The decade ended with a bang for various fields in science. Journals are being published left and right regarding various discoveries and one publication has been at the forefront of the advancement of scientific knowledge.
Nature is an international journal publishing peer-reviewed researched in all scientific fields on a weekly basis. Journals than wishes to be published in Nature must fulfill the magazine's criteria of originality, importance, accessibility, timeliness, interest, elegance, must have surprising conclusions, and should be interdisciplinary. The journal's goals are simple: to give an avenue for scientists to publish relevant and game-changing scientific discoveries, and for people to discuss these discoveries, and ensure that these findings are not limited to scholars and the academe but to the general public as well.
As the decade comes to a close, Nature honors 10 people who made a big impact on the field of science and helped to expose issues relevant to society.
RICARDO GALVAO
As the environmental situation in Brazil worsens since right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro swore to position, indigenous people and environmental defenders find themselves in the line of fire of the president's blatant anti-environment sentiments. Earlier this year, physicist Ricardo Galvao and his team at the National Institute of for Space Research reported that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest had increased rapidly. President Jair Bolsonaro not pleased with this data and accused Galvao and his team of falsifying data to suit their interests.
Even though faced with a threat that can harm him and his career, Ricardo Galvao bravely took a stand and defended the scientists; after which he accused the president of cowardice and challenged him to talk to him personally. Needless to say, Galvao lost his job because of this controversy two weeks after.
President Bolsonaro may not be happy with what Galvao did but the actions of the 72-year-old physicist inspired people especially his colleagues. According to Paulo Artxo, an atmospheric physicist and Galvao's colleague at the University of Sao Paulo, Galvao lost his job because he was very clear in defending science in the face of authoritarianism especially since Bolsonaro is mirroring the dictatorship that the Brazilian people experienced before. Bolsonaro is quick to challenge and dismiss scientists even when he is presented with facts and analysis as is the case with the deforestation in the Amazon where Galvao and his team showed him satellite images of the region.
READ: Amazon Rainforest Worst Decade: An Overview of the Crisis
VICTORIA KASPI
American-Canadian physicist Victoria Kaspi used the world's best telescopes for the expansion of mankind's astronomical knowledge for more than 25 years and by 2017, she is among the team develop a new one: the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME.
This year, CHIME was able to prove its capabilities by becoming the best in capturing mysterious flashes of radio energy that goes off in the sky called Fast Radio Bursts. In its location in the southern part of British Columbia, CHIME was able to find and identify more FRBs than other telescopes.
Kaspi had a big role in developing the FRB-detection capabilities of the telescope. The original plan was to create a telescope that can map hydrogen emission from distant galaxies in hopes of finding answers about the universe's early state but by 2010, FRBs are getting more and more frequent and by 2013 those flashes were confirmed to occur. Despite dedicating her life in studying ultra-dense neutron stars, this unexplained astronomical phenomenon excited her. As she began thinking of ways on how to CHIME can help study fast-rotating neutron stars, she realized the telescope's potential in finding FRBs through its sensitivity and large field-of-view but they have to make upgrades. She shared her idea with fellow astronomer Ingrid Stairs and after a few months, Kaspi is already working with the cosmologists behind the telescope project to ask for more funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Kaspi and the team plan to add an instrument to the telescope as well as an additional computing power so it can analyze data that are gathered 1000 times per second at 16000 different frequencies.
With the help of Kaspi's personal connections and political skill, this seemingly impossible project was pulled off. Kaspi was known to challenge the norms of the science sector and develop new scientists especially women. She won the prestigious Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering in 2016 and used the money she won to hire students and scientists for the completion of CHIME. Early this year, Kaspi and her team fought to land a $2.4-million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to build outrigger telescopes that will be situated 1,000 kilometers away from CHIME and help it find FRBs.
GRETA THUNBERG
This year, one person is consistently making the headlines. Greta Thunberg may only be 15 years old when she started her climate strike but her voice became louder and louder as millions of youth around the world answered her call and joined the climate strike.
At a congressional hearing on climate change last September in the United States, Greta Thunberg gave the lawmakers a slim bundle of paper which contains the data from a special report made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which predicts the dire consequences if the world's temperature continues to rise because of carbon dioxide emissions. In a powerful statement, Greta states, "I don't want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to scientists. I want you to unite behind the science and I want you to take action."
For more than a decade, scientists, indigenous people, and activists have been exposing the alarming state of climate change and fortunately, the world has had enough. Greta Thunberg became the poster child for climate and according to climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Thunberg's candidness and outrage brought the necessary power to demand action. "Some may wonder why a teenage girl should get more credit and attention for publicly lamenting a well-known dilemma that most climate researchers get for years of hard work and effort. But, as scientists, we normally don't dar to express the truth in such heartfelt simplicity." Thunberg posed a challenge to these scientists who try to remain apolitical despite a pressing issue and Seneviratne says this motivates them to continue their study of climate and science, in general despite slow political action.
JOHN MARTINIS
For physicist John Martinis, the spark plug for his career in quantum computers is the lecture of the late Richard Feynman which he attended in the mid-1980s. In the lecture, Feynman discussed the possibility of using the quantum characteristics of particles to create computers that will be able to do things that conventional machines cannot.
Last October, Martinis took a step in making this idea a reality when he led a group of researchers at Google to create what he says is the culmination of his career: a quantum computer that is able to carry out calculations faster than the best conventional computer in the world. Martinis spent 17 years honing the hardware of the quantum computer which they now call Sycamore. It consists of tiny superconductors known as qubits. These qubits will enable the computer to excel at certain calculations like probing unsearchable databases and cracking encryption.
HONGKUI DENG
A breakthrough in the field of medicine was made by Hongkui Deng when he was able to use the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system to cure a patient marking the first time that the controversial gene-editing system was used and proving that the system can create a potentially limitless supply of immune cells that are susceptible to HIV infection.
Deng's study was designed to recapitulate the success of the case with Timothy Ray Brown also known as the "Berlin Patient" back in 2008. Back then, Brown was known to be the first person to be cured of the virus through a bone marrow transplant he received for leukemia. Through this methodology, doctors wiped out Brown's immune system and replaced it with donor cells that have a mutation that can disable the protein (called CCR5) that the virus uses to infect the immune system.
Because this type of genetic mutation is rare, Deng who was a part of the team that discovered the importance of CCR5's importance in HIV back in the 1990s, tried to do genetic editing to acquire the rare gene. What Deng did was to take immunologically matched blood-forming stem cells from a marrow harvested from a donor and edited them with CRISPR-Cas9 and then transplanted it into a person with leukemia and HIV.
Understandably, this feat was not a walk in the park for Deng and his team. The type of cell that was used is difficult for scientists to edit that's why Deng used a mixture of cells and only 18% of cells had been modified. Although the patient's HIV infection remained, Deng was confident that CRISPR-Cas9 edited cells can be a part of bone-marrow transplant and have no negative effects.
WENDY ROGERS
In a brave and thorough investigation, bioethicist Wendy Rogers of the Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia was able to find a new way to prise open the issue of examining research publications done by Chinese transplant doctors. The investigation done by Rogers and her team triggered a lot of retractions of reports of transplants after doctors cannot prove that donors gave their consent.
According to Yves Moreau, a computational biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, these retractions help to place the practice of illegal transplants among major bioethical scandals and that scientists and publishers should be serious in following research ethics.
Wendy Rogers was first exposed to the situation back in 2015 at a conference that screened a documentary that tackles forced organ donations from political prisoners.
YOHANNES HAILE-SELASSIE
Yohannes Haile-Selassie discovered a pale, circular shape on the ground when he was working on a site in the northern region of the Ethiopian desert in February of 2106. He did not know that this discovery will be groundbreaking. The objects, which he found lying in an area 3 meters away from the previously found jawbone, formed a remarkably complete hominin skull.
Haile-Selassie and his team were able to find out that this skull belonged to an early Hominid species which existed 3.8 million years ago. The team categorized the newly-discovered skull as an Australopithecus anamensis, the oldest and most mysterious and elusive known relative of modern humans.
This newly discovered fossil gave scientists a first look at the facial structure of a human's ancient relatives since previous bones found of the Australopithecus anamensis were just fragments.
JEAN-JACQUES MUYEMBE TAMFUM.
As early as 1976, Muyembe trekked the tropical forests in the territory of what is known as the Democratic Republic of Congo to identify the plague that swiftly kills people. He realized he was onto something when he observed that the needle pricks on the patients are not clotting. He also observed that the nurses he was working with contacted the disease easily and dies. Years later, this highly infectious and highly fatal diseases will be known as Ebola.
Forty-seven years later, Muyembe is still at the forefront of responding to Ebola's most volatile outbreak. Muyembe had years of experience with him as ammunition in defeating the disease. Why not? He developed the key public-health measures in containing the disease since 1995. His efforts in engaging the community to completely eradicate the virus became an effective tool in minimizing the risk of infection in the area.
Muyembe also led an investigation that will eventually make a way in the dissemination of Ebola medicine and vaccines. In an outbreak that occurred in a city in DRC, Muyembe took blood from Ebola-infected patients and fused with the blood of other infected patients. Out of eight patients, seven survive from the methodology.
Just last November, Muyembe and his team organized a controlled clinical trial on 680 people and showed a 90% survival rate for those who were treated with antibody-based drugs.
SANDRA DIAZ
Earlier in May, Diaz and 144 other researchers finished the most exhaustive biodiversity study in the world and the findings are dire: one million species of the world are facing the threat of extinction due to human activities and it requires drastic actions for us to stop the impending doom. "The rate at which species are going extinct is at least ten times faster than it has been on average over the past ten million years. Our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point," Diaz explains.
Diaz and her fellow scientists published their findings in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services where Diaz is one of the co-chairs of the panel. Together with anthropologist Eduardo Brondizio of Indiana University Bloomington and ecologist Josef Settele of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany, Diaz coordinated the work of experts from 51 countries in the span of three years, often meeting in physical workshops and in virtual working groups. These workshops produced 15,000 sources of information regarding the state of the world's biodiversity.
In their report, Diaz and the scientists stated that every nation will fail meeting the global target for biodiversity and sustainable development unless massive and drastic changes are made.
NENAD SESTAN
Sestan and his colleagues at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut were excited when they discovered electrical activity in brains taken from dead pigs. To achieve this discovery, the team harvested the brains from pigs posthumously and infused them with oxygen and an ice-cold preservative. The effect partially brought the brain back to action and because of that, Sestan thinks this could be the start of mankind's better understanding of life and death.
This discovery kind of spooked the team especially when they saw coordinated electrical activity which means the brain is once again conscious. However, the first thing Sestan did was shut down the experiment and contacted the United States National Institutes of Health and a bioethicist from Yale. Scientists discussed the potential ethical implications of the discovery for a few months and whether or not the brain can become conscious once again. The team also discussed whether the definition of brain death should be redefined or not.
After deliberations, Sestan adopted some safeguards and he and his colleagues continued the experiment. But before that, they put anesthetics in the brain to prevent neuron from firing in unison. The team's discovery is met with excitement and once the team was confident that the experiment was ethical, they resumed.
