This is the third time that I have rewarded what I consider to be the most important scientific and technological advances of the year.
In 2022my theme was the principle of “twin ideas,” when similar inventions emerge around the same time. Just as Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray arguably both designed the modern telephone in 1876 (and, some say, on the same day!), the United States has seen a series of achievements in the areas of generative AI, cancer treatment and vaccinology.
In 2023my theme was the long road to progress. My biggest breakthrough was Casgevy, a gene-editing therapy for patients with sickle cell anemia. The therapy draws on decades of research into CRISPR, an immune defense system borrowed from the world of bacteria.
This year my theme is the more subtle power of incremental improvement, which has also been a motive for technological progress. Although nothing invented in 2024 rivals the stunning debut of ChatGPT or the discovery of GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, this year has witnessed several advancements in the fields of medicine, space technology and AI which significantly extends our knowledge.
An ingenious defense against HIV
Worldwide, 40 million people live with HIV and approximately 630,000 people die from AIDS-related illnesses each year. The disease has no cure. But while patients in rich, developed countries have access to drugs that keep the virus at bay, many people in poor countries, where the disease is more widespread, do not have access to them.
This year, scientists at pharmaceutical company Gilead announced that a new injectable drug appears to provide exceptional protection against HIV for six months. In a clinical trial of South African and Ugandan girls and young women, the injection, called lenacapavir, reduced HIV infections by 100 percent in the intervention group. Another trial conducted on several continents reported an effectiveness rate of 96 percent. Clinical trial results don’t show much more success than that.
This fall, Gilead agreed allow other companies to sell cheap generic versions of the vaccine in poor countries. Even more controversial, the agreement excludes middle-income countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, which will have to pay more to access the therapy.
Lenacapavir works by targeting key “capsid proteins” that act as both a sword and a shield for HIV’s genetic material, protecting the virus’s RNA and allowing it to invade our cells. Lenacapavir stuns proteins and disarms their sword and shield functions, rendering HIV viral particles harmless. By naming lenacapavir its breakthrough of the yearthe review Science reported that the same technique could disrupt proteins that protect from countless other deadly viruses, including those that cause colds or even once-in-a-generation pandemics. The ability to break down the structure and function of these viruses by targeting capsid proteins could help us cure even more diseases in the long term.
The United States enters the era of rocket capture
For six decades, the United States has been very adept at using propulsion technology to launch heavy objects into space. But catching them when they fall back to Earth? Not so much.
Until last October, when a SpaceX booster fell from the sky at 22 times the speed of soundbraked, slowed over the same tower that had launched it, and settled into its two giant mechanical arms for a high-tech hug. Sixty-six years after America entered the rocket launch era, it has finally entered the rocket capture era.
So what is this rocket clamp technology – nicknamed “chopsticks” – actually used for? SpaceX, founded and led by Elon Musk, has already reduced the price of transporting objects into space by an order of magnitude. Making rockets fully reusable could reduce this price “by another order of magnitude” writing Eric Hand, a journalist from Science. Almost every aspect of a space economy – conducting scientific experiments in our solar system, mining asteroids, manufacturing fiber optics and pharmaceuticals in microgravity conditions – faces the same fundamental economic bottleneck: ejecting objects outside our atmosphere are still very expensive. . But cheap, large, reusable rockets are the prerequisite for building any kind of world outside our own, whether it’s a small fleet of automated factories humming in low orbit or, well, a multi-planetary civilization.
A quantum breakthrough
In December, Google announced that its new quantum computer, based on a chip called Willow, solved a math problem in five minutes that would require about one of the fastest supercomputers. “10 seven billion years” crack. For context, 10 seven billion years is the entire history of the universe – about 14 billion years – repeated several billion times. The feat was so audacious that some speculated that Google’s computer operated by borrowing computing power from parallel universes.
If this paragraph provoked a nauseating combination of wonder and bewilderment, that seems entirely normal. Quantum computers don’t make sense to most people, in part because they have been touted as the ultimate supercomputer. But as science journalist Cleo Abram said explainit is an inappropriate term. You shouldn’t think of quantum computers as being bigger, faster, or smarter than the computers that run our daily lives. You should view them as fundamentally different.
Traditional computers, such as your smartphone and laptop, process information as a parade of binary switches that flip between 1 and 0. Quantum computers use qubits, which harness quantum mechanics, the strange physics that governs particles smaller than atoms. A qubit can simultaneously represent a 1 and a 0, thanks to a property called superposition. As you add qubits, computing power increases exponentially, theoretically allowing quantum computers to solve problems of dizzying complexity.
Qubits are finicky and error-prone. This is one reason why quantum computers are kept in special containers refrigerated to near 0 kelvin, a temperature colder than deep space. But Google’s chip, which connects 105 qubits, is among the first to show that the number of errors can decrease as more qubits are added – a finding that future quantum computing teams can surely build on .
With some optimism, quantum computers could help us understand the rules of subatomic activity, which underlie all physical reality. This could mean designing better electric batteries by allowing researchers to simulate the behavior of electrons in metals, or revolutionizing drug discovery by predicting interactions between our immune systems and viruses at the smallest level.
But not all possibilities are beautiful. The United States, China and other countries are engaged in a multibillion-dollar race toward quantum supremacy, in part because it is widely believed that a fully functioning quantum computer could also solve the type of problems complex mathematics that forms the basis of public key cryptography. . In other words, a working quantum computer could render most Internet encryption null and void. Again, the technological capacity to do more good tends to increase in proportion to the capacity to cause more chaos.
Another year of generative AI magic
This may be the time when any plausible list of the year’s most important technological advances ends with the phrase Oh, and also, artificial intelligence researchers have done a bunch of crazy stuff.
In the last three months alone, a small study find that ChatGPT outperformed human doctors in resolving medical histories; several AI companies have released a torrent of impressive video generators, including Google DeepMind’s Veo 2 and OpenAI’s Sora; Google announcement an AI agent whose weather forecasts outperformed those of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts – the “world leader in atmospheric forecasting,” according to The New York Times; and OpenAI released a new “reasoning” system that blew away industry standards in coding and complex math problems.
I continue to be interested in how the transformer technology behind large language models handles the most complex logic systems. With ChatGPT, researchers showed that an AI could master the grammar of language well enough to produce plausible sentences, code, and poetry. But the cosmos is full of other languages, that is, other logical systems that obey a finite number of rules to produce predictable results. An example is DNA. After all, what is DNA if not a language? With a vocabulary based on just four letters, or nucleotides, our genetic code explains how our proteins, cells, organs and bodies should function, replicate and evolve. If one LLM can master the logic of English and computer programming, perhaps another could master the grammar of DNA, allowing scientists to synthesize biology in the laboratory the same way you or I could produce summary paragraphs on our personal computers.
To that end, this year, researchers from the Arc Institute, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley created Evo, a new AI model trained on 2.7 million genomes of microbes and viruses . Evo acts like a master linguist, learning the rules of DNA over billions of years of evolution to predict functions, analyze mutations, and even design new genetic sequences.
What could scientists do with generative AI for biology? Think about CRISPR technology. Scientists use a special protein to cut a cell’s DNA, like a pair of molecular scissors, allowing researchers to make basic changes to the cut genome. This year, Evo scientists designed a completely original protein, unknown in nature, that could perform a similar gene-editing task. As Patrick Hsu, principal investigator at the Arc Institute and assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, said, just as tools like ChatGPT have “revolutionized the way we work with text, audio and video, these same creative abilities can now be applied to the fundamental codes of life.