Media release

From: Springer Nature

Nature’s 10: Ten people that shaped science in 2024

The 2024 edition of Nature’s 10 — Nature’s annual list of people who were part of some of the biggest science stories of the year — is published this week. “From a fraud buster in Germany to a student campaigning for higher wages in Canada to the interim leader of Bangladesh — this year’s list features people who have made a big impact on the scientific community and the world,” says Brendan Maher, a features editor at Nature.

This year features two people for their crucial work on issues of global importance. Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), raised the alarm to a deadly mpox outbreak in the country. He accurately predicted the virus’s ability to spread past the borders of the DRC and has argued for a greater global focus on such outbreaks to support quicker responses and save lives. Anna Abalkina, a researcher at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of East European Studies, in Germany, found herself on a Russian state watchlist for her work trying to root out and expose fraud in scientific publishing, including plagiarists and paper mills — actors that pollute the scientific literature with fake papers.

Extraordinary scientific advances also provided notable names to this year’s list. Chinese physician Huji Xu at the Naval Medical University in Shanghai, China, delivered successful treatments for devastating autoimmune disorders using donor-derived, gene-edited T cells. The therapy, which builds on success with T cells in cancer, raises hopes for the mass production of cutting-edge CAR-T therapies. Meanwhile, Ekkehard Peik, a physicist at the PTB, Germany’s national metrology institute in Braumschweig, recorded the first tick of a clock tuned to the frequency of an atomic nucleus, which promises to one day deliver technology that can surpass the accuracy of current atomic clocks. Li Chunlai, a geologist at the China National Space Administration, was the first scientist to get his hands on samples of soil from the Moon, delivered to Earth this year by the Chang’e 6 mission. Rémi Lam, a researcher at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, brought powerful artificial-intelligence tools to weather forecasting, delivering on the technology’s promise to produce predictions that are faster and more accurate than conventional modeling. Meanwhile, Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, Illinois, presented results that could put to rest a long-standing question regarding the speed at which our Universe is expanding.

It was also a year in which the work of three individuals who have championed important causes are recognized: Kaitlin Kharas, a PhD student at the University of Toronto in Canada, helped to lead a campaign that resulted in the first pay bump for Canadian researchers in two decades. A Swiss lawyer, Cordelia Bähr, successfully represented thousands of women in a landmark lawsuit arguing that climate change is a human-rights issue. And Nobel prizewinning economist Muhammad Yunus answered the call to become interim leader of Bangladesh, following a student-led revolution.

“These are all remarkable people at the centre of some remarkable events,” says Maher.