste Landry, couldn’t resist adding a punchline:“You’re one to talk!”