At 0:00 Beijing time on December 16, the international authoritative scientific journal "Nature" released the top ten people in 2021, and Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission, was selected.
On May 15, 2021, when China's Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully landed on the tarsia sandy plains of Mars, Zhang Rongqiao took off his glasses and burst into tears.
After the "Zhurong" rover transmitted a telemetry signal, the flight control center in Beijing lit up a big red screen, and the Chinese astronauts excitedly shouted "Mars, hello!" At this point, China has become the second country after the United States to successfully deploy a rover.
"Mars Explorer"
Nature's Person of the Year describes Zhang Rongqiao as a "Mars explorer."
Mars is a space nightmare for many countries, and so far the overall success rate is only about 50%, and the success rate of landing missions is only a little more than 40%. China's first Mars exploration mission has completed the three major goals of Mars orbit, landing and inspection, which is even more difficult and dangerous. Behind the steady completion of the three major goals is the effort of "grinding a sword in ten years".
"In order to win today's first battle, we began to plan from 10 years ago, thousands of troops and horses have struggled for 6 years, insisted on 110 days at the launch site, insisted on 202 days in the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, the first victory was around Mars, and then today we insisted on 93 days, what is the purpose, is to win today's final victory!" Zhang Rongqiao said excitedly at the flight control center on May 15.
Born in 1966, Zhang Rongqiao is a native of Qimen County, Anhui Province, studied at Xidian University with a bachelor's degree, obtained a master's degree from the China Academy of Space Technology in 1991, and has been working in the Lunar Exploration Center of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense since 2004.
At a press conference held by the China National Space Administration in Beijing on June 12, Zhang Rongqiao said, "One step to achieve a round patrol means that the difficulty of development has increased. The pressure on us developers has increased dramatically. ”
Zhang Rongqiao said that it is fortunate that there is the correct leadership of the party Central Committee, the organization departments of governments at all levels, especially the strong organization of the China National Space Administration, the vigorous coordination of the Aerospace Science and Technology Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the competent departments of launch site and measurement and control, as well as the hard work and hard work of all the personnel for fire exploration and development.
To put it bluntly, it is the anger of the fire seekers. We succeeded today, and in retrospect, the choice of this technical route was very correct. Zhang Rongqiao said that on the whole, it is more cost-effective, especially in terms of technology, it can achieve leapfrog development, and in a relatively short period of time, China will enter the world's advanced ranks in the field of planetary exploration." Therefore, we say that the first Mars exploration mission is to combine China's national conditions and embark on the road of space development with Chinese characteristics. ”
After Mars, China also has more star sea goals: around 2025, China will implement near-Earth asteroid sampling and main-belt comet orbital exploration missions to achieve near-Earth asteroid orbital exploration, attachment and sampling return; around 2030, implement Mars sampling and return missions; and will also implement Jupiter circumference exploration and planetary crossing exploration missions.
"Look up at the stars, down-to-earth", are two sentences that Zhang Rongqiao likes very much. On November 4, 2016, Zhang Rongqiao gave a keynote speech entitled "Looking Up at the Stars, Down-to-earth" for the young teachers, graduate students and undergraduates of his alma mater, Xidian University. He explained at the time: "It may be a bit cheesy to take 'looking up at the stars and being down-to-earth' as the theme of the report, but this is precisely the demand of society for each of us, the way for us to settle down in society, and we need to base ourselves on the present and look to the future." ”
Zhang Rongqiao said: "Our knowledge and understanding of the universe is still very superficial. We should see that the world beyond the cradle is infinitely vast. Innovation never ends. ”
Sound the alarm for the new crown mutant strain
Nature's Annual Top 10 People list aims to select the people who have a place in the year's major scientific events. In addition to Zhang Rongqiao, the top ten people selected this time are:
Tullio de Oliveira, Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, South Africa
Winnie Byanyima, Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS).
Meaghan Kal, an epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Janet Woodcock
Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UNITED Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of indigenous peoples, working in the Philippines
Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher
Computer scientist Guillaume Cabana
Deepmind AI researcher John Jumper
Rich Monastersky, editor-in-chief of Nature's feature division, said, "From tracking dangerous CORONAVIRUS variants to demonstrating the role of climate change in extreme weather to sending probes to Mars, this year's Nature Top Ten personalities focus on individuals at the center of important scientific events that have had a profound impact on the world." ”
As with last year, science headlines in 2021 are still dominated by COVID-19, and many of the stories of Nature's top ten personalities are related to COVID-19. Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform in South Africa, and his team sounded the alarm for the new coronavirus variant, Omicron, which is currently spreading rapidly around the world.
Tulio de Oliveira
On November 25, Oliveira announced that they had discovered a highly mutated strain of covid-19, Ormicron, which, because of its numerous dangerous mutations, was concerned that it might develop immune escape against current vaccines and antibody drugs. There are a total of 50 mutations in the Omikejong mutation, of which 32 are spike protein mutations, which is the most mutated strain of the new crown virus found so far.
Previously, scientists have learned that if the new coronavirus S protein has K417N, E484A or N501Y mutations, it indicates increased immune escape ability; and the Omilon strain also has a triple mutation of "K417N+E484A+N501Y"; in addition, the Omiljun strain also has a number of other mutations that may reduce the neutralization activity of some monoclonal antibodies. The superposition of mutations may reduce the protective efficacy of some antibody drugs against the Opmicron variant.
Oliveira's team in South Africa risked tuberculosis and AIDS to test coronavirus samples. Previously, another well-known variant strain of the new coronavirus, Beta, was also discovered by Oliveira's team. Beta also has a strong immune escape capacity, which led to a brief increase in infection rates in South Africa, which led to travel bans on South Africa in the months following the report.
The story was repeated after the discovery of the Ami kerong mutant strain: many countries began imposing travel bans on South Africa. The first countries to report mutated strains were punished. It has also drawn attacks from some South African politicians, who see Oliveira's virus genetic testing team as the enemy. Oliveira was very disappointed, "We are not their enemies. Contrary. Oliveira said that the spread of the new crown epidemic in underdeveloped countries such as South Africa is also to some extent the evil consequence of rich countries hoarding vaccines.
Winnie Byanyima, director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has spearheaded criticism of rich countries and pharmaceutical companies for turning a deaf ear to calls for an equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, leaving many low- and middle-income countries powerless to protect their citizens. Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency, broke down the agency's scientific reports into easy-to-understand content and posted them on social media to help spread key messages about COVID-19. Janet Woodcock led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through a stormy year, including a controversial decision in response to the FDA's booster needle for the new coronavirus vaccine and an Alzheimer's disease drug.
This year, wildfires, floods and heat waves have hit many parts of the world, elevating climate change to a major scientific issue, and countries are exploring how to combat global warming and its effects by strengthening an international agreement. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, collaborated with other researchers to quickly assess whether human-caused climate change played a role in triggering specific extreme weather. This year, countries have made substantial strides in recognizing the importance of indigenous groups in conserving biodiversity and preventing global warming, thanks to the efforts of people such as The former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of indigenous peoples and Currently working in the Philippines, such as Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.
Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher, has set up a research institute to build on her previous work on how to develop AI systems in a more ethical way — a year after she left tech giant Google for that work, she made a lot of noise. Computer scientist Guillaume Cabana has sounded the alarm for the world by exposing thousands of fake papers filled with software-generated meaningless text.
"Protein Predictor"
Nature gave AI researcher John Jumper and his colleagues in DeepMind in London the "protein predictor." They unveiled alphaFold's code— AlphaFold's ability to predict protein structures with astonishing accuracy using AI technology.
John Jumper
Protein is the material basis of life, and the amino acid chains of each protein are twisted, folded, and wound into complex structures, which usually take a long time or even difficult to complete to decipher. So far, the structure of about 100,000 proteins has been resolved experimentally, but this is only a small fraction of the 1 billion proteins that have been sequenced.
But the structure of "seeing" proteins is closely related to many disease mechanisms of human beings, drug research and development, and so on. In the decades of protein structure resolution, X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-SEM) technologies have made great contributions, but these technologies have the disadvantages of laborious and expensive in the eyes of the scientific community.
How can a protein's amino acid sequence be simply predicted by its shape? How to answer this question will open a very different window into the way life works. More than 50 years after this idea was proposed, DeepMind, a Google-owned artificial intelligence company, dropped a heavy shot at the international protein structure prediction competition CASP last December, and the new neural network-based model AlphaFold2 they developed beat other players to achieve nearly human experimental results in terms of prediction accuracy, shocking the entire structural biology community.
The DeepMind team provided a statement to www.thepaper.cn, in which founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said that at CASP14 last year, we unveiled a new AlphaFold system that can predict the 3D structure of proteins to the atomic level, and we have since pledged to share our methods and provide the scientific community with broad, free access.
"Today we took the first step in our commitment to share AlphaFold's open source code in the journal Nature and publish a complete methodology for the system that explains in detail how AlphaFold can accurately predict the 3D structure of proteins. As a company dedicated to advancing science, we look forward to seeing what other new research methods our approach will inspire for the scientific community, and look forward to sharing more of our new advances with you soon." Hassabis said.
Monastsky concludes: "The stories of Nature's Top Ten People of the Year provide a new perspective on the major developments, issues and controversies that are profound in science and resonate with the world. ”