The top ten figures of Nature in 2023 are released: ten news figures of the year and one AI

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ChatGPT is not a person. Yet in many ways, this program has had a profound and widespread impact on science over the past year.

Today, the top scientific journal Nature announced the 2023 list of Nature's 10 scientists - a list that aims to select 10 people who have a place in all major scientific events of the year.

It is worth noting that there is another non-human selected for Nature's 10 this year , that is ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that has dominated various news headlines since last year.

Richard Monastersky, editor-in-chief of Nature's features department, said, "Although this tool is not a person and does not fully meet the selection criteria for Nature's top ten people, we have made an exception and included it in the list to recognize the tremendous changes that generative AI has brought to the development and progress of science ."

Nature's 10 explores the important developments in science this year and the ten people who played a major role in these milestones. Together with their colleagues, these people have helped make amazing discoveries and brought attention to critical issues. Among them:

Kalpana Kalahasti played a key role in ensuring the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon, making India the fourth country to achieve such a feat.

Marina Silva helped control rampant deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and rebuild institutions weakened by the previous government.

Katsuhiko Hayash has created viable eggs using cells from male mice, work that could help save the species from extinction.

Annie Kritcher helps NIF produce nuclear reactions once seen only in hydrogen bombs and stars.

As the United Nations’ Chief Heat Officer, Eleni Myrivili is helping the world prepare for the threats of climate change.

Ilya Sutskever, the pioneer of ChatGPT and other society-changing AI systems, is worried about the future of AI.

James Hamlin helped discover the flaws in the sensational claims of room-temperature superconductivity.

Svetlana Mojsov is gaining recognition for her role in the development of a multi-billion dollar weight loss drug.

Halidou Tinto has helped bring about a second vaccine for a deadly disease .

Thomas Powles leads a transformative clinical trial to treat a severe form of bladder cancer. “The story of these 10 people and one AI tool encapsulates the most important advances in science in 2023,” Monastersky said.

The following is a detailed introduction to the top ten people selected by Nature's 10 and ChatGPT. (The introduction of this article is based on Nature reports and authoritative public information. If there are any omissions, please leave a message to criticize and correct them.)

ChatGPT: A benefit or a burden?

It’s the poster child for generative AI software, and it’s heralding a potential new era of science.

It co-authors scientific papers with humans—sometimes secretly. It drafts outlines for talks, grant proposals, and courses, writes computer code, and serves as a "sounding board" for research ideas. It also makes up references, fabricates facts, and even engages in hate speech. But most of all, it captures people's imaginations : ChatGPT is sometimes obedient, sometimes fascinating, sometimes entertaining, and even terrifying. It plays a variety of roles—some of which users expect, some of which they don't.

Why include a computer program on a list of people who will have a major impact on science in 2023? ChatGPT is not a person. Yet in many ways, the program has had a profound and wide-ranging impact on science over the past year. ChatGPT's sole goal is to credibly continue a conversation in the style of its training data. But in doing so, it and other generative AI programs are changing the way scientists do their work. They're also reigniting debates about the limits of artificial intelligence, the nature of human intelligence, and how best to regulate the interaction between the two. That's why this year's "Nature's 10" includes a new, non-human member.

Some scientists have long recognized the potential of large language models (LLMs). But for many, it was ChatGPT, released as a free conversational agent in November 2022, that quickly became clear how powerful and potentially risky the technology is. The program was created by OpenAI researchers in San Francisco, California, including Ilya Sutskever, who was also selected for "Nature's 10" this year. It is built on a neural network with hundreds of billions of parameters, and its training cost is estimated to be tens of millions of dollars. The training data includes a huge corpus of online books and documents. In addition, they have hired a large number of annotation engineers to edit or evaluate its responses, further constraining the output of the robot. This year, OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT's underlying model and connected it to other programs, enabling the tool to receive and create images and use mathematical and coding software to provide assistance. Other companies have also hurried to launch competing products.

For some researchers, these apps have become invaluable lab assistants—helping summarize or write manuscripts, polishing applications, and writing code. ChatGPT and related software can help people brainstorm, power scientific search engines, and identify research gaps in the literature, says Marinka Zitnik of Harvard Medical School, who works on AI for medical research in Boston. Models trained on scientific data in a similar way could help build AI systems that guide research, perhaps designing new molecules or simulating cellular behavior.

But this technology also has dangers. Automated conversational agents can help cheaters and plagiarists; if not controlled, they may irreversibly pollute the ocean of scientific knowledge. Undeclared AI-generated content has begun to spread on the Internet, and some scientists have admitted to using ChatGPT to generate articles without declaring it.

There’s also the problem of errors and bias, which is inherent to the way generative AI works. Large language models build a model of the world by mapping the interrelationships of language, then spit out possible samples from this distribution without evaluation, without being able to tell what’s true or false. This leads the program to replicate historical biases or inaccuracies in its training data and to make up information, including scientific references that don’t exist.

Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington in Seattle, believes there are few appropriate ways to use computer programs or systems that can automatically generate text. ChatGPT has a huge impact on the environment, has problematic biases, and could mislead users into thinking its output comes from a human, she said. On top of that, OpenAI is being sued for stealing data and accused of labor exploitation (hiring freelancers at low wages).

The size and complexity of large language models means they are essentially a “black box,” but when their code and training materials are not publicly available (as is the case with ChatGPT), it can be difficult to understand why they produce certain content. The open-source large model movement is growing, but so far these models are less capable than large proprietary programs like ChatGPT.

Some countries are developing national AI research resources to enable scientists to build and study large-scale generative AI outside of large companies. But it is unclear to what extent regulation will force developers of large models to disclose proprietary information or build in safety features.

No one knows how much more potential ChatGPT-like systems have. Their capabilities may be limited by computing power or new training data. But the generative AI revolution has begun, and there is no turning back .

——By Richard Van Noorden, Richard Webb

Kalpana Kalahasti: Landing on the Moon

The engineer and manager played a key role in ensuring the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the moon, making India the fourth country to achieve the feat.

"We have achieved our goal perfectly," said Kalpana Kalahasti soon after the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully landed on the moon. "This will be the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us," she added.

As deputy project director of the mission, Kalahasti played a key role in ensuring the success of the mission, a feat that made India the fourth country to successfully land on the lunar surface.

On July 14, Chandrayaan-3 was launched carrying the hopes and anxieties of the entire nation of India. India’s previous attempt, the Chandrayaan-2 mission, failed in 2019 when the lander crashed. In the same year, SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander, and this year Japan’s ispace’s HAKUTO-R mission 1 and Russia’s Luna 25 lander also suffered similar fates.

For Kalahasti and her team, the Chandrayaan-2 lander failure was a critical moment, and they poured all their efforts into preventing the next failure .

One of the biggest challenges the team faced was that the total mass of the spacecraft and the budget had to be consistent with Chandrayaan-2. This meant the team couldn’t significantly redesign the lander or add many redundant systems. So Kalahasti, along with project director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel, reconfigured the orbiter and lander for the Chandrayaan-2 mission. ISRO reduced the mass of the orbiter and gave the lander extra fuel, sturdier legs, and other improvements.

"The experience gained from Chandrayaan-2 was invaluable," Kalahasti told Nature. "Many of its systems worked successfully, allowing us to find the optimal configuration for Chandrayaan-3."

Veeramuthuvel and Kalahasti spent a lot of time on Chandrayaan-3 development, conducting comprehensive tests and simulations, such as evaluating the navigation system's ability to avoid obstacles on lunar-like terrain.

“Our goal was to have a well-documented, well-understood system,” Kalahasti said. “There was no compromise in terms of demonstrating the performance of the system.”

Their efforts paid off. But conducting so many tests and integrating the results while planning the flight was a massive undertaking, requiring coordination among more than a dozen ISRO centers across India. “It was like we were building five or six different satellites together,” Kalahasti said. She drew on past experience in project management and systems engineering, including leadership roles in the development of several of ISRO’s Earth observation satellites.

She was still a long way from leading a lunar mission when she joined ISRO in 2000. She said she was drawn to ISRO because she wanted to work at a core engineering institution that would put her degree in electronics and communications to good use. Her first job at ISRO was as a radar engineer at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where ISRO launches missions.

Kalahasti is heartened by the enthusiasm that the Chandrayaan-3 mission has inspired among the youth of India. “Beyond the technical aspects of the mission, I hope young professionals in India and around the world will be inspired by how the team has meticulously risen from failure.”

The mission's success has also inspired other countries and companies to make future attempts at the moon. "It's great to see India return to this mission so soon after their first attempt," said Jessy Kate Schingler, a space policy researcher and senior advisor at the Open Lunar Foundation. "Moon landings are a very hard thing to do. So Chandrayaan-3, I think, is an appreciated investment that the whole world will benefit from."

Kalahasti is excited about what ISRO might take on next. The agency hopes to send a mission to recover lunar samples as a prelude to its goal of sending humans to the lunar surface by 2040. “Now that the critical lunar landing demonstration is complete, we can move toward other capabilities,” she said.

——By Jatan Mehta

Marina Silva: Protector of the Amazon

Brazil's environment minister has helped control rampant deforestation and rebuild institutions weakened by the previous government.

In a year filled with bad environmental news, with record global warming, scorching heat waves and raging fires, Marina Silva, Brazil’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, delivered a hopeful message on August 3. She announced that, based on satellite imagery, deforestation alerts in the Amazon rainforest fell 43% from January to July 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. This was in stark contrast to the previous four years, when deforestation alerts had increased significantly.

This shift towards environmental protection in Brazil began on January 1, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva assumed the presidency and Marina Silva began her current post. This is her second time leading the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, a post she previously held during Lula da Silva’s first and second presidential terms, from 2003 to 2008.

During her first tenure, Marina Silva successfully reduced deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 83% between 2004 and 2012 by leading the development of the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Amazon Deforestation (PPCDAm).

But many of the protections she helped establish were dismantled during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency from 2019 to 2022. During Bolsonaro’s term, government fines for environmental crimes were cut by 40%, and logging in the Amazon increased by about 60% compared with the four years before.

Marina Silva and her team this year began the “difficult task of rebuilding what was abolished and at the same time creating new outcomes for environmental policy”.

Marina Silva faced many difficulties at an early age. She was born in 1958 in Rio Branco, in the heart of the Amazon region, into a poor family of 11 children (three of whom died young). She and her siblings worked from an early age, extracting latex from rubber trees. She wanted to become a nun and didn't learn to read and write until she was a teenager.

Marina Silva began her environmental activism in the mid-1970s, when she met environmental activist Chico Mendes (who was killed by ranchers in 1988) at a rural leadership course. In 1994, at age 35, she became the youngest elected senator in Brazil.

In her current role, Marina Silva has not always been in line with the current government, according to Pedro Jacobi, an environmental governance researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Lula da Silva’s government intends to increase oil and gas drilling — including at the mouth of the Amazon. As a result, the environment ministry “has been walking on thin ice,” he said.

But Brazil is making progress in curbing and preventing deforestation, said Natalie Unterstell, director of the Talanoa Institute, a climate policy group in Rio de Janeiro. “Marina Silva’s leadership on this agenda is very important and she’s doing an outstanding job,” she said.

One of her key achievements was the launch on June 5 of an upgraded version of the PPCDam program (which had been shut down by the Bolsonaro government) to protect the Amazon. Marina Silva also restored policing support to the region to enforce environmental regulations. It didn’t take long for these policies to start working. From January to July 2023, fines for environmental crimes issued by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) increased by 147% compared to the average for the same period from 2019 to 2022.

According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), deforestation in the Amazon is expected to be 22% lower between August 2022 and July 2023 than in the previous 12 months. The rate is the lowest since 2018, but still double the lowest deforestation rate in 2012.

Marina Silva said a key reason environmental protection is working is that the agenda is being promoted across all sectors of government. “It fills me with joy to see in practice a concept that I hold very dear – that environmental policy should not be confined to one sector but should run across all sectors,” she said.

However, simply ending deforestation is not enough. "If countries do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, forests may also be destroyed in the same way due to climate change. Therefore, we need to change the way we live."

She compares herself to the tough fibers of Amazonian trees, which are used to bind wood to make rafts. “That’s how I see my work, to bring together those who are willing to participate and everything that is needed to form a support surface in the journey of the challenges of our time,” she says.

——By Meghie Rodrigues

Katsuhiko Hayashi: Redesigning Reproduction

He created viable eggs from cells taken from male mice, work that could help save the species from extinction.

When Katsuhiko Hayashi and colleagues announced in March that they had created mouse pups from cells from two male mice, the news stunned some researchers. “I fell off my chair,” says Robert Gilchrist, a reproductive biologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “This is an amazing scientific achievement.”

It’s the culmination of years of hard work by Hayashi, now a developmental biologist at Osaka University in Japan, who and his team previously developed a method to coax mouse stem cells into becoming immature egg cells, then get them to mature, fertilize, and produce live pups (O. Hikabe et al. Nature 539, 299–303; 2016). This year, Hayashi revealed that his lab had successfully created eggs using cells from male mice (K. Murakami et al. Nature 615, 900–906; 2023), a task many researchers had thought was nearly impossible.

Hayashi, however, is more conservative about his achievement: “It wasn’t that hard, actually. ”

Hayashi and colleagues took cells from the tails of male mice that have both X and Y chromosomes and transformed them into stem cells. In the process, about 3% of the cells spontaneously lost their Y chromosomes. The team then isolated these cells without Y chromosomes and treated them with a chemical that causes errors when cells divide.

These errors caused some cells to produce duplicate X chromosomes, effectively turning them into female cells. The team then put these cells through a complex and laborious process to make eggs. Each step is very delicate, and many cells are usually lost, says Mitinori Saitou, a developmental biologist at Kyoto University in Japan who collaborated with Hayashi.

The team then fertilized the eggs and implanted the resulting embryos into female mice. Only seven live pups were produced from 630 embryo transfers.

Over the years, Hayashi has become known for taking on assignments that are both difficult and imaginative. “I admire his work,” says Azim Surani, a developmental biologist and former advisor to Hayashi at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “His work is very original.”

Collaborators, past and present, have also mentioned Hayashi's patience and work ethic. "He works as fast as 10 people," says Daisuke Kitamura, an immunologist at the Tokyo University of Science, who supervised Hayashi's doctoral research.

Hayashi, for his part, doesn’t get lost in the praise: “It’s really hard for me to get everything done,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t finish my work on time.”

Hayashi had wanted to study germ cells — the cells that naturally give rise to sperm and eggs — since his undergraduate days, intrigued by their importance in reproduction and how they perpetuate life in future generations. “The germ line is the source of life,” he said. “It’s eternal. It’s the only cell line that can survive indefinitely after differentiation.”

Now, his lab is looking to expand this research from mice to another animal: the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). Today, only two northern white rhinos are known to be alive, both female.

Hayashi's technique may be the way to save the species, but he says it's much harder to grow rhino sperm and eggs in the lab than it is with mice.

The complications are even greater when it comes to dealing with human germ cells. Amander Clark, a developmental and stem-cell biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that the techniques Hayashi has pioneered to make eggs and sperm are likely to take decades before they can be used in humans. In the meantime, Hayashi has largely stayed out of the ethical discussions his work has raised. “From a scientist’s perspective, we have a relatively simple approach: We strive to produce high-quality eggs ,” he says. “ However, it is not our decision whether those eggs should be used. That decision should be made by society. ”

——By Heidi Ledford

Annie Kritcher: Fusion Ignitor

The physicist helped NIF produce nuclear reactions once seen only in hydrogen bombs and stars.

In 2023, physicist Annie Kritcher keeps moving forward with optimism.

A few weeks ago, she helped the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieve a goal that has long eluded laboratories around the world: fusing atoms together through highly compressed nuclei and producing more energy than the reaction consumes.

However, after reaching this experimental milestone, known as "ignition," the pressure came to achieve more.

The $3.5 billion NIF, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was designed to enhance nuclear weapons science. Advances could also help advance nuclear fusion as a safe, clean and virtually unlimited energy source. NIF’s successful experiment last year took many by surprise. The “ignition” experiment was a decade behind schedule, and some had begun to worry that the goal was simply out of reach. As lead architect of the major fusion experiment, Kritcher and her team immediately set out to prove that NIF could reliably achieve ignition.

High-risk research doesn’t always go smoothly: The team’s first replication attempt in June was disappointing. “It can be crazy, and I get really stressed out,” Kritcher says.

Fortunately, the next attempt was successful. On July 30, the facility's 192 lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to a pellet of frozen hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, contained in a gold cylinder. The resulting implosion released energy as the isotopes fused into helium, generating temperatures six times that of the sun's core. The reactions produced a record 3.88 megajoules of fusion energy.

Other facilities have produced more fusion energy for longer periods of time, particularly in tokamaks, which use powerful magnetic fields to confine fusion reactions. Such technology is being developed at the $22 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, an international collaboration. However, until NIF’s achievement, no laboratory had ever produced a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed.

Kritcher and her team followed up July’s success with two more ignition attempts in October, succeeding four out of six attempts. They are preparing for even higher production capacity next year. In the process, scientists at the facility are opening the door to research and increasing optimism about the future of fusion energy.

NIF is designed to help government scientists ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal without test explosions, but that’s not what initially attracted Kritcher to the lab. She began studying fusion energy as a summer intern at Livermore in 2004, and before starting graduate school, she quickly set her sights on NIF because it’s one of the few places on Earth studying fusion reactions.

She joined NIF in 2012 and became chief designer in 2016. Since then, she has led a team to analyze experimental data and use computer models to design experiments aimed at achieving and improving nuclear fusion yields by adjusting parameters such as the size and configuration of the target and the energy and timing of various laser beams. Once her team completes the design, the laboratory's experimental team will take over to fire the lasers and collect data.

“Kritcher was an excellent student who threw herself into her work,” said Roger Falcone, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked with Kritcher since she was a graduate student and through her early work at NIF. During that time, she demonstrated her prowess in designing laser experiments to test how materials behave under extreme temperatures and pressures.

Those skills put Kritcher at the center of the fusion program in 2016. Energy output from fusion experiments had stagnated, and NIF chief scientist Omar Hurricane wanted a new approach. Kritcher came up with some ideas, and “she threw herself into them,” Hurricane says, and that’s how she became one of NIF’s lead designers.

Kritcher and her team spent the next few years doing a lot of number crunching and design tweaking on what became the main NIF experiment. In addition to making various changes to the target, they also used various improvements to increase the overall energy of the laser. As a result, they achieved fusion more and more often .

Now that Kritcher has achieved the official ignition goal, she is working on a series of new experiments aimed at increasing the throughput again by pumping more laser energy into thicker target capsules. This represents another step toward NIF’s goal of achieving throughput of tens of megajoules or more.

In the long term, she believes the facility, after some upgrades, will be able to achieve its goals and increase output by an order of magnitude, which would allow scientists to hopefully begin working on prototype laser fusion energy reactors. “It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’ ” she said, in which she hopes lasers will play a role.

“I think it’s a great possibility,” she said, “and I’d love to be a part of it.”

——By Jeff Tollefson

Eleni Myrivili: Climate Change Supervisor

As the UN's chief heat officer, the former politician is helping the world prepare for the threat of climate change.

As temperatures soared and wildfires raged across Greece in July, Eleni Myrivili watched in horror from her home in Athens. “This kind of destruction is irreplaceable,” she said. “This is clearly a disaster for which we have to take responsibility.”

Myrivili, a former deputy mayor of Athens who now works around the world to mitigate the catastrophic effects of a warming climate, is the United Nations’ first chief heat officer, charged with keeping people cool as the planet “boils.”

July broke unofficial records for the hottest daily and monthly global average temperatures , and by the end of December, 2023 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record. Extreme heat is taking a deadly toll. A paper published in July estimated that the 2022 European heatwave killed more than 61,000 people between late May and early September, with the highest heat-related mortality in Italy, Greece, and Spain (J. Ballester et al. Nature Med. 29, 1857–1866; 2023).

Myrivili has been interested in heat for years, beginning with her career as a cultural anthropologist. She earned a PhD studying migration, violence and border regions, specializing in the region where Albania, North Macedonia and Greece meet. She then began teaching at the University of the Aegean in Greece. In the summer of 2007, fires burned across parts of Greece, destroying much of Parnis National Park near Athens. “All of us who work on climate change have that moment when the reality of climate change hits you,” she says. “For me, it was 2007.”

Angry at the lack of information and advice about the fires, Myrivili decided to go into politics. After a stint working for a Greek green party, she read Benjamin R. Barber’s 2013 book If Mayors Ruled the World and decided to turn to city government.

She has held various positions in the Athens government, working to integrate climate resilience and planning into various city departments. When she became head of the parks department, she changed her title to head of the city’s nature, resilience and climate change adaptation to emphasize what she sees as her focus. In 2021, she was named Athens’ Chief Heat Officer.

To raise awareness of deadly weather patterns, Myrivili has launched a campaign to name heat waves in Greece. She has also worked to secure funding for climate initiatives; in 2018, her group received a €5 million loan (then $5.9 million) from the European Investment Bank for climate adaptation projects, including planting green spaces in Athens.

Elissavet Bargianni, who succeeded Myrivili as Athens' chief heat officer earlier this year, said Myrivili's efforts and connections have enabled her to gain effective support within the city government. "A lot of people trust her," Bargianni said. "She can make the seemingly impossible possible."

Myrivili’s work is now focused on raising awareness of extreme heat around the world and securing funding for projects through UN-HABITAT, a program dedicated to sustainable urban development. This includes the Global Cooling Commitment, presented at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai this month. The pledge aims to support the development and deployment of cooling technologies that do not increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Don’t mention air conditioning to Myrivili, who hates its impact on the climate. But during a heat wave in 2021, she finally bought a small unit for her bedroom. “I still hate it,” she says.

However, as temperatures climb, air conditioning use will only increase. That’s one of the reasons Myrivili is attending the Dubai climate talks, to stop the world from burning up and prepare for the future.

——By Alexandra Witze

Ilya Sutskever: AI Visionary

He is a pioneer of ChatGPT and other society-changing AI systems.

As a teenager, looking for a job, Ilya Sutskever knocked on the door of modern artificial intelligence (AI) godfather Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada. "He said he would rather work for me, working on AI, than fry French fries on his vacation for money, " Hinton said.

Hinton gave his ambitious student some papers to read, and Sutskever came back wondering why the authors hadn’t worked out what seemed to him to be an obvious solution . “His intuition was right,” says Hinton, who considers Sutskever a visionary pioneer in deep learning and large language models (LLMs), the foundation for conversational AI bots like ChatGPT, which took the world by storm this year. “What makes him special is not just his intelligence,” Hinton says, “but the urgency with which he approaches things.”

Sutskever later became OpenAI's chief scientist and played a central role in developing ChatGPT. However, he also worries about the future of AI. In July, he shifted his focus to co-leading OpenAI's four-year "superalignment" project. OpenAI said the project will use 20% of its computing power to study how to "guide and control AI systems that are much smarter than us."

The tension between safety and the commercial motivation to move fast may have led to a confusing saga in November, in which Sutskever played a key role in the firing and rehiring of OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman. After the turmoil, Sutskever declined to be interviewed by Nature.

To some, Sutskever’s foresight is admirable. “He has a strong sense of morality,” Hinton said. “He’s really concerned about the safety of AI.” But some say that focusing on how to control AI systems that haven’t arrived yet distracts from the very real dangers of the technology. It “postpones intervention until a distant future,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI ​​Now Institute, a policy research group in New York City. Instead, she said, we need to “address near-term harms,” such as AI systems that reinforce biases in training data or that could leak private information.

The lack of transparency in AI systems is also a concern. OpenAI and some other companies keep their code and training data secret. Sutskever said that in the long run, closed systems will be the responsible approach to prevent others from creating powerful AI. "There will be a point in time when AI capabilities will become so powerful that it would be irresponsible to open source the model," he said in April.

Born in 1986, Sutskever began taking university-level coding courses as a teenager. After his family moved to Canada, he began working with Hinton on deep learning in 2003. In 2012, Sutskever and another Hinton student (Alex Krizhevsky) built the neural network AlexNet and won a landmark image recognition competition by a stunning margin. Sutskever later went to Google, where he helped develop AlphaGo.

In 2015, Sutskever was invited to dinner with Altman, Musk and others. That same year, they co-founded the nonprofit OpenAI, which aims to "benefit humanity." Sutskever saw this as an opportunity to seriously pursue general artificial intelligence (AGI). "I would say that researchers are somewhat trained to start small... But at OpenAI, we dare to think big ," he said earlier this year.

Wojciech Zaremba, another OpenAI co-founder, credits Sutskever with pushing the company to invest more effort in its generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) system after the launch of GPT-1 in 2018. Unlike many others at the time, Sutskever was convinced that these systems could be made smarter simply by increasing computing power. “He understood this before almost anyone else,” Hinton said.

To attract the funding needed for more computing power, the team switched OpenAI from a nonprofit to a “capped profit” model in 2019, attracting tech giant Microsoft to pour billions of dollars in cash and computing resources into it. This paid off: the model improved, and ChatGPT, which they released in November 2022, became a worldwide sensation.

Just after this success, on November 17 this year, Sutskever and other OpenAI board members fired Altman, causing internal chaos. Many employees threatened to defect to Microsoft with Altman. Later, Sutskever expressed regret for his actions. Five days later, when Altman rejoined the company, Sutskever was removed from the board.

Sutskever has consistently made bold statements about AI. In 2022, he proclaimed that AI might already have “some sentience,” prompting gasps, fears, and derision. He has publicly said that AGI and even “superintelligence” that surpasses the sum of human intelligence could be developed within years or decades. “To this day, I’m still amazed by his optimism,” says AI researcher Andrew Ng.

But Ng also said that Sutskever "has an admirable quality, which is that he can choose a direction and pursue it relentlessly, regardless of whether others agree with his views or not."

——By Nicola Jones

James Hamlin: Superconductivity Investigator

The physicist helped discover flaws in the sensational claims of room-temperature superconductivity.

James Hamlin recalls the first time he was fooled by an experiment. As a graduate student, Hamlin discovered superconductivity—a phenomenon in which electrons flow without resistance—in an unexpected material. He excitedly shared the news with his advisor, but he was unimpressed. “He asked me lots of questions and suggested more measurements,” Hamlin says. Upon further inspection, the superconducting signals were gone. He learned a straightforward lesson: “Don’t assume what you’ve discovered.”

That lesson was on display on the international stage this year, when Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, reported in the journal Nature that he had achieved the long-sought goal of room-temperature superconductivity at moderate pressures.

Amid the hype and criticism, Hamlin, who conducted high-pressure experiments at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Brad Ramshaw, a superconductivity researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, expressed their concerns about the study to Nature. The paper was retracted in November, causing a stir: it was Dias’ third retraction in just over a year.

Hamlin has repeatedly exposed problems in Dias' work. In 2020, Dias published a paper in Nature claiming to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductor, although it required higher pressures to achieve it. All currently known superconductors must be operated at extremely low temperatures or high pressures. A superconductor that can operate at room temperature and pressure could lead to imaginative applications, such as magnets for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that do not require expensive cooling equipment and efficient computer chips - these tantalizing possibilities have led to the hype around room-temperature superconductivity.

After Dias’ 2020 paper was published, Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, thought a measurement in the study looked fishy — and had similarities to a measurement in a 2009 paper co-authored by Hamlin. Prodded by Hirsch, Hamlin investigated his own work and found that another co-author, Matthew Debessai, had manipulated the data. (Debessai, who is no longer involved in the research, did not respond to a request for comment.) That paper was retracted in 2021, but Hamlin suspects that Dias’ 2020 study was also problematic.

It took Dias and co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, more than a year to publish the data Hirsch wanted. Analyses by Hirsch, Hamlin, and others found evidence of manipulation. In September 2022, Nature retracted the work; the retraction statement did not mention misconduct, and Dias denied the allegations of misconduct.

Hamlin also found that Dias had plagiarized his own work and that of others in his paper—and that Dias had reused some of the paper’s data in a later paper in Physical Review Letters. That paper was retracted in August. (Although Dias disagreed with the retraction, he acknowledged that he had not provided “clear attribution” for some of the material in the paper.)

In March, Hamlin presented his evidence at a virtual symposium, where some observers expressed “shock” at the work he had done, says Brian Skinner, a physicist at Ohio State University in Columbus and a conference organizer. At some point, without access to the raw resistance data, Hamlin created a tool to extract data directly from Dias’s graphs. “It was pretty heroic,” Skinner says.

This controversial background is why many researchers were surprised when Nature published a second paper by Dias in March, which also claimed to have achieved room-temperature superconductivity, albeit in a different material.

This time, a large amount of raw data was publicly available, and questions quickly emerged online. Ramshaw and Hamlin focused on some core issues, including whether Dias actually measured the resistance to zero.

In subsequent back-and-forth discussions with Ramshaw, Hamlin, and Nature editors, Dias and his co-author Salamat did not explain how they obtained this measurement. “We could not get a clear answer to this very simple question,” Hamlin said. The Nature news team contacted Dias and Salamat for comment but did not receive a response.

Then, in September, eight of the 11 authors of the paper, including Salamat, called for a retraction, confirming the concerns raised by Hamlin and Ramshaw. Nature retracted the paper on 7 November, citing concerns about the integrity of the data.

Hamlin and Ramshaw say data availability made the latest retraction easier: It took only six months, rather than two years.

Shanti Deemyad, a high-pressure experimentalist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, mentored Hamlin in his lab as an undergraduate. She wasn’t surprised by his dedication. “He was very ambitious and very excited,” she said. “He wanted to know all the details.” Even when she arrived at the lab at 6:30 in the morning, Hamlin was there, eager to learn.

Hamlin is not a full-time investigator, and he is eager to spend more time on his own superconductivity research. “It’s still the most exciting topic in physics to me,” he said. “Human nonsense is much less interesting than discovering the secrets of nature.”

——By Dan Garisto

Svetlana Mojsov: The unknown drug developer

How a biochemist finally got recognition for his role in developing a multi-billion dollar weight-loss drug.

A new class of weight-loss drugs has rapidly entered the clinic, making drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy household names, generating billions of dollars in profits for the pharmaceutical industry and earning scientific acclaim for the researchers who discovered the hormone behind the drugs, an appetite suppressant called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1).

Yet one early pioneer has not received the recognition she deserves : Svetlana Mojsov. Now a biochemist at Rockefeller University in New York City, she played a key role in identifying and describing the active form of GLP-1. Yet her efforts have been overlooked in many accounts of hormone discovery, and she has not shared in the scientific awards that have been bestowed upon her achievements.

This year, Mojsov challenged those entrenched narratives — and began to win wider recognition for her contributions to the field. “All I’ve done is to correct the scientific record,” she says.

The scientist, now in her seventies, was a member of the endocrinology department at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston in the 1980s, where she also headed a facility that made synthetic proteins for use within the department and beyond, during which time she conducted a series of landmark studies and provided others with the tools they needed to conduct their own research.

Her work with GLP-1 began with her prediction that a specific version of the hormone should be present in mammalian intestinal tissue, which she then confirmed experimentally (S. Mojsov et al. J. Biol. Chem. 261, 11880–11889; 1986). She then demonstrated that this biologically active form of GLP-1 could trigger insulin release from the rat pancreas (S. Mojsov et al. J. Clin. Invest. 79, 616–619; 1987).

The peptides and antibodies that Mojsov created were also critical to several other GLP-1 experiments then being conducted in cell lines and enabled clinicians to demonstrate that GLP-1 could lower blood sugar in early human trials.

These studies laid the foundation for drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which contain a GLP-1 analog called semaglutide. It has only minor changes to the peptide outlined in Mojsov's original paper; these changes improve stability and ensure a longer-lasting effect. Global sales of semaglutide now exceed $1 billion per month, and the drug class is expected to become one of the best-selling drugs of all time.

However, Mojsov’s role in the discovery process was long overlooked.

She had to fight a lengthy legal battle to get her name added as a co-inventor to the foundational patent, a move that earned Mojsov a year or two of royalties from sales of the first-generation GLP-1 drug. But with her patent long expired, she received no financial benefit from the massive profits from semaglutide.

Mojsov began to resent the lack of recognition. History, she said, was being “manipulated.” She believed, for example, that commentaries published to accompany the awards overstated the contributions of some winners and downplayed her efforts .

“That was the moment I decided to fight back,” Mojsov said. She began speaking out.

At her urging, journals such as Cell and Nature revised their accounts of the discovery of GLP-1 to better reflect Mojsov’s involvement at MGH—one of two places that independently focused on and described the hormone’s active form, the other being the University of Copenhagen. In September 2023, two extensive profiles in Science magazine and the news outlet STAT finally told her story, some 40 years after she began studying GLP-1.

Since then, she has received email after email expressing support — from fellow scientists, especially women who feel their work is similarly marginalized, and from people frustrated by the hierarchy of biomedical research.

The attention focused on Mojsov is also starting to change the minds of some in the early GLP-1 research community.

“She has a point,” says Joel Habener, a molecular endocrinologist at MGH. Habener has collaborated with Mojsov and is listed as a senior author on all of her seminal papers, but was the sole patent holder until Mojsov corrected the patent. “She definitely deserves recognition,” he says.

In past reports about the discovery, Mojsov was incorrectly described as a scientist in Habener's group rather than an independent researcher whose efforts helped advance the MGH work. "Her contribution was critical," says Richard Goodman, a molecular neurobiologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who helped decode the gene for the GLP-1 precursor as a postdoc with Habener. "Without Mojsov, would it have moved forward? No."

Although awards and the prestige they bring may come with them, they are not a priority for Mojsov, who will continue to study GLP-1 and related proteins in her lab.

“I’m just happy that my work is recognized,” she said. “Everything else is secondary.”

——By Elie Dolgin

Halidou Tinto: Malaria fighter

A second vaccine for a deadly disease is on the horizon, thanks to this researcher's rigorous testing.

Halido Tinto’s work and life collided in October 2020 when his six-year-old daughter came down with malaria. Having worked as a clinical trial director for malaria drugs and vaccines for more than a decade, Tinto knows the severity of the disease. His daughter was hospitalized for four days with fever, headaches, and vomiting, and although she recovered, he said “it was really serious.”

That same month, the vaccine he had been testing, R21, was recommended for use by the World Health Organization (WHO). It was the second malaria vaccine to be approved, and many believe it could prevent millions of deaths in Africa, where there are more than 200 million cases and half a million deaths each year, mostly among children under the age of five .

Many scientists credit Tinto's diligence with being key to the success of the institution he directs, the Clinical Research Unit (CRUN) in Nanoro, Burkina Faso, which is a key site for testing R21, its predecessor RTS,S, and several other drugs.

Tinto earned his doctorate at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, studying malaria resistance to various drugs. His then-mentor, Umberto D'Alessandro, now a clinical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said Tinto had both the rigor of a scientist and a commitment to his craft. "He really wanted to promote science and research in Africa," D'Alessandro said.

Tinto had the opportunity to do postdoctoral research at a university in the United States, but chose to return to Burkina Faso in 2006. There, he helped establish CRUN with local scientists and clinicians.

In 2007, pharmaceutical company GSK and its partners were preparing to conduct late-stage clinical trials for the RTS,S vaccine—a vaccine that had been years in the making. For Tinto’s new clinic, which had only 10 employees, being part of the trial seemed like a far-fetched dream. “They were surprised by our application,” he says, “because there was no electricity, no cars, nothing.” Still, Tinto convinced the coordinators.

He met the village king and together they convinced the Burkina Faso government to connect Nanoro to the grid. The data provided by CRUN helped get RTS,S approved in Africa.

The vaccine has been linked to significant drops in child mortality. But GSK can only make a few million doses a year. Even if Burkina Faso gets a million of those doses, Tinto says that would only vaccinate 250,000 children a year. “We still have millions of children,” he says. That’s why people are excited about R21: India’s Serum Institute in Pune is currently able to produce 100 million doses a year. Compared with RTS,S, R21 will be more affordable, and some researchers expect it to be more effective.

Tinto conducted an influential early study of the vaccine from 2019 (MS Datoo et al. Lancet 397, 1809 1818; 2021). “The trial he led really made people in the field think that this vaccine would be different,” says Adrian Hill, a vaccinologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who oversaw the development of R21.

The WHO says R21 will be rolled out across Africa by mid-2024. Meanwhile, Tinto is conducting more than 30 clinical trials, including two other malaria vaccines and more studies on R21.

CRUN has outgrown Nanoro and now has more than 400 employees and partners, including dozens of graduate students from across Africa. Tinto still works with D'Alessandro, and he says it's a great example of how research can contribute to development in Africa. But what motivates Tinto most is the opportunity to save lives. "Nothing is more satisfying than this, because for me, life is the most important thing."

——By Brendan Maher

Thomas Powles: Cancer Explorer

The physician and cancer researcher is leading a transformative clinical trial for treating a serious form of bladder cancer.

When Thomas Powles looked at data from a clinical trial for advanced bladder cancer, he could hardly believe what he saw. “I thought there was going to be something wrong,” says Powles, a cancer researcher at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. But he didn’t.

Compared with traditional chemotherapy, the combination of two new drugs appears to extend patients' average survival time from about 16 months to 2.5 years. When Powles presented the data at the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Madrid in October, the audience twice broke into applause. "That was really moving," Powles said.

"This trial is undoubtedly the most significant breakthrough we've had in treating advanced bladder cancer in the last 40 years or so," said bladder cancer researcher Eila Skinner of Stanford University in California. The drug combination is the first to outperform standard treatment since the 1980s.

Funda Meric-Bernstam, a cancer researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said the exciting results add to a growing body of research highlighting the promise of a recently developed class of treatments called antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). ADCs consist of a specific tumor cell-targeting antibody combined with a toxic chemotherapy drug. Studies in other cancer types have also shown that ADCs can slow tumor growth and prolong survival in treated patients, Meric-Bernstam said. "I think ADCs are going to be the next pillar of cancer care. It's clear that we're going to be able to change treatment outcomes for multiple tumor types. "

The bladder cancer trial tested an ADC called enfortumab vedotin, which targets a protein called nectin-4 that is abundant on bladder cancer cells, in combination with another immunotherapy drug, pembrolizumab, which disarms the suppression of anti-cancer immune cells.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for patients who are not suitable for a certain type of chemotherapy called cisplatin, which includes about half of patients with advanced bladder cancer.

The drug could be approved for wider use early next year, says Guru Sonpavde, a bladder cancer researcher at Advent Health Cancer Institute in Orlando, Florida.

Powles almost became a cardiologist after completing his medical training. But he realized there was more opportunity for discovery in bladder cancer. “People have been getting the same treatment for 20 years. The life expectancy is 12 months, and unfortunately almost everyone dies from the disease,” he says. “Only a very small fraction of it is depicted on this map.”

He has led more than 20 randomized clinical trials, several of which are focused on applying advanced immunotherapy drugs to kidney and bladder cancers. Many trials failed to show improvements, but Powles persisted, believing there was a way to improve survival. The biggest challenge was convincing research funders to invest. "Sometimes we run into storms on this journey, but even with failed trials, we're discovering new things," Powles said.

Sonpavde, who has known Powles for more than a decade, said he has a knack for coming up with good ideas and executing them. “A lot of people have ideas,” he said, but they “don’t get executed.”

Powles enjoys traveling and painting in his spare time. He has been working on a series of aerial cityscapes that reflect his love of depicting complex systems. “I can get lost in them. If I’m having a bad day, I’ll tweak one of them,” he said.

But beyond the thirst for discovery, Powles said he is driven by the patients he treats. “The patients who participate in these trials really make extraordinary sacrifices,” he added.

——By Carissa Wong

Original link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03919-1