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Maybe you don't think much about the 1-2 liters of urine you flush down the toilet every day.
或许你都没有仔细研究过每天在厕所里排泄下的1-2公升的尿液。
But when you send it swirling down the drain, you could be getting rid of liquid gold.
但是当你将它们旋进漩涡中时，你或许已经浪费掉了那些金水。
Because there's molecular goodness hidden in that pale yellow puddle, which has been used to treat everything from basic infections to menopause.
因为在那浅黄色的水坑中暗藏着的分子，能够被用作治疗感染和更年期。
That's right: there are medicines in your pee.
是这样的：在你的尿液中藏着一些药物。
When it makes its way out of you, about 95% of the volume of your urine is water.
当排泄时，尿液中约95%的体积为水。
Of the remaining 5 percent, about half is urea, a molecule your body uses to get rid of nitrogen.
剩下的5%中，约一半是尿素，一种被身体用于排出氮的分子。
There are also some extra ions like chloride and sodium that you don't need.
还有一些其他离子，比如你并不需要的氯化物及钠。
But the remaining one or two percent is where things get really interesting.
但是剩下1%-2%才是真正有趣的东西。
That's where scientists have found trace amounts of useful stuff ready for the taking.
科学家在这剩下的1%-2%里发现微量的有用物质。
For example, there was a time that doctors saved their patients' urine so they could extract penicillin from it.
例如，有一次医生将病人们的尿液存了下来，用于从中摄取盘尼西林（青霉素）。
During World War II, the newly-discovered drug was in short supply.
二战期间，这种新发现的药物供不应求。
By June of 1942, the amount of penicillin in the United States was only enough to treat ten patients.
到1942年6月，美国的盘尼西林数量仅够治疗10位病人。
But doctors realized early on that when someone took penicillin, anywhere from 40-99% of it was excreted into their urine unchanged.
但医生们早先意识到，当人们服用盘尼西林时，排入尿中的40%-99%的盘尼西林并未改变。
That, and the severe shortage of penicillin, led doctors to collect and crystallize their patients' urine to extract the drug.
盘尼西林的严重短缺导致医生们开始收集他们病人的尿液并使其结晶化以提取其中药物。
A lot of other medications pass through the body the same way, because it's part of your kidneys' job to flush out foreign substances.
多数其他药物也以同样方式流过体内，因为这是你的肾脏工作的部分，它们需要排出外来杂质。
So doctors could do this for lots of things, in theory.
所以理论上，医生们能够加以利用。
They don't, though, because manufacturing them is generally cheaper and less gross.
虽然他们并没有这么做，因为制造它们通常很便宜且没那么劣质。
Even penicillin recycling was short-lived. By the end of the war, production of the drug had ramped up,
盘尼西林循环利用也是短暂的。截止至战争结束，这种药物的生产增加，
and doctors stopped hoarding their patients' pee.
医生们也不再贮藏病人的尿液。
But pretty soon, they started extracting something else from it: hormones.
但很快，他们开始从尿液中摄取其他物质：激素。
In the late 1940s, an Italian scientist successfully extracted two hormones called FSH and LH,
1940年代后期，一名意大利科学家成功提取两种激素：卵泡刺激素（FSH）以及黄体生成素（LH），
that work together to induce ovulation, where an ovary releases an egg.
两种激素合力能够刺激排卵，即卵巢释放卵子。
A decade later, a medical student named Bruno Lunenfeld wanted to turn these hormones into a treatment for infertility, but he had a problem.
十年后，一名叫做Bruno Lunenfeld的医科学生想要将这些激素转用于治疗不育，但还有个问题。
It was going to take thousands of liters of pee to isolate enough of the hormones for trials.
需要上千公升的尿液才足够提取用于试验的激素。
And where do you even get that much pee?!
到哪才能获取这么多尿液呢？
After a few false starts, Lunenfeld was put in touch with the Catholic Church, which offered up the services of their nuns.
经过几次不成功的尝试之后，Lunenfeld与大公教会取得联系，修女能够帮忙。
Soon, the pharmaceutical factory had a steady supply of fresh urine.
很快制药厂提供了稳定的新鲜尿液供应。
Each treatment required about ten days' worth of urine from ten nuns, but it worked:
每次治疗需要十位修女10天的尿液，但这样是有用的：
in 1962, the first baby conceived with the help of Lunenfeld's drug was born.
1962年，首个经Lunenfeld药物帮忙的婴儿出生了。
About two dozen followed over the next two years, and demand for the drug skyrocketed.
接下来的两年，约有20名婴儿诞生，而对这种药的需求激增。
The treatment continued to come from pee for decades, until chemists figured out how to make the hormones synthetically in the mid-1990s.
几十年来这种治疗都依赖尿液，直到1990年中期，化学家研究出如何合成制造激素。
But you can still be prescribed other pee-derived hormones today.
但如今你仍能够买到其他从尿中提取的激素。
Estrogen, which is used to treat the symptoms of menopause, was also originally isolated from urine, the urine of people who were pregnant.
雌性激素，被用于治疗更年期症状，起初也是从尿液中提取的，是从那些孕妇的尿液中提取的。
But it was difficult, and expensive, to get it that way, so pharmacologists turned to pregnant horses instead, which pee out way more urine each day.
但这样很困难也很昂贵，为了获取激素，药理学家转向怀驹母马，它们每天排泄的尿液更多。
The drug, called Premarin, is still widely used. And yes, it's still made from pregnant horse pee.
这种药被称为结合雌激素，仍被广泛使用。是的，这种药也是取自怀驹母马的尿液。
There's also another medically useful thing you can find in pee: stem cells.
尿液中还有另一种有药物作用的物质：干细胞。
Stem cells are special because they can become many different types of cells, which makes them incredibly useful for medical research.
干细胞很特别，因为它们能够变成许多不同类型的细胞，这使它们对医学研究变得尤为有用。
And in 2014, scientists managed to extract them from pee.
2014年，科学家尝试从尿液中提取它们。
Only 0.2% of the cells in urine are stem cells, so researchers can only pull 5-10 unique stem cells from every 100 milliliters of pee. But they are there.
尿液中仅有0.2%的细胞是干细胞，所以研究员仅能从每100毫升的尿液中提取5-10个罕见干细胞。
Like the other cells in urine, they probably slough off from the tubing in your kidneys while your urine makes its way to your bladder, but we don't know for sure.
向尿液中的其他细胞一样，它们可能从你肾脏中的管中流出，而你的尿液则去了膀胱，但是我们还不确定。
And while that might seem like very few cells, once they're isolated, they divide quickly, making billions of cells in a couple of weeks.
虽然看起来似乎很少，一旦它们被分离，就会快速分裂，在几周内制造出数亿细胞。
Urine-derived stem cells are great because they're easy to get without doing anything invasive at all as opposed to other types of stem cells,
从尿液中获取的干细胞很好，因为它们能够轻易获取，和其他类型的干细胞相比，它们无需任何侵袭性技术，
which are usually extracted from things like bone marrow or blood.
其他类型的干细胞，通常是从骨髓或血液中提取的。
Doctors are hoping to use the stem cells from urine to rebuild damaged portions of the urinary tract, since that's where they're from.
医生们希望利用这些从尿液中获取的干细胞重建泌尿道的损坏部分，因为它们就来自那里。
By making changes to their genetic code, researchers can also reprogram these stem cells to act like other types of cells,
通过改变它们的遗传密码，研究员们还能够重新调整这些干细胞，让它们看起来像其他细胞类型一样，
which they can use to study things like neurological and cardiac diseases.
用于神经病学和心脏病研究。
Which is not bad for cells you normally just flush away.
对于那些被你冲掉的细胞还不算太坏。
But just because there can be lots of useful stuff in pee doesn't mean you should start collecting and drinking your own urine.
但尿液中有很多有用物质并不意味着你应该开始收集并饮用自己的尿液。
Urinotherapy is not actual medicine.
尿疗法并不是一种真的药物。
Though its proponents suggest drinking urine can cure cancer, or smearing it on your skin can cure acne, let's be clear: none of that is backed by science.
虽然其支持者暗示饮用尿液能够治愈癌症，或是将其抹在你的皮肤上能够治疗痤疮，要清楚一点：这些都没有得到科学的支持。
Your pee does contain compounds, hormones, and cells that can be used medically, but that doesn't mean drinking it will cure you!
你的尿液确实含有化合物、激素和细胞能够用于医疗，但这并不意味着喝下尿液能够治愈你！
Plus, it also contains a lot of other stuff you don't need to be drinking. So it's probably best if you don't try to mine your liquid gold at home.
还有，尿液中有些物质并不需要饮用来获取。所以或许最好不要在家开采你的金水。
Leave it to the experts! Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow!
把它们留给专家吧！感谢收看本期科学秀！
If all this made you want to learn more about urine, and why wouldn't it, you might want to check out our video about why your pee might be green. Or purple. Or black!
如果你想了解更多有关尿液的知识，你或许想去观看我们的视频—为什么你的尿液会是绿色，紫色或黑色！
Because there's a whole strange rainbow of colors that can come out of you. It's beautiful!
因为尿液可以是各种奇怪的颜色。很漂亮！
