Nature selects “People of the Year” in Science

 

The editors of Nature published a list of ten people who, according to the publication, made the most important contribution to the development of science in 2021.

 

In 2021, as in 2020, many studies have focused on COVID-19.
The list of nature includes specialists whose work was associated with the study of the Corona virus – the director of the South African research platform KRISP Tulio de Oliveira, who warned the scientist about the emergence of the Omicron strain. Winnie Byanyima, Head of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, who actively works to educate the public about the inequitable distribution and shortage of vaccines in low-income countries;

 

British epidemiologist Megan Cole, who has written extensively about the agency’s research in a way that people without a medical background can understand; and Janet Woodcock, who has led the US Food and Drug Administration through this difficult year for the health services.

 

Another important topic was climate change – wildfires, floods and heat waves were observed in many parts of the world, and countries discussed how to strengthen the international agreement to combat global warming and its consequences.

Nature has received an interest from climate scientist Frederick Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, who has studied the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to specific extreme weather conditions. The work of many activists, including the Philippine UN Special Rapporteur Victoria Tawley Corpus, has helped countries recognize the important role of indigenous peoples in protecting biodiversity and preventing global warming.

 

Also in Nature, they note the merits of a prominent specialist of the Chinese National Space Administration Zhang Rongqiao, thanks to which the Chinese rover could successfully land on Mars.
AI researcher Timnit Gebru has opened a research institute that will deal with the ethics of AI – in 2020 she was fired from Google for publishing her research on the bias of neural network algorithms working with language.
Mathematician and programmer Guillaume Cabanac has discovered thousands of fake science publications with automatically generated meaningless text and helped draw this problem to the world’s attention.

British AI scientist John Jumper and colleagues at DeepMind have made major contributions to biology by releasing the code for the AlphaFold program, which uses AI to predict the structure of proteins with astonishing accuracy.