The most important breakthroughs of 2024

This is the third time I have recognized what I consider to be the most important scientific and technological advances of the year.

In 2022, my topic was the principle of “twin ideas,” when similar inventions arise around the same time. Just as Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both arguably conceived of the modern telephone in 1876 (and by some accounts on the same day!), the US has seen a number of achievements in generative AI, cancer treatment and vaccinology.

In 2023, my theme was the long road to progress. My biggest breakthrough was Casgevy, a gene editing therapy for patients with sickle cell anemia. The therapy is based on decades of research into CRISPR, an immune defense system borrowed from the world of bacteria.

Outlook: 2024 in pictures: The annual financial statements

This year my theme is the subtler power of incremental improvement, which is also a motif of technological progress. While nothing invented in 2024 can match the stunning debut of ChatGPT or the discovery of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, this year has seen several advances in medicine, space technology and AI that are expanding our knowledge in groundbreaking ways .

An ingenious defense against HIV

Worldwide, 40 million people are living with HIV and an estimated 630,000 people die from AIDS-related diseases each year. The disease is not curable. 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.

This year, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Gilead announced that a new injectable drug appeared to provide exceptional protection against HIV for six months. In a clinical trial of South African and Ugandan girls and young women, the vaccine called lenacapavir reduced HIV infections in the intervention group by 100 percent. Another study involving people on multiple continents found an effectiveness rate of 96 percent. The results of clinical studies could hardly be more successful.

This fall, Gilead agreed to let other companies sell cheap generic versions of the vaccine in poor countries. More controversially, the agreement ignores middle-income countries like Brazil and Mexico, which must pay more to access the therapy.

Lenacapavir works by targeting key “capsid proteins” that act as both a sword and shield for HIV’s genetic material, protecting the virus’s RNA and allowing it to enter our cells. Lenacapavir anesthetizes the proteins and defuses their sword and shield functions, rendering the HIV virus particles harmless. By naming lenacapavir Breakthrough of the Year, the journal said Science reported that the same technique could destroy the proteins that protect countless other deadly viruses, including those that cause colds or even once-in-a-generation pandemics. The ability to disrupt 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 is entering the era of missile capture

For six decades, the US has been pretty good at using propulsion technology to launch heavy objects into space. But catching them when they fall back to earth? Not so much.

Until October of this year, a SpaceX booster plunged from the sky at 22 times the speed of sound, slammed on the brakes, slowed over the same tower that launched it, and settled into its two giant mechanical arms for a high-tech hug . Sixty-six years after America entered the age of rocket launching, it has finally entered the age of rocket catching.

Read: The most powerful rocket in history had a good morning

What is this rocket tong technology – also called “chopsticks” – actually good for? SpaceX, founded and run by Elon Musk, has already reduced the cost of getting things into space by an order of magnitude. Making rockets fully reusable could reduce this price “by another order of magnitude,” writes Eric Hand, journalist at Science. Almost every aspect of a space-bound economy—conducting scientific experiments in our solar system, mining asteroids, producing fiber optics and pharmaceuticals in zero-gravity conditions—runs into the same fundamental economic bottleneck: ejecting things from our atmosphere is still very expensive. But cheap, large, and reusable rockets are the prerequisite for building any kind of world beyond our own, be it a small fleet of automated factories humming in low orbit or, well, a multiplanet 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 take one of the fastest supercomputers about “10 septillion years” to solve. For comparison, 10 septillion years is the entire history of the universe – about 14 billion years – repeated several trillion times. The feat was so daring that some people speculated that Google’s computer worked by borrowing computing power from parallel universes.

If this paragraph evoked a sickening combination of wonder and confusion, then that feels about right. Quantum computers make no sense to most people, partly because they are praised as the ultimate supercomputers. But as science journalist Cleo Abram has explained, that’s a misnomer. You shouldn’t think of quantum computers as bigger, faster, or smarter than the computers that run our daily lives. You should think of them as fundamentally different.

Traditional computers like your smartphone and laptop process information as a series of binary switches that toggles between 1 and 0. Quantum computers use qubits that take advantage of quantum mechanics, the strange physics that governs particles smaller than atoms. Thanks to a property called superposition, a qubit can represent a 1 and a 0 at the same time. As you add more qubits, computing power grows exponentially, theoretically allowing quantum computers to solve problems of dizzying complexity.

Qubits are sensitive and prone to errors. That’s one of the reasons why quantum computers are kept in special containers cooled to almost 0 Kelvin, a temperature colder than that of space. But Google’s chip, which connects 105 qubits, is one of the first to show that the number of errors can decrease as more qubits are added – a discovery that future quantum computing teams can certainly build on.

Optimistically, quantum computers could help us understand the rules of subatomic activity that underlie all of physical reality. That could mean developing 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 the options are not all pretty. The United States, China and other countries are in a multibillion-dollar race for quantum supremacy, in part because it is well known that a fully functional quantum computer could also solve the kinds of complex mathematical problems that form the basis of public-key cryptography. In other words, a functioning quantum computer could defeat most Internet encryption. Again, the technological power to do more good tends to increase in proportion to the power to cause more chaos.

Another year of generative AI wizardry

This might just be the time when any plausible list of the year’s most important technological advances ends with this sentence Oh, and also, artificial intelligence researchers have done a lot of crazy stuff.

Just in the last three months, a small study found that ChatGPT outperforms human doctors at solving medical case histories; Several AI companies have released a spate of impressive video generators, including Google DeepMind’s Veo 2 and OpenAI’s Sora. Google announced an AI agent whose weather predictions outperformed the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, according to the “world leader in atmospheric forecasting.” The New York Times; and OpenAI released a new “reasoning system” that broke industry standards in coding and complex math problems.

Read: The generative AI revolution could be a bubble

I remain interested in how the transformer technology behind large language models handles the most complex logic systems. Using ChatGPT, researchers showed that an AI can master the grammar of a language well enough to produce plausible sentences, code, and poems. 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. Because what is DNA if not a language? Using a vocabulary based on just four letters, or nucleotides, our genetic code determines how our proteins, cells, organs, and bodies should function, replicate, and develop. If one LLM can master the logic of English and computer programming, perhaps another could master the grammar of DNA – which would allow scientists to synthesize biology in laboratories in the same way that you or I could create synthetic paragraphs on our PCs .

To that end, this year researchers at the Arc Institute, Stanford University and UC Berkeley developed Evo, a new AI model trained on 2.7 million genomes of microbes and viruses. Evo acts as 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 for biology with generative AI? Consider CRISPR technology. Scientists use a special protein to cut a cell’s DNA, similar to molecular scissors, allowing researchers to make fundamental changes to the cut genome. This year, Evo scientists developed a completely novel 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, the same creative skills can now be applied to it “the basic codes of life.”