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Only slightly less devoted, and certainly more unexpected, was Alfred C. Kinsey, who became famous for his studies of human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. But before his mind became filled with sex, so to speak, Kinsey was an entomologist, and a dogged one at that. In one expedition lasting two years, he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection of 300,000 wasps. How many stings he collected along the way is not, alas, recorded.
虽然没有那么潜心，但肯定是更加出人意料的是，在20世纪40-50年代，艾尔弗雷德·C·金西以研究人类的性活动出了名。可以说，在脑子里充满性问题之前，金西是一位昆虫学家，而且是一位执著昆虫学家。在一次历时两年的探险活动中，他跋涉了4000公里，采集了30万件黄蜂标本。在此过程中他被螫过多少次，哎呀，没有记录下来。
Something that had been puzzling me was the question of how you assured a chain of succession in these arcane fields. Clearly there cannot be many institutions in the world that require or are prepared to support specialists in barnacles or Pacific snails. As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.
令我感到费解的是，在这种冷门的领域，你怎么能确保有接班人。显而易见，需要或愿意支持藤壶专家或太平洋蜗牛专家的机构并不多。我们在伦敦自然史博物馆分手的时候，我问理查德·福泰，当一个人离去的时候，科学界是怎么确保有人来接他的班的。
He chuckled rather heartily at my naivete. "I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while."
听了我幼稚的问题以后他纵情地格格一笑：“恐怕不像是有替补队员坐在板凳儿上等着被叫上场的情况。要是有一名专家退休或不幸去世，那个领域的事情有可能中断，有时候要中断很长时间。”
And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?
“我想，正是由于这个原因，要是有人花了42年时间来研究一种植物，即使没有出什么很新的成果，你们也会觉得很宝贵，对吗？”
Precisely, he said, "precisely." And he really seemed to mean it.
“一点儿不错，”他说，“一点儿不错。”他说的确实好像是真话。
