When Lucy was ten, she went to the theatre to see a play The House at Pooh Corner with her parents. Immediately, Lucy fell in love. But although she took part in school and college plays, she never thought it could lead to a career. Instead, she studied business at university, working for the Land Register of Scotland until she retired in 2012. Her newly free time reignited (重新，点燃) a decades-old spark. “I still wanted to do something with my brain so I went back to university to study theatre and performance,” says Lucy.

That year, she took part in a folk drama workshop and discovered mumming, an ancient masked form, in which male actors travel through villages, performing simple plays, often in exchange for food or shelter. “It’s a simpler story than conventional plays. It has one central conflict rather than slow character development. It’s rooted in history and involves more improvisation (即席创作) because the play is always tailored to a local audience,” says Lucy.

Interest grew and Lucy set up her group — the Meadows Mummers — as a charity, to attract wider support and donations. Its first performance was in 2015, at the Meadows festival in Edinburgh. Things snowballed from there. As well as touring central Scotland, the group went to the International Mumming Symposium and Unconvention in Gloucestershire in 2016, and learned more about the history of folk drama.

More recently, life circumstances have made performing difficult. “I’ve had health problems.” She says that, at times, she has considered giving up, but gets too much joy from doing it to stop. “We’ve just done one performance this year but I’m really excited that we’re getting ready for more festivals next year.”

The drive to keep going is inspired by an experience more than 30 years ago. “I was in a national park in Yugoslavia when I saw a woman staring attentively at this green river,” she says. “She told me she was going blind and wanted the river to be the last beautiful thing she ever saw.” Whenever doubt creeps in (不知不觉产生), Lucy recalls that encounter and feels forced to continue grasping life with both hands. “Just because you’ve reached 60, it doesn’t mean the drawbridge has been pulled up,” says Lucy.

Amelia, a ninth-grade student at Carson Middle School, wanted to help her grandmother who struggled to open bottle caps. She found a solution in her engineering class, where students were tasked with adapting existing products to make daily life easier for people with difficulties.

Amelia’s creativity kicked in as she researched existing bottle-opening devices. “The shape and size of a cellphone are familiar,” she said. To create a better bottle opener, Amelia used a piece of wood. It was shaped like a cellphone. Next, she put three holes in the wood. The holes were in different sizes so that they could match common bottle cap sizes. Each hole also had a layer of dried hot glue, providing a strong hold for the bottle caps. With a simple twisting motion, her grandmother could open bottles without assistance.

While addressing challenges those with learning disabilities, movement challenges and other issues face, students like Amelia used more than their math, physics, and tool skills. They also learned about empathy (共情). “Empathy is looking at problems from another person’s point of view,” Amelia’s teacher, Mark Bolt, said. “It’s an important part of engineering. Engineers need to put themselves in their product users’ shoes to build effective solutions. It was empathy, while watching friends and family deal with daily tasks, that pushed other students’ projects.”

Student Michael noticed how reading disorder made it difficult for his friends to follow along on pages full of text. Their brains tend to confuse the order of numbers, letters, and other images. So Michael created a small adjustable window-blind-style device. “My friend could separate small sections of text while reading,” he said.

In the process, students tried different versions of their products to make the best one to show the class. Rather than having step-by-step directions for the projects. Bolt preferred to leave students’ creative paths open. “If we want to do better, we have to have a chance to fail,” he said.

In the second half of the 18th century, a British doctor named Edward Jenner gave his gardener’s son cowpox (牛痘) and then deliberately infected him with smallpox (天花) to test his assumption that people who were frequently exposed to cowpox, a similar but less severe virus, would avoid catching smallpox. It worked and cowpox as the vaccine (疫苗) was highly effective. “Vaccination”, from the Latin word for cow, soon became commonplace.

Challenge trials are forms of research where, rather than relying on data from natural infections, we intentionally expose someone to a disease in order to test the effectiveness of a vaccine or treatment. Things have changed a lot since Jenner’s time, of course, when it was not uncommon for doctors to conduct this kind of research. Even so, there’s a continuous sense that there’s something immoral about making someone ill on purpose.

But this shouldn’t blind us to the extraordinary power of challenge trials. They could become increasingly important weapons in the medical research, in a situation where vaccine technology is advancing and the threat of diseases jumping from animals into human beings is increasing.

Much has been done to reduce the risks of challenge trials. Like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), researchers have involved adults who are at a low risk of severe illness. These acts have already cut down a massive range of vaccine candidates. But not all diseases are like these ones. We don’t always know the dangers volunteers might face; we don’t always have treatments ready. What then?

We could, of course, just avoid these questions entirely, and rely on other types of research. But that doesn’t always work: sometimes, animal testing is tricky and uninformative, because the disease doesn’t develop in the same way as it would in humans. In contrast, challenge trials can be deeply informative within weeks, with far fewer volunteers. And the benefits can be surprisingly high.

In order to make sure we are as protected as possible from current and future threats, we should try to get rid of the misbelief in challenge trials, making them a more familiar part of our tool kits. Perhaps the greatest reward of all would be to make sure participants’ efforts are worthwhile: by designing trials to be fair and effective and applying them when and where they might make a real difference. In short, by helping them to save thousands, if not millions of lives.