The doctor who contained an epidemic and the ‘father’ of AI that best predicts the weather, among the ten personalities of the year for ‘Nature’

Earlier this year, an outbreak of monkeypox, also known as mpox, killed hundreds of people across central Africa. Placide Mbalafrom the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), raised the alarm when it detected a suspicious cluster of cases among young adults and sex workers in the country. The researcher and his team predicted that the disease would spread rapidly and urged health officials in both Congo and neighboring countries to devise plans to contain it. Analysis of the virus genome revealed that it was a new strain, capable of passing from human to human and different from the virus that caused the global outbreak in 2022. It has since been detected in Sweden, Thailand, India, Germany, the United States , the United Kingdom and six African countries that have never before reported mpox infections. For ‘Nature’, Mbala’s rapid and efficient response has been “crucial” in controlling the new outbreak.

Scientific fraud

The recognition of Anna Abalkinafrom the Institute for Eastern European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, has to do with its fight against another type of virus, that of fake articles. Earlier this year, the researcher discovered that her name was on a watch list by Roskomnadzor, a Russian agency that tracks online and social media activity. Abalkina, a Russian citizen, has not returned to her country for fear of reprisals. The reason is its pursuit of fraud in scientific literature, especially of companies that sell fake goods, called paper mills, in Russia and the former Soviet countries, and more recently in Iran and India. It has also tracked down pirated magazines, fraudulent websites that clone titles from authentic magazines to scam authors in exchange for publication fees. Abalkina demonstrated that kidnappers launder their money to gain respectability by being indexed in research databases such as Scopus.

‘Nature’ also celebrates scientists who have made exceptional advances in their fields. The Chinese doctor stands out Huji Xufrom the Naval Medical University of Shanghai (China), who has published the first results of a revolutionary cell therapy with CAR-T cells, which is widely used in blood cancers, to treat autoimmune diseases. Two weeks after receiving modified immune cells, the first patient—a woman with extreme muscle weakness—was able to raise her arms and comb her hair. Two other recipients, both men, with a different illness, said their symptoms began to disappear within days. More than six months later, all three were in remission.

nuclear clock

Another of these exceptional researchers is Ekkehard Peika physicist at Germany’s national metrology institute in Braumschweig, who recorded the first ‘tick’ of a clock tuned to the frequency of an atomic nucleus. This technology could one day surpass the accuracy of today’s most precise atomic clocks (which gain or lose just one second every 40 billion years). In addition, it could serve as a new highly sensitive tool with which to search for new phenomena in physics beyond the Standard Model, such as detecting variations in time of the fundamental constants of nature or searching for ultralight dark matter.

For its part, Li Chunlaia geologist with the China National Space Administration, was the first scientist to get his hands on samples from the far side of the Moon delivered to Earth this year by the Chang’e 6 mission. The 3,200-kilogram lander passed two days drilling and removing material from the lunar surface before sending the samples back. The researcher was instrumental in deciding where on the Moon the spacecraft would land.

Remi Lama researcher at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, enters the decalogue for being the ‘father’ of GenCast, a powerful artificial intelligence capable of making medium-term weather predictions that are faster and more accurate than the best current models. In addition, the tool excels in predicting extreme weather and the trajectories of tropical cyclones, which could save thousands of lives, and is capable of anticipating what wind energy production will be like.

Another researcher on the list, Wendy Freemanhas presented results that could put an end to a long-standing controversy over the speed at which our Universe is expanding. This astronomer from the University of Chicago, Illinois (USA) has calculated a cosmic expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, greater than what was considered until now.

The magazine has also recognized the work of three people “who have defended important causes.” Kaitlin Kharasa doctoral student at the University of Toronto in Canada, helped lead a campaign that resulted in the first pay increase for Canadian researchers in two decades. A Swiss lawyer, Cordelia Bahrsuccessfully represented thousands of women in a landmark lawsuit arguing that climate change is a human rights issue. And the Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus he answered the call to become interim leader of Bangladesh, after a student-led revolution.