In a year when scientists managed to develop
and deliver a vaccine in the fastest ever time and three different space
missions reached Mars, many were surprised entrepreneur and
multi-billionaire Elon Musk was nominated "person of the year" by both Time Magazine and the Financial Times. Thankfully, science journal Nature
(which has become familiar to many since the outbreak of COVID-19) also
publishes a list of the most important people of the year - its list
featured those who helped shape science over the extremely challenging
past 12 months. Zhang Rongqiao Chinese
physicist and chief designer of Tianwen-1 Zhang Rongqiao, the first
mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to send a
robotic spacecraft to Mars, gets a special mention for leading the team
landing China's first successful Mars mission. China is only the
second country after the U.S. to land a rover on the surface of the "Red
Planet," a milestone that has made Zhang something of a hero in his
home country. An illustration of China's Mars rover Zhurong working on the Red Planet's surface. Winnie Byanyima Winnie
Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS and an under-secretary-general of
the United Nations, is praised for her vocal support for vaccine
equity. Byanyima has been calling for an equitable share of
vaccines across the world since early 2020, but has always known it
would take a fight to achieve it. Her experience with the AIDS epidemic
in her home country of Uganda, where life-saving drugs were largely
unavailable despite being already administered elsewhere, taught her as
much. This year, she celebrated an unexpected victory when the U.S. announced support for waiving vaccine patents. Friederike Otto Friederike
Otto, a "weather reporter" at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) and a
climate researcher at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the
Environment in London, is celebrated by Nature for linking the exceptional heatwave that hit Canada and the Pacific Northwest in July to human-induced climate change. Otto
is one of the many scientists at WWA who worked on climate models and
simulations that make researching extreme events, and linking their
causes to global warming, much more reliable and accurate. Timnit Gebru After
being fired by Google in December 2020 over a row around research
showing how AI is biased towards spreading racism, star engineer Timnit
Gebru started her own independent research institute to study AI ethics. Gebru is now working on creating a positive model of how AI should work, autonomously from big tech companies. Tulio de Oliveira You might not recognize Tulio de Oliveira's name, but we are sure you know why he is on Nature's
list: the director of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation
and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), de Oliveira first announced the
discovery of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant we're now all familiar with as
Omicron. Last year, de Oliveira was also the first scientist to report the discovery of the Beta variant of the coronavirus. The discovery of the Omicron variant was first announced by researcher Tulio de Oliveira. John Jumper British AI researcher John Jumper finds himself in Nature's
top 10 of 2021 after he and his team discovered a way of using
artificial intelligence to predict protein structures with incredible
accuracy, changing the way experts approach structural biology. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz Never
was so much importance given to indigenous people on the front line of
climate change as this year, when leaders reunited at the COP26 climate
summit in Glasgow pledged $1.7 billion to indigenous communities to
preserve biodiversity in their local regions. It was a victory for
which Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an indigenous leader from the Philippines
who served as the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous
peoples for six years, can largely take credit. After leaving her role with the UN, Tauli-Corpuz continues to fight to empower indigenous communities.
Chinese space scientist among Nature's top 10 of the year
Editor:阮梓峰
Source:CGTN
Updated:2021-12-20 08:40:40
Source:CGTN
Updated:2021-12-20 08:40:40
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