On December 15, 2021, Nature released its top ten people of the year. They have made landmark contributions in their respective fields...
Vaccine warrior
Vaccine Warrior
In the two years since the emergence of the new crown, it has brought great impact to the world. The epidemic has affected people's health, but also affected many aspects such as politics and economy. Fortunately, researchers have developed various vaccines and followed up with improved versions of vaccines for the new crown mutation.
But foreign policies, unlike at home, can achieve free vaccination for all, so a new problem arises - vaccine distribution. High-income countries buy most of the vaccines, while low- and middle-income countries only have donor vaccines, which is not enough. As a result, some regions are still in a state of pandemic at a time when our country has achieved a "dynamic zero" of COVID-19. In this case, new variants will continue to emerge, the number of deaths will continue to rise, and the convenience of global population movement will make it difficult for the new crown to be completely eliminated.
Some countries have started receiving booster injections, while in others only 6% of people have received a single injection. Winnie Byanyima, who has spoken out against this distributional divide, argues that "it's not normal to sell life-saving technology like a luxury", and she created the People's Vaccine Alliance to change that so that companies and countries can give up intellectual property rights to COVID-19 vaccines, allowing more companies to make and build distribution systems to get vaccines to those in need.
In May 2021, Winnie Byanyima and colleagues scored their first victory – the United States will support the proposal to "abandon intellectual property protection for COVID-19 vaccines", enabling South Africa and India to increase vaccine production capacity. The work of Winnie Byanyima's team is not over, and the EUROPEAN Union and some countries still oppose this exemption for intellectual property protection. Winnie Byanyima said: "Without the support of the government, we will achieve nothing. ”
They will continue to push for vaccine equality from start to finish.
Weather Detective
Weather Detective
In July, an unusual heat wave hit Canada and the United States, killing hundreds of people. Weather, like nature's mood changes, is a riddle that humans can't understand. "Global Storm", "The Day After Tomorrow", "2012"... The scenes of nature's anger in disaster movies are daunting, but the disasters that are happening in reality are not inferior to the pictures produced by special effects.
People are trying to prepare for the upcoming extreme weather through climate change. It's like finding a case that's going to happen based on clues. Friederike Otto and her team are working on this, and in 2015 she co-founded the World Weather Attribution (WWA) to be able to quickly analyze whether climate change is linked to extreme weather.
In the past, scientists had difficulty determining whether extreme weather was related to climate change, and WWA's modeling and data analysis were initially scrutinized and scrutinized by the academic community – was it reliable to use only one or two climate models? Now Friederike Otto's team uses up to 50 models to simulate climate to obtain data, and the data obtained is widely accepted by the academic community.
In August, Friederike Otto released a report at the United Nations conference on climate, and the panel agreed that extreme weather is becoming more frequent. Attribution research is important in understanding the impact of climate change on humans.
Martian explorer
Mars Explorer
In 2021, "Zhu Rong" was selected as one of the top ten new words in 2021.
In 1970, China's first artificial earth satellite "Dongfanghong I" was successfully launched, and the millennium-old flying dream turned from myth to reality step by step. In fifty years, China's spaceflight has gone from scratch, from conquering low-Earth orbit to landing on the surface of Mars. On May 15, the highly anticipated Mars rover Zhu Rong crossed a distance of 475 million kilometers and landed on the surface of the mysterious russet planet.
Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission, shed tears when Zhu Rong landed on the Martian plain. "Can't help yourself, leave tears, sweet and salty." The Mars exploration project includes five major systems, including the overall engineering and the probe, launch vehicle, launch site, measurement and control, and ground application. The complete success of the project is the joint efforts of thousands of research and development units and tens of thousands of scientific and technological workers behind it, and it is the "ten years of grinding a sword" of China's aerospace industry.
Faced with an unfamiliar and complex Martian environment, Zhu Rong and the Mars mission team face many unknowns. At the beginning of the design of the program, Zhang Rongqiao and his team made a comprehensive and detailed task implementation plan, carried out targeted design of the detector, and carried out a large number of ground test verification work.
During this period, the sudden outbreak of the new crown epidemic has brought a great impact on the implementation of the task, but the engineering development personnel have the courage to take responsibility in the face of the serious difficulties caused by the epidemic, and under the vigorous coordination, careful arrangement and close cooperation of governments at all levels and relevant units in China, they have overcome the adverse impact of the epidemic on the implementation of the task and achieved a successful launch on time as planned.
The success of the Tianwen-1 space station and the Zhurong Mars rover has laid a solid foundation for China's deep space mission, tianwen-1 is the first step in China's planetary exploration, and China has completed one milestone achievement after another in 52 years. More deep space exploration activities will continue in the future, and the footprints of the Chinese will be on every star, so that the stars at night will no longer be faint.
Ethical leader in artificial intelligence
AI Ethics Leader
Timnit Gebru joined Google in 2018 to take charge of AI (Artificial Intelligence) ethics research. In December 2020, she published a paper pointing out that there may be biases against ethnic and marginalized groups in the language models used by Google. She was then fired from Google, and nearly 7,000 researchers and engineers (2,600 from Google) signed a petition demanding that Google reform the company's research integrity.
Timnit Gebru has always had the idea of creating her own institute, and after leaving Google, she founded a new institute that studies AI independently of big tech companies and studies how to develop AI systems in a more ethical way.
Covid-19 Mutant Strain Tracker
Variant Tracker
In 2020, Tulio de Oliveira and his team discovered the COVID-19 beta strain in South Africa, and Tulio de Oliveira knew that reporting this variant would not only affect the South African economy, but also affect his career, but he did not hesitate to report the strain. "The way to stop a pandemic is to act quickly, and waiting and seeing is not a good option." On November 25, 2021, Tulio de Oliveira once again announced the discovery of the COVID-19 Semicon variant, which attracted the attention of the world.
The rapid detection and reporting of beta and Omiljunn strains in South Africa demonstrates the importance of using genome sequencing to track outbreaks. The genetic sequencing team led by Tulio de Oliveira mapped the early outbreak of COVID-19 in hospitals, which led to ward layout guidelines to prevent the spread of the virus in hospitals.
Edit: Ge Ge Wu
Image source: Network