Scientists who changed the world in the past year
"We brought less substance from the moon!"
Results of 2013 according to the journal NaturePavel Kotlyar, Newspaper.
The devastating typhoon, exoplanets, human cloning, the Chelyabinsk meteorite and men harassing fellow scientists – all this somehow attracted attention in the scientific world.
Viktor Grokhovsky is a scientist who collected space rocksViktor Grokhovsky, a member of the RAS Committee on Meteorites from Ural Federal University, who earlier this year organized a large-scale search for fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, learned about his inclusion in the final Nature list from a correspondent of the newspaper.
Ru». "I heard about it, but I didn't know if I was on this list or not, of course, you shocked me somewhat. This assessment, of course, is super-unpleasant, I don't even know why they chose me. The main thing is that even the comments we gave after 50 minutes turned out to be accurate, and for nine months we did not make any mistakes. And the fact that we managed to get a large piece of substance from Chebarkul is just fantastic, we brought less substance from the Moon!" the scientist said.
Shukhrat Mitalipov is a biologist who isolated stem cells from a cloned human embryoMitalipov, a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, known for cloning a monkey for the first time in 2007, last year developed a technique that allows saving many children from incurable diseases and even death.
The essence of the technique is simple: nuclear DNA is removed from an unfertilized egg with defective mitochondria and placed in a healthy donor egg, from which its own DNA has been previously removed.
Feng Zhang is a biologist who learned how to tune DNA from bacteriaTo pinch off in one place and insert in another – the technique of gene modification, which bacteria use to protect against viruses, became one of the hottest topics in the field of biomedical research in 2013.
And among those who started promoting this revolutionary gene editing technology was 32-year-old neuroscientist Feng Zhang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) system, which appeared in 2012, is able to edit a gene cheaply, simply and accurately. Scientists are confident that if they manage to bring this system to perfection, instead of taking pills, people in the future will be recommended to "rewrite" their own genes associated with a particular disease. Now Zhang is passionate about developing new applications of this technique. However, most of all he is fascinated by the prospect of rewriting genes for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders such as Huntington's disease and schizophrenia.
Tanya Simoncelli is an expert fighting for the availability of knowledge about genes for everyoneWhen, in 2005, Tanya Simoncelli, a scientific consultant for the American Civil Liberties Union, complained to her colleagues that various companies had started patenting human genes, Chris Hansen, the organization's chief consultant, exclaimed: "This is ridiculous!
Who can we sue?" Despite the fact that the US patent office had been issuing patents for genes for 30 years by that time, Simoncelli was sure that this practice violated the right of citizens to receive information about their health, and scientists to be able to conduct gene research. For the next four years, the lawyer tried to sue Myriad Genetics, which aggressively defended its rights to two genes – BRCA1 and BRCA2 – associated with breast cancer. Having changed more than one place of work and field of activity, Simoncelli now works in the Department of Science and Technology of the White House.
Deborah Persaud is a virologist who has proved that children born with the HIV virus can be curedIn March 2012, Persaud was preparing to announce that for the first time a child born with HIV was cured five months after the end of drug therapy.
Previously, such cases of "healing" were reported more than 40 times, and every time the doctors were wrong. However, Persaud and his colleagues conducted genetic tests of a child born to an HIV-positive mother and proved their case: after a course of three antiretroviral drugs, the child's body completely got rid of the virus. After the news spread around the world, Persaud was included by Time magazine in the hundred most influential people in the world.
Michel Mayor is an astronomer with a flair for technologyThis year, Michel Mayor, a 71-year–old Swiss astronomer, shocked the scientific community - his group discovered the planet Kepler-78b, the most similar in density and size to Earth.
However, his main discovery was made in 1995: with the help of an accurate spectrometer, observing the smallest swings of the star, he discovered the first exoplanet outside the Solar System, paving the way for other astronomers. Over the years, the Major has become a participant in the discovery of hundreds of other planets, creating new instruments. "Year after year, Michel built instruments ten times more sensitive than the previous ones. Every time he succeeded, I'm amazed," says astronomer Jeff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley about his colleague. Today, the world's most sensitive HARPS spectrometer is able to detect the fluctuations of stars caused by the movement of planets at a speed of only a meter per second. Taking into account the merits of the Major, in 2013 experts called him a possible contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Naderev Sano is a diplomat who starved in the name of climateWhen Naderev Sano, the representative of the Philippines to the UN, spoke from a high rostrum in November of this year, he himself did not yet know whether his relatives had survived the impact of Typhoon Haiyan.
Unexpectedly for everyone present, the diplomat said that he would starve until effective decisions were made at the climate change conference. I had to starve for two weeks. "What my country is going through as a result of extreme climate change is crazy," he said. Sano's statement made it possible to draw attention to the fact that the constant warming of the climate leads to an increase in extreme weather manifestations, and it is impossible not to notice this.
Hualan Chen is a virologist who helped stop the outbreak of the H7N9 virusIn April 2013, the attention of virologists of the world was focused on China, where the H7N9 strain of avian influenza spread to humans, causing several deaths and spreading in Shanghai.
At the forefront of the scientific battle was Dr. Chen and his colleagues from the Chinese National Laboratory for the Study of Avian Influenza in Harbin. As the doctor herself later recalled, who managed to stop the spread of the virus, during her work she and her colleagues lost 4-5 kilograms each.
Catherine Clancy is an anthropologist who spoke about harassment of female scientists working on excavationsAbout her research, which sheds light on why some male scientists sometimes go to excavations, last year Clancy told "Газете.Ru ".
One day, after a heart-to-heart conversation with a colleague, Clancy learned that a friend had been the victim of sexual abuse by a male colleague during field work at an excavation site. Having taken up this topic closely, the girl received unsightly statistics: about half of the female researchers working "in the field" heard dirty hints from men, and every fifth experienced harassment from colleagues, representatives of the stronger sex.
Henry Snaith – physicist who gave impetus to the development of solar cells"I've always wanted to be an inventor," says Snaith, a physicist at Oxford University, who has significantly improved the performance of solar cells by including the mineral perovskite in their composition.
Today, most solar cells are made on the basis of silicon, and the maximum efficiency of such devices exceeds 17-25%. Elements made on the basis of other semiconductors are cheaper, but have a lower efficiency – over the years of research it has not been possible to raise it above 15%. The elements created by Snate combine the best properties of both types. In his opinion, in the future, his technology is able to raise the efficiency to 29% – the efficiency shown by the best and most expensive solar panels operating in space.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru19.12.2013