From the first to have sequenced the Omicron variant to the ‘rebel’ that left Google to create ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to the Chinese researcher who led the historic descent of the first non-American rover on Mars: these are some of the 10 people who according to the drafting of Nature have made the history of science in this 2021.
The list opens with Winnie Byanyima who, at the head of the United Nations program for the fight against HIV (Unaids), has repeatedly expressed strong criticism of institutions and companies asking for greater equity in the distribution of vaccines even to poor countries. Well before the arrival of the first vaccines, Byanyima had been one of the very few voices to alert on the need to take radical and concrete political decisions to support poor countries by helping, for example, the creation of vaccine production plants and better distribution systems. . A fight against inequalities but which has so far produced very little considering that only 6% of the African population has vaccination coverage while the rich world is already receiving the booster dose.
Linked to Covid-19 are many of the 10 people selected by Nature, including Tulio de Oliveira, director of the South African research center KwaZulu-Natal who with his team has sequenced and alerted the world about the risks of the new Omicron variant of Sars-Cov-2, Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist with the British Health Security Agency who has devoted herself to a long and patient work of information and dissemination on the pandemic, and Janet Woodcock which led the US Drug Agency (FDA) through a series of difficult decisions like booster dose of vaccines and a new Alzheimer’s drug.
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The climatologist is also on the list Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute in London who worked on measures of human impacts on the climate crisis, the activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz which for years has defended the rights of indigenous peoples, Timnit Gebru, a former Google employee who, after losing his job in a discrimination lawsuit with the Californian giant, started a research institute to create ethical AI systems. A relevant issue for the diffusion of these technologies and that Gebru has managed to make it a subject for public debate.
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On the issue of disinformation, a significant role is given to the French computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac while in the space field the contribution offered by Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of the Tianwen-1 mission that led to the landing of the first non-American rover on Mars, a great success for the Chinese space agency CNSA. Finally, to close the list John Jumper, one of the leaders of the British company DeepMind that has shaken the field of biology by publicly releasing the codes of AlphaFold, the AI algorithm capable of predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins with very high precision.
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