当我在ＢＮ书店第一次看到这本书时，我的心不禁有些颤动。不是象见初恋情人般的激动，而是看见财宝似的心慌。哇，好厚的一本书，那里面得蕴藏有多少智慧呀。

某种程度上，理查德.道金斯是个文字大师。他的最新的《祖先的传说》的正文有６１４页。密密麻麻的文字都让我觉得眼花。我能读完这本书么？

昨天晚上，当我翻到第６１４页的时候，我重重地嘘了口气。终于地终于，我可以合上这本伴我６０多个夜晚的书。

我摩挲着书的封面，感受着书皮上ＤＮＡ的凹凸，而我的思绪则又一次一步一步地走回几亿年前的世界。

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Government is always the major funding source for basic research, no matter whether it is in the US, China, and zny European country.

During the budget surplus era, the US NIH enjoyed the doubled amount of research funding. It issued many big research projects such as human genome project, etiology of cancer, and neuroscience. The biology is advanced immensely from these types of research.

This big science model is appealing because it can potentially achieve big success. It becomes fashionable in other countries. Unfortunately, things not always turn out the way people have expected.

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JAMA in this week published three articles about dietary fat in the etiological development of breast cancer, colon rectal cancer, and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Unexpectedly, all reported negative findings.

The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study is a randomized clinical trial in which about 49,000 healthy women with average age 62 were randomized into the intervention group or the comparison group, and were followed up on average 8 years. Women in the intervention group were instructed to adhere on a low fat diet (total fat accounted for 20% of total energy), while women in the comparison group could eat their usual diet (fat accounted for 30-35% of total energy).

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To sort out the puzzle surrounding the name of Beijing, I talked to an American colleague who is a native English speaker. I asked her two questions:

First, has she ever heard of Peking? Her answer was no. With her instinct, she pronounced “Peking” like “pee-king”, exactly like most people joke about. In fact, in the www.dictionary.com, the Peking is “peeking.”

Then I asked her how to pronounce Beijing. She pronounced it like “Bei(zh)ing”, the j sounds like the s in the “vi(s)ion. ”

Apparently, neither pronunciation is correct. I call this language phenomenon “hyperforeignism.”

In English, the “j” is usually pronounced as “g”, for example, jeep, judge etc. Instead of sticking to the common rule, Americans resort to an exotic way of pronunciation, making it like “s” in “vision.” It indeed sounds more foreign.

By writing thus far, a French word comes into my mind, Déjà vu. In this word, e is pronounced as a short “ei”, and “j” as “s” in the “vision.” Now a picture grows clear. Is it possible that Peking was originally pronounced as “peiking? ”

As some people have pointed out, the name of Peking might be coined by French missionaries. It is very likely the “e” in the “Peking” does sound like the e in the “déjà vu.”

The interchange of “p” and “b”, “k” and “j” is very easy to understand. In old days and in some dialects, for example, Cantonese, “P” and “B”, “K” and “J” might sound indistinguishable to those foreigners who entered China through Guangzhou. It is also possible that a sound change from k to j occurred after the Peking was invented.

Therefore, if Peking is an old way and wrong way (in terms of modern pinyin) of pronouncing Beijing, the Peking should be abandoned to avoid ridiculous confusions of “Peeking.”