2020 Sucked, But We Also Made Some Astounding Scientific Progress
By: Yasmin Tayag
Tags: Science, Future, Climate Change, Space, Health

2020 Sucked, But We Also Made Some Astounding Scientific Progress

In a year of lows, it’s important to remember the highs

Photo sources: enot-poloskun, Tang Ming Tung, Odd Andersen, Mlenny, and dowell via Getty Images

In a recent conversation about the year in science, a colleague made the inevitable joke: “There was this little thing called the coronavirus…” Grim, but impossible not to smirk: Ten, twenty years from now, when we look back on this moment in science, we will remember Covid-19 and the maddening dash to understand it.

But now and in the future, it will be important to remember that the dominant narrative of 2020 was in fact a culmination of science stories we’ve been aware of — and complicit in — for a long time.

Humans have been well aware of their destructive tendencies for millennia — this year, our relentless march into the habitats of wild animals created the conditions that scientists have long warned would allow a zoonotic disease to spread. A disproportionate number of Americans who died from Covid-19 in the U.S. were Black or other people of color, a result of the racist healthcare access and geographical redlining that is part of this country’s dark legacy. Now, as two vaccines roll out across the nation, we face the consequences of mounting mistrust in public health and government: hesitation, in many cases warranted, to receive vaccines that scientists have vetted as safe and effective.

Despite itself, 2020 was a staggering year for scientific achievement. You might have just missed it because of all the bad news.

Covid-19 was just one culmination of what we already knew. There will inevitably be others if we don’t change the way we react and respond to what scientists are continually telling us. But that’s not to say that there aren’t people out there, building on the knowledge that previous research has amassed. Despite itself, 2020 was a staggering year for scientific achievement. You might have just missed it because of all the bad news.

In a year of lows, it’s important to remember the highs: In 2020 in particular, scientific progress was a reminder of what people are capable of if we “trust the process,” to quote NBA star Joel Embiid. Just look at the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which were developed in record-breaking time and vetted by multiple panels of experts as safe and 95% effective: There’s so much we can do if we decide we actually want to do it. My hope for 2021 is that we’ll finally want it badly enough.

The Lows

The botched U.S. public health response to Covid-19. When the global pandemic was declared in March, it was surreal to watch U.S. leaders flip-flop on the utility of shutdowns and mask-wearing despite the strong recommendations of scientists. There was a shocking dearth of Covid-19 tests and the distribution of faulty tests; today, there still aren’t enough. Contact tracing, a tried-and-true public health intervention that helped get the virus under control in countries like Taiwan and Japan, has ramped up unevenly and is still not considered robust enough to stop transmission. As of this writing, there are over 17.2 million cases and over 310,000 deaths in the U.S., and while Vice President Mike Pence has received the vaccine on public television, President Trump still hasn’t shared plans to get vaccinated.

The U.S. left the Paris Climate Agreement. This year tied 2016 as the hottest year on record and had the worst West Coast wildfire season on record. It was the worst possible time for the U.S. to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, which it did, officially, in November, at the behest of Donald Trump’s three year-old promise. This means the U.S. is no longer bound to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Trump administration is also responsible for rolling back numerous other environmental regulations, like those protecting the country’s largest pristine landscape from drilling, and most recently rules for limiting soot pumped into the air by power plants. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will rejoin the Paris Agreement on his first day in office.

Gene editing human embryos shown to be unsafe. Gene editing holds promise for treating and eliminating genetic disease — perhaps even permanently. But researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London used the technique in human embryos this year, to disastrous results. To be clear, researchers had no intention of allowing these embryos to develop; they just wanted to investigate the role of a single gene in early development. They learned that making even tiny edits can lead to major unintended edits — changes that could lead to genetic disease or cancer later in life, as Emily Mullin wrote in June. “This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing,” Fyodor Urnov, PhD, an expert in the field, said at the time.

The pandemic within a pandemic. U.S. data on Covid-19 made it clear that the coronavirus disproportionately impacts Black people and people of color in the U.S. This discrepancy, as Drew Costley wrote in April, is the sad consequence of longstanding systemic racism, which reaches into every realm of daily life: As a result, Black and POC Americans experience a lack of access to healthcare, clean air, and healthy food; the tendency for these groups to have essential jobs that force them onto the frontlines. These inequalities, which cleared the way for the deadly virus to wreak its most severe consequences, were well documented long before the pandemic. Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matters protests, which displayed the full ugliness of racist police brutality, forced us to confront them. Now, the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine is testing whether any of these difficult truths have been taken to heart: Experts have recommended prioritizing minorities for the vaccine, but whether states will implement this guidance in their distribution plans remains to be seen.

Waving goodbye to the Arecibo Observatory. In November, the National Science Foundation announced plans to demolish Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, the renowned radio telescope facility that had served the astronomy community for almost 60 years. At the beginning of December, the massive telescope collapsed, bringing the legendary facility to a devastatingly pitiable end. One researcher, speaking to the New York Times, angrily insisted that its destruction wasn’t inevitable: “If they had properly maintained it, it’s likely that wouldn’t have happened.” Funding issues had plagued Arecibo in the last few years, with the NSF transferring its care to the University of Central Florida. Its end marks the end of an era in which public funds were routed toward this kind of public research, wrote Brian Merchant in Future Human. The baton has been passed to private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, for better or for worse.

The Highs

Vaccines were developed in record time. The development, testing, and distribution of multiple safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines this year was an astounding achievement. Normally this process would take at least a decade; to accomplish it in fewer than 12 months is essentially miraculous. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, both approved in the U.S., show roughly 95% efficacy — experts had hoped for 50%. They’re both also the triumphant conclusion of three decades of research on mRNA-based vaccine technology, which has never been applied in a human vaccine until now. It paves the way for a vastly more nimble and efficient vaccine-making process in the future.

Proof that an HIV cure is long lasting. In March, researchers announced that a man who became the second person to be cured of HIV in 2019 is still free of the virus after 30 months. The man, previously known only as the “London patient,” revealed his identity to the New York Times as Adam Castillejo, wishing to become an “ambassador of hope.” (Timothy Brown, the “Berlin patient,” was cured in 2011.) The technique involved infusing Castillejo with stem cells carrying a genetic mutation that conferred protection against HIV. Doing so essentially replaced his immune system with one that was HIV-resistant. The treatment won’t be available to the majority of people, but it opens the door to genetic therapies involving the same resistance-conferring mutation.

SpaceX sends people to space. In May, a few months before Arecibo’s closure sounded a death knell for publicly funded space exploration, the private company SpaceX successfully carried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, marking what many called a “new era” of spaceflight — one where private vehicles primarily bring people to orbit, and NASA’s role diminishes. While there are many reasons to be critical of privatization — especially with super-billionaires like Elon Musk helming space companies — it could rapidly speed up the development of new spacefaring technology, much as private pharmaceutical companies accelerated a Covid-19 vaccine.

CRISPR pioneers win the Nobel prize. In October, Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their pioneering work on the gene-editing tool CRISPR — the first pair of women ever to win a science Nobel. CRISPR, which allows scientists to make precise changes to the genomes of living organisms, is considered a revolutionary discovery. When perfected, it could allow scientists to eliminate genetic disease, engineer climate change-resistant crops and animals, and diagnose illness. In a conversation with Emily Mullin in October, Doudna discussed one exciting future of CRISPR: using it to regulate, but not permanently edit, human genomes.