Nature Announces Its Ten People of the Year for 2024, with Two Chinese Scientists Among the Honorees

Release Date:

2024-12-10

　　LONDON, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) — By reporter Guo Shuang: The website of the British journal Nature on the 9th released its list of the Top 10 Individuals Who Advanced Science in 2024, with two Chinese scientists among the honorees.

　　This list, compiled by the editors of Nature, aims to highlight this year’s major scientific advances, pivotal events, and some of the key figures behind them. Among the ten individuals recognized are two Chinese researchers: Xu Huji, a rheumatology expert at the Naval Medical University of the People’s Liberation Army, hailed as a “fearless physician”; and Li Chunlai, deputy chief designer of the Chang’e‑6 mission and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, known as the “guardian of lunar rocks.” Dr. Xu Huji has boldly pioneered the use of CAR‑T cell therapy to treat autoimmune diseases, offering new hope for the large-scale production of this groundbreaking treatment. Meanwhile, Li Chunlai played a decisive role in selecting the lunar landing site for the Chang’e‑6 probe and was among the first scientists to begin analyzing the returned samples.

　　Other figures featured on the list include: “Father of Time”—Eckhard Peik, a physicist at the German National Metrology Institute, whose groundbreaking discoveries could pave the way for nuclear clocks that surpass today’s atomic clocks; “Cosmic Voyager”—Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, whose research may help resolve a longstanding puzzle about the universe’s expansion rate; “Virus Hunter”—Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who sounded the alarm over a deadly monkeypox outbreak; and “AI Weather Forecaster”—Rémi Lam and others, researchers at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google.

(Editor: Xu Chan, Bai Yu)

Source: Xinhua Net

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