Nature released the "Top Ten Scientists of 2022", and Peking University's Cao Yunlong was on the list for "tracking the evolution of the new coronavirus"

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Today, the top scientific journal Nature announced its 2022 list of Nature's 10 - a list that aims to select 10 people who have a place in all major scientific events of the year.

“In a year of crisis and astonishing discoveries, this year’s top ten figures in Nature’s science include astronomers who are helping us explore the most distant parts of the universe, researchers who have played a vital role in the COVID-19 pandemic and monkeypox outbreaks, and surgeons who have pushed the limits of organ transplants,” said Rich Monastersky, Nature’s features editor.

This year's list also includes some names with a stake in the development of climate change and other global crises. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on countries to actively respond to crises such as climate change; Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh, helped secure a commitment from wealthy countries to bear the "losses and damages" caused by climate change at last month's international climate talks.

In addition, Nature also selected several people who have made outstanding contributions to global public health issues. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, Cao Yunlong, a genomics researcher at Peking University, helped track the evolution of the coronavirus and predicted some of the mutations that led to new variants; Lisa McCorkell is a researcher with "long COVID". As a founding member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, she helped raise public awareness of the disease and raised research funds; Dimie Ogoina is an infectious disease physician at Niger Delta University in Nigeria. His research on the monkeypox infectious disease in Nigeria provided key information on fighting the monkeypox epidemic.

Muhammad Mohiuddin, a surgeon at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, led a team to complete the first human transplant of a genetically modified pig heart; Jane Rigby, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, played a key role in the mission of the Webb Space Telescope to enter space and operate normally, bringing humanity's ability to explore the universe to a new level.

Monastersky said, "The stories of Nature's top ten people condense some of the most important scientific events in this extraordinary year from a unique perspective." 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.

Astronomy Hunter Jane Rigby: The Universe Will Not Reject Me

She played a key role in getting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) into space and functioning properly, providing new energy for humanity's exploration of the universe.

Of the hundreds of things that could go wrong with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which successfully launched on December 25, 2021, Jane Rigby kept thinking about one nightmare scenario. As the $10 billion telescope unfolds in deep space, it must have a secondary mirror in front of the giant primary mirror to capture photons and transmit them back to Earth.

"That's what scares me the most, that without the secondary mirror, this beautiful golden mirror could focus light everywhere," said Rigby, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Despite her poor eyesight, over the course of a month her team perfectly deployed the secondary mirror and all other components for JWST. She then led the effort to evaluate the telescope’s performance. The mission’s success exceeded almost everyone’s expectations. From releasing its first eye-popping images to discovering distant galaxies and exoplanet atmospheres, JWST dominated astronomy headlines in 2022. Rigby played a key role among the thousands of astronomers who worked over decades to get JWST into space.

Growing up in rural Delaware, Rigby read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series and the story of American astrophysicist Sally Ride’s journey to becoming an astronaut. She couldn’t fly the space shuttle because of her short stature, so she became an astronomer. She bought a second-hand telescope and took it to the fields at night, welding and tinkering with it with her father, a physics teacher.

She began her astronomy research as an undergraduate using data from the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. When she started graduate school at the University of Arizona, she analyzed observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. "When you set up the best telescope, you can't help but discover something new," she said.

At the time, however, it was far from clear that JWST would succeed. Since it was conceived in 1989, the project has been challenged by schedule delays and soaring costs. In 2010, as all the problems with the telescope worsened, she turned down two other job offers to commit to the project. “The science was so compelling,” she says. Part of her job was to figure out how to restore capabilities that had been cut as a result of JWST’s ballooning budget.

Twelve years later, the telescope’s launch took place at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, as the team has done time and again. As the telescope separated from the rocket and extended its solar arrays to generate electricity, she clearly heard “there’s electricity on the array,” and she said, “It’s hard to imagine how much joy was contained in that statement.”

Once the five-month commissioning of the telescope began, Rigby played a key role in measuring and understanding the background light that seeped into JWST observations, since JWST is not enclosed in a tube like Hubble. “She worked very hard every day” to reduce the uncertainty of how much background light was affecting the telescope’s data, said Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. This gave astronomers confidence that their measurements were accurate.

On July 12, Rigby published the first paper on JWST’s scientific results. That week, she unveiled the telescope’s first images at the White House with U.S. President Joe Biden. Since then, she has become a staple at scientific presentations and press conferences related to the telescope’s results.

COVID-19 Prophet Cao Yunlong: Only by making effective predictions can you prove that you understand this system

His rich descriptions of new variants allow researchers to track the evolution of the new coronavirus.

At the end of 2019, Cao Yunlong returned to China from the United States, hoping to continue his research on single-cell genomics. But shortly after he took up the position of research assistant at Peking University, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

At that time, Cao Yunlong and his mentor, biophysical chemist Xie Xiaoliang, found that their laboratory was without technicians and students. Faced with the "shutdown", Cao Yunlong realized that he could use his expertise to study antibodies in the immune response to the new coronavirus. "I never thought I would be engaged in immunology and virology," Cao Yunlong said.

Now, as scientists watch COVID-19 ravage the world—carrying with it variants of the coronavirus derived from Omicron—Cao’s work offers a glimmer of hope about the rapid evolution of leading viruses. By meticulously probing the human body’s antibodies, his team was able to predict many of the mutations that define this “swarm.”

“This is an absolute tour de force,” says Laura Walker, an immunologist and chief scientific officer at the biopharmaceutical company Invivid, who has also been trying to predict Omicron evolution. “We are humbled by the depth and breadth of their work.”

Cao Yunlong, who leads much of the COVID-19 work in Xie Xiaoliang's group, screens COVID-19 patients for antibodies that could be used for treatment. The team worked with a Chinese pharmaceutical company to pick the two most potent infection-blocking antibodies and began testing them in COVID-19 patients.

Early results looked good, but after South African scientists discovered the Beta variant in late 2020, the drug stopped working, and the pharmaceutical company stopped developing it. “I started thinking, ‘Damn, there has to be a better way,’” Cao said.

Rather than developing treatments based on the strongest antibodies, he wondered, perhaps it would be possible to identify which antibodies are most resilient to viral mutations. He was inspired by the work of Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, which described how nearly every possible change to the receptor-binding domain of the coronavirus spike protein (a combination of about 4,000 amino acids) affects its ability to attach to and infect host cells.

However, this study only involved one protein. Cao Yunlong wanted to do the same type of research to track how viruses evolve to evade hundreds or thousands of antibodies. Cao Yunlong said that if traditional techniques were used, this would take years, so he developed a high-throughput method that could be achieved in weeks.

The research work of Cao Yunlong's team shows in detail how the virus responds to antibody pressure. It also identifies the mutations that provide the greatest effect in evading immunity. This approach allows Cao Yunlong's team to study how different variants affect the antibodies people produce. For example, those who recovered from Omicron BA.1 produced neutralizing antibodies that could be overcome by the spike protein mutations that appeared in Omicron BA.5, which swept across the United States in the first half of this year.

Cao Yunlong's team predicted the key mutations of the currently circulating variants by studying the antibodies of recovered patients with BA.5 and BA.2. These predictions enabled the research team to assess the ability of viral variants to evade immunity after they were identified, which was usually a few weeks earlier than other teams. "I believe this is the first time we are ahead of the virus," Cao Yunlong said.

Bloom said his team has been at the forefront of generating experimental data on new variants and rapidly sharing that information through preprints, social media and virus-tracking websites.

Now, Cao and his colleagues are seeking to design new antibody therapies to identify those that are best able to protect against the disease.

Climate Revolutionist Saleemul Huq: This is definitely a red line and we are ready to cross it

He has helped force wealthy countries to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change.

In the final hours of last month's United Nations climate change conference in Egypt, exhausted delegates slumped on sofas outside the formal meeting room. But Saleemul Huq did not. He sat upright, scrolling through messages on his phone.

A final text for the conference has yet to be agreed. Huq told Nature that he believes government negotiators attending the meeting will eventually agree to a new climate fund that would pay for “loss and damage” in vulnerable countries. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s coming.”

And so it is. The final agreement signed in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh includes a provision for a loss and damage fund to help low-income countries cope with the effects of climate change. The provision, nearly 30 years in the making, is aimed at getting the world’s historically highest carbon emitters to acknowledge that they have some financial responsibility for lower-emitting nations facing devastation as temperatures continue to rise. For more than a decade, the unofficial leader of the movement has been Huq, a plant biologist who now heads the International Center for Climate Change and Development.

“Responsibility for loss and damage, not aid, should be the answer,” Huq said. It’s based on the “polluter pays” principle. That’s why this clause was opposed before the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which produced today’s climate agreement. “When money is given as aid, all the power is in the hands of the donor.” It’s an unequal relationship, he added.

He grew up in Europe, Africa and Asia, where his parents served in diplomatic posts, and developed a passion for science, moving to London 50 years ago to study biochemistry before pursuing a doctorate at Imperial College London. Huq later returned to Bangladesh and co-founded the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) with Atiq Rahman, an independent think tank focused on environmental policy. Bangladesh is perennially affected by environmental disasters, especially floods. Huq and his colleagues pushed the government to set up an environment department, with BCAS to guide the research. Mirza Shawkat Ali, the government's climate change chief, said BCAS helped the department write Bangladesh's first environmental action plan.

Huq led a global network of experts working on community-based adaptation for development, said Lisa Schipper, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford in the U.K. The long-standing concept, pioneered in Bangladesh, focuses on helping rural communities find research-based solutions to their problems, such as improving flood resilience or adjusting cropping patterns to cope with climate change.

Communities “need to take the reins,” Huq believes.

By the 1990s, he was actively involved in international climate negotiations, serving as an advisor to climate-vulnerable countries, especially small island states, helping them get their demands on the UN negotiating agenda. The idea of ​​funding loss and damage gained traction in the years before the 2015 Paris climate agreement, said Achala Abeysinghe, an environmental lawyer working at the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul, who worked with Huq on advising climate-vulnerable countries. Huq's strategy, she said, was to convince more countries to accept the loss and damage case, "so that the least developed countries and small island states are no longer alone." But persuading wealthy countries with high emissions is a difficult task.

The Paris climate talks in 2015 achieved an initial breakthrough. Article 8 of the final agreement explicitly uses the term: “The Parties recognize the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.” But getting those words into the text was not easy, Abeysinghe says. “If we insist on including loss and damage, we will be blamed if the treaty fails. But it is definitely a red line. We are prepared to cross it.”

Huq was met with the same response from the European Union and the United States in Sharm el-Sheikh. But he said that as some of the world's richest countries tried to exclude the commitment from the treaty, the advocates of loss and damage were reaffirming their stance. "We did not blink."

Climate voice Svitlana Krakovska: No one can tell the same story as me

She linked the Russia-Ukraine war to climate change, calling it a "fossil fuel war."

On February 24, Svitlana Krakovska could hear missiles falling near Kiev while she sat in her apartment, holding a video conference with representatives from 93 countries. Delegates attending a meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were presenting a much-anticipated report on the effects of global warming. Krakovska didn’t know what to do, whether to use the meeting to protest the Russian-Ukrainian war.

“I understand that the IPCC is not a political body, and I don’t want to go against it,” said Krakovska, who runs the Applied Climate Laboratory at the Ukrainian Institute of Hydrometeorology in Kyiv. “But this is a special case.”

The bombing forced Krakovska to withdraw from most of the IPCC meetings; she, her husband and four children, were preparing to survive the war. But after three days of deliberation, she decided to speak at the closing plenary session. “I was angry,” she said.

“Human-caused climate change and the Russo-Ukrainian war have a direct link and the same root causes: they are both fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on them,” she told delegates. “The ease with which energy can be obtained from burning coal, oil and gas has changed the balance of power in our world.”

Krakovska and her family have not moved out of Kiev since, in part because her father was seriously ill and lived in a nursing home before his death in April. But the international attention following the IPCC conference changed her life. A friend convinced her to accept invitations to speak at major events around the world. This put Krakovska in the public eye as a climate activist; she has called the war between Russia and Ukraine a “fossil fuel war.”

Krakowska did not start her career in climate science: she attended her first IPCC meeting nine years ago. Born in Kiev in 1969, she studied meteorology in St. Petersburg and later became a cloud physicist, working on cloud seeding experiments to increase precipitation in the Ukrainian steppes.

As a postdoc in the early 2000s, she discovered the emerging field of regional climate modeling and became the first scientist to apply it in Ukraine, where she found that many people—including some scientists—were dismissive of the threat of climate change, either disbelieving it or arguing that it wouldn’t have much of an impact on a country far from the oceans, tropics, or polar regions.

At the 2013 IPCC meeting, she was impressed to see that rigorous science could be understood by policymakers. When the scientists spoke, everyone listened. “I’m not used to people listening to me so carefully.”

She then persuaded other Ukrainian scientists to join the IPCC, including their ecologist Yakiv Didukh, who praised her “charisma” and “humility.” The experience boosted the scientist’s influence at home: last October, senior Ukrainian ministers approved a strategy for environmental security and adaptation to climate change until 2030.

After the February conference, Krakovska left Ukraine to speak at events such as the European Geosciences Union in Vienna and the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In September, she moderated a virtual session on rebuilding Ukrainian science at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. She also participated in a side event at the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Back in chilly Kiev, she continues to work on climate change projections for Ukraine and hopes to hold a postponed webinar to explain the IPCC report.

All around her, Ukrainian citizens, including scientists, are struggling. Some 131 Ukrainian universities and colleges have been damaged in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and 22 have been destroyed; more than 50 research institutions have been damaged or destroyed, said Olga Polotska, executive director of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine in Kiev. Some 1,300 scientists at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine have also left the country.

Ko Barrett, vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and senior climate change adviser at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C., praised Yakiv Didukh’s decision to speak out in February. “We are scientists, but we are also human,” she said. “No one else can tell the same story in her shoes.”

Monkeypox Watcher Dimie Ogoina: Very focused and motivated

His research helped other parts of the world fight the monkeypox virus.

When Dimie Ogoina first heard in May that the monkeypox virus was spreading around the world, he had a sense of déjà vu. The virus had emerged in his native Nigeria in 2017 for the first time in nearly 40 years, causing more than 700 confirmed and suspected cases.

During that outbreak, Ogoina was the first person to diagnose a confirmed case of the disease, which the World Health Organization renamed MPOX last November.

As with the current outbreak, which has now infected more than 82,000 people worldwide and killed 65, the 2017 outbreak appeared to be concentrated in urban areas and young and middle-aged adult males. This is different from the spread of previous MPOX, which has typically occurred in rural areas and among children, often due to contact with infected wild animals.

Ogoina played a key role in detailing the pathogen’s spread in Nigeria, noting the atypical genital swellings it caused. Children seemed to be spared, even in some families with infections. In 2019, on that basis, he and his colleagues argued that the virus might be spread through sexual contact, and perhaps much more efficiently than from person to person. He tried to convince people, but with little success. “People didn’t want to take it seriously,” he says.

While it’s not clear whether the virus is strictly sexually transmitted — through blood, semen, or other body fluids — it’s clear that it can easily spread through sexual contact. Ogoina’s MPox research has been cited hundreds of times since the global outbreak of monkeypox. It informed health officials about the role of sexual contact and helped speed the development of education and vaccination campaigns in high-income countries, says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been involved in tracking and controlling MPox in the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than 20 years. “Ogoina has been a leader in the field,” she says. “His findings were so important that they should have alerted the world.”

Mpox isn’t Ogoina’s first foray into viruses. Since becoming an infectious disease doctor more than a decade ago, he has been at the forefront of Nigeria’s research into other infectious diseases, including HIV and Ebola. “He’s a very focused and motivated person,” says Rosemary Audu, a virologist and research leader at the Nigerian Institute for Medical Research.

But now, even as the global outbreak is waning — new cases are averaging less than 100 a week worldwide, about 10 times lower than in August — the situation on the ground in Nigeria has not changed significantly. In West and Central Africa, the drugs, vaccines and surveillance resources needed to control the spread of the virus in high-income countries remain out of reach.

Publications about mpox have spread rapidly over the past year, but Ogoina said he fears that new attention and funding for mpox will soon dry up and the disease will revert to being confined to countries in Central and West Africa.

So he made it his mission to delve deeper into and stop the disease. His country has confirmed 624 infections so far in 2022, but Ogoina considers that a "gross underestimate." He says that without a clear picture of who has the virus and how they became infected, Nigerian health officials are flying "completely blind" in their efforts to contain the virus.

He also warned the rest of the world not to continue to be complacent about the spread of MPox in Africa, otherwise it will "come back" again.

Lisa McCorkell, a long-term COVID advocate, strives to put patients at the forefront of all types of research

Despite the disruption to daily life, she still puts patients at the center of research on "long COVID-19."

As a graduate student, Lisa McCorkell studied how to address some of the biggest challenges in social policy, including food poverty and social safety nets. But there was one topic she avoided: health care. “I thought it was too complicated,” she said. “I tried to stay away from it.”

However, she has since spent much of her time on health care policy. After contracting COVID-19 in 2020, she became a victim of "long COVID," a condition that continues to affect her daily life. Later that year, she and four other women with the disease founded the Patient-Led Research Collaborative to try to study and inform the condition.

This year, even as the pandemic has fallen off the agenda in many countries, the group has continued to grow in membership and influence. It has introduced a $4.8 million fund for research projects, with recipients chosen by a group of people who have had Covid.

McCorkell has driven critical research into long COVID; last year, she testified before the U.S. Congress about the needs of people with the disease. “We’re trying to put patients at the forefront of all types of treatment,” McCorkell said. “We’re letting patients determine our research priorities and where these funds go.”

This collaborative approach is particularly well suited to COVID-19: From the beginning, patients must take charge of their own health care and design their own treatment plans. Letícia Soares, from Salvador, Brazil, said the confusion and fear were very isolating. "Talking to people who have been through similar experiences as me is the only way to get through it emotionally, to stay alive and to see a way forward," she said.

McCorkell and her collaborators were frustrated that there had been no key studies on the condition. So they decided to conduct their own research. In 2020, they surveyed people with long Covid about their experiences and set up a Google Doc to share the results. “It got quite a bit of attention and helped put long Covid on the table as a problem,” McCorkell says.

Later, the collaboration and research have expanded beyond the scope of Google Docs. Last year, the group released a landmark report documenting more than 200 symptoms. Members of the collaborative have served on advisory boards for "long COVID" research projects, including the National Institutes of Health's $1 billion RECOVER project. "It's remarkable what they've done in such a short period of time," said Kelly O'Brien, a physical therapist at the University of Toronto in Canada. O'Brien worked with the group on a study on symptom fluctuations. McCorkel said she and co-founder Hannah Wei played an important role in refining the study, making it more feasible for people with "long COVID" to participate in the study.

Currently, they are conducting research on the impact of COVID-19 reinfection on "long COVID" and advocating to study this condition in low- and middle-income countries. This year, the partnership began distributing $4.8 million awarded by Balvi, a fund established by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin to support high-impact COVID-related projects.

Soares said the organization's staff maintains flexible work schedules to cope with recurring symptoms. "Our work styles are very out of sync, and we prioritize the health of our employees above all else," McCorkell said.

Meanwhile, McCorkell’s own agenda was in flux. As she reached out to government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she realized that people with long Covid were just part of a broader group of people with disabilities who needed a voice. “I’m hopeful that we can move forward into the future by making disability justice a lens into any policymaking.”

Abortion fact-finder Diana Greene Foster: Ready and willing to hear unwelcome results

After the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, she began tracking its aftermath.

While attending the National Abortion Federation’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, Diana Greene Foster saw a leaked draft of the ruling the U.S. Supreme Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade in May. “My phone was blowing up,” said Foster, an abortion researcher and demographer at the University of California, San Francisco.

The decision wasn’t entirely unexpected. In fact, Foster was so concerned that the Supreme Court would undermine the landmark 1973 ruling protecting abortion rights that she had begun planning a study to see what effect the ruling would have on the states most likely to ban abortion. But it still felt like a gut punch. “I hope that study never needs to be done,” she said.

Foster, noting that the draft ruling made no mention of the extensive research on abortion outcomes that she and others had presented to the court, vowed to make sure scientific evidence was part of the conversation. She spent the next day on the phone with reporters.

For more than two decades, Foster has studied access to contraceptives and the effectiveness of family planning programs. But she’s best known for her research on the effects of having (or being denied) an abortion on a person’s mental, physical and economic health. Called the Turnaway Study, it was inspired by an offhand comment she heard from an abortion provider in 2006: “I wonder what happens to the women we turn away?”

Foster realized that by tracking outcomes for people who were denied abortions, she could finally answer the question: Does abortion cause harm? Previous studies have looked at outcomes for people who have children and those who have abortions. But “the only reasonable comparison group is people who want an abortion but can’t,” Foster said. No one had done that comparison before.

“We haven’t really come up with a rigorous way to document the effects of abortion itself on people,” said Lauren Ralph, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the study with Foster. “She really came up with this beautiful and innovative design.”

Foster and her team convinced 30 abortion providers across the country to recruit women who came to the clinic for abortions, as well as those who were denied abortions because they missed the facility's designated deadline. Through more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, the research showed that receiving an abortion does not harm a woman's health or well-being. However, being denied an abortion can lead to negative economic and health outcomes and harm families. Women who were denied an abortion were more likely to live in poverty, raise their children alone, and experience life-threatening complications related to the birth of their children.

For example, one analysis that matched a subset of Turnaway participants with their credit scores showed that women who were turned away from abortion clinics experienced greater financial hardship and faced increased negative events such as bankruptcy and eviction than those who were allowed in.

Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economist at Middlebury College in Vermont, was initially skeptical of the Turnaway Study’s design. She thought people who waited until it was too late to get an abortion might already be struggling financially. But Foster’s credit score analysis showed that the two groups were similar “until a critical time in their lives,” Myers said. “Then they diverge dramatically.”

Foster’s next study, launched just days after Roe v. Wade was formally overturned in June, will compare those who had successful abortions in the two weeks before state bans took effect with those who planned for abortions but were unable to get them. In the Turnaway Study, women who were denied abortions had few other options for terminating their pregnancies. “But with these bans, the question is who can actually circumvent state laws,” Foster says. The study will also consider transgender and nonbinary people who seek abortions; these people were not tracked in the Turnaway Study.

Katie Watson, a lawyer and bioethicist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has always been struck by Foster’s relentless pursuit of the facts. “She’s a true scientist. She’s ready and willing to hear unpopular results.” When policymakers and activists make assertions without supporting evidence, Watson said, “her life’s work is to fact-check them.”

Foster hopes the evidence she gathers in the coming months will help policymakers decide whether to change their states’ restrictions on abortion. The Supreme Court may have ignored the science, but Foster hopes states won’t. “I’m absolutely confident that when the state level makes that decision, they’ll have data on the consequences for families.”

Crisis diplomat António Guterres: I have great faith in human solidarity

He embraced his role as the world's conscience.

In November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a fiery speech to world leaders attending the UN climate summit. “We are on the highway to climate hell, and our foot is still on the gas,” he told the delegates. “Our planet is in the emergency room.”

Bold public statements as the voice of human conscience have become a hallmark of Guterres, who believes failure is failure. In a 2015 interview with the BBC, the then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees said, “The world is in chaos.”

Most of these calls have focused on environmental issues, aimed at serving the interests of low-income countries and setting global priorities. But his quiet diplomacy behind the scenes has also helped avert this year's food crisis, according to insiders.

During the Russo-Ukrainian war, hostilities blocked the shipment of millions of tons of food from both countries, which normally accounts for at least 30 percent of all wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil exported to global markets. About 90 percent of Ukraine’s exports normally pass through the Black Sea, but when hostilities block shipping, it can cause food prices to soar and millions of people to go hungry.

Guterres and other U.N. officials, working with outside partners, helped broker negotiations to establish a protected corridor for food shipments.

“A lot of it had to be arranged not only by him personally but by many other officials,” said David Malone, president of the United Nations University. “Despite some harsh words he said before and after, he did go to Moscow and explain the situation, and there’s no doubt that his intervention was a factor.”

Food prices fell 10 percent after the agreement was signed, and since then nearly 11 million tons of grain and other foods have passed through the Black Sea.

The feat was a testament to the power of "prudent diplomacy in finding multilateral solutions," Guterres wrote on Twitter. It also countered critics who say his approach to complex global crises is overly cautious and all talk and no action.

Guterres acquired his negotiating skills during a long career in public service: he previously served two terms as Portugal’s prime minister.

While carrying out internal reforms, he continues to urge world leaders to address global issues. “Guterres has been a strong and important voice on climate change and biodiversity,” said Måns Nilsson, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute. “He has used his convening power to mobilize heads of government and especially business leaders to take action on climate change.”

In November, as countries reached an impasse in climate negotiations, Guterres urged countries to pass a Climate Solidarity Pact that commits wealthy countries to help accelerate the global transition to renewable energy. Despite the challenges facing the world, Guterres still sees hope for the future. In November, as the global population passed 8 billion, he said: "I never bet against human ingenuity. I have great faith in human solidarity."

Transplant pioneer Muhammad Mohiuddin: I lived and died with that patient

He and his team transplanted the first gene-edited pig heart into a human.

On a snowy January night, Muhammad Mohiuddin, reluctant to risk driving home for an hour, slept in the office of the University of Maryland Medical School of Baltimore. If the weather continues to get worse, the transplant surgeon fears he might miss the historic surgery scheduled for the next morning: the first time a gene-edited pig heart transplanted into the human body.

The surgery will achieve decades of work by Mohiuddin and others, whose goal is to make pigs the source of organs for patients waiting for transplants. It is well known that xenogeneic organ transplants were first proposed centuries ago, but the idea was abandoned when it became clear that the body quickly rejects organs from other species. However, advances in gene editing technology have allowed researchers to remove specific pig proteins and sugars that trigger the human immune system, thus making the organ more compatible. Some companies have also begun raising genetically modified pigs for this purpose.

Like many other scientists, Mohiuddin has applied to the FDA to allow testing of xenografts in clinical trials. Regulators have been asking for more data on GM pig organ studies in non-human primates.

Then, in December 2021, Mohiuddin and Bartley Griffith, a surgeon who also came from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, found a solution. A 57-year-old man, David Bennett, was bedridden for two months due to heart failure. He also couldn’t get a human heart and would definitely die soon. Mohiuddin and his team realized that Bennett’s condition qualifies him for experimental treatment—including xenografts.

Bennett agreed to the procedure, and Mohiuddin and his colleagues sent their dozens of experiments on transplanting pig organs into baboons over the next few weeks to the FDA. The team then needed approval from ethicists, funding from the university system, and blood samples from all participants (collected before and after the surgery) to ensure no one was infected with the pig pathogen. Four psychiatrists confirmed that Bennett was in good spirits when he signed the consent form.

Finally, on New Year's Eve, the FDA approved the emergency surgery, and the surgical team set the operation on January 7. In the weeks after the operation, multiple infections made Bennett's already vulnerable state even more vulnerable. Later, the team learned that the pig's heart was infected with an undetected pig herpes virus, but it was not clear whether it was the virus that affected Bennett's health.

News of the transplant surprised and excited researchers around the world. “It’s a big step forward in the field and an amazing achievement for a seriously ill patient,” Wayne Hawthorne, president of the International Xenotransplant Association, wrote in a comment. Although Bennett died two months after completing the surgery, he lived longer than anyone actually expected. “I lived and died with that patient,” Mohiuddin said. “I wanted him to live forever—that’s what I thought about—but in my head, I knew it would be a miracle.”

Mohiuddin said his team occasionally receives criticism from animal rights groups and other researchers about recipient choices. “There are a lot of opinions, but we have data, and we think it’s better than not.” However, many scientists and transplant surgeons welcomed the news, seeing it as a milestone in giving legitimacy to the field.

Mohiuddin is willing to perform more urgent cardiac xenografts and hopes to start a larger clinical trial, but it is not clear when it will begin. In June, the FDA held a meeting with scientists and companies outlining their concerns about xenografts. The main issue is the safety of patients, especially the possibility of contracting swine viruses.

But Mohiuddin's experiments, along with several recent studies of transplanting pig hearts and kidneys, have put the researchers in hope. "I never thought it would happen in my lifetime," Mohiuddin said.

Policy key person Alondra Nelson: She has a program for doing things

She has made great contributions to fairness, integrity and open access.

When Alondra Nelson took over the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February, the institution was in chaos, and the former obscurity office, Eric Lander, resigned over allegations of bullying and workplace harassment, suddenly became the focus of the public as besieged employees expressed their dissatisfaction in the national media. Nelson’s early message as acting director was simple: Let’s go back to work.

"We calmly rethinked why we were there, what our purpose was, and how we should get along with each other," said one staff member. The staff member asked to be anonymous because they did not have the right to be interviewed by the media. "That was exactly what we needed at the time."

Nelson is a sociologist who has built his reputation in exploring the social and racial impacts of science and technology, and was appointed OSTP’s first deputy director of science and society in 2021. The office’s main responsibility is to coordinate the scientific policy of the federal government.

For Nelson, before joining the agency, she was writing a book about OSTP, an opportunity to put her research into practice. The government has a historic opportunity to promote equity through federal policy and strengthen scientific integrity across agencies. “It’s an exciting time.”

In 2013, about 20 scientists funded by government agencies were to disclose the research for free within one year of their official publication, and the new policy canceled a one-year grace period and applied to all government agencies. Although OSTP has been studying the policy for many years, the statement surprised some. Open access proponents appreciated the action, saying it would inject momentum into a growing global movement. But science publishers have responded differently, and they are facing a transformation in the industry.

Many journal publishers — including Springer Nature, which publishes Nature — expressed caution support, but the American Publishers Association (AAP) slammed the policy, saying it was formulated without meaningful participation from the scientific publishing industry. Nelson insisted that she consulted stakeholders in the publishing community, but the American Academy of Pediatrics’ warning was responded to by Congress. In a letter to OSTP in October, House Science Committee staff warned that the government must not only ensure federally funded research is available, but to do it “in a way to avoid unintended consequences and maximize scientific benefits.”

Some insiders worry whether Nelson did enough to fight Lander in the early days when more junior employees were abused. A government official familiar with the situation said “she was in the room” when the incident happened. But Nelson’s supporters pushed the blame entirely on Lander, believing that the power gap was too large to overcome.

Nelson declined to answer questions about Lander’s tenure, saying that after he left, “we had to do some work to get the culture of OSTP back on the track where we can focus on science, technology and policy.”

Many people have great hope for what Nelson can still achieve. People who know her or have worked with her say she is good at listening, remembering other people’s names, working for a long time, and stimulating the potential of her colleagues.

“She has a program to do things, which is impressive, but it also makes you sit a little higher,” said Rebecca Gluskin, who works as a data scientist with Nelson at Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit in New York City.

Nelson said she was focused on the job at hand and was still excited to do it. Even though two years later, she said, “I pinch myself every day.”

Original link:

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-04185-3/index.html

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