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Three African Africans Are Included In Nature's Top 10 People Who Shaped Science.
The article is here and is probably open sourced: Nature’s 10 Ten people who helped shape science in 2021
The subtitle:
An Omicron investigator, a Mars explorer and an AI ethics pioneer are some of the people behind the year’s big research stories.|An Omicron investigator, a Mars explorer and an AI ethics pioneer are some of the people behind the year’s big research stories.
Africa, as a continent, is still suffering under the weight of its colonial past, and it's important to humanity as a whole to recognize the importance of Africa is building a sustainable and equitable world.
The three African Africans, with subtitles, are:
Winnie Byanyima: Vaccine warrior
This UN leader knew that vaccine equity wouldn’t happen without a fight.
Timnit Gebru: AI ethics leader
After losing her job at Google, an artificial-intelligence pioneer founded an independent institute to raise questions about ethics in technology.
Tulio de Oliveira: Variant tracker
A bioinformatician in South Africa helped to identify troubling variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
Two of the "Top 10" African Africans were born in Africa; one in Brazil, having moved to South Africa.
One of the African Africans is an immigrant in the United States.
Excerpts on each follow:
Winnie Byanyima:
Before vaccines for COVID-19 even existed, Winnie Byanyima knew that distributing them equitably would be a challenge. In early 2020, she was one of the few voices warning that low- and middle-income countries could not rely on donations alone to vaccinate their people. The only way to get life-saving shots to everyone, she argued, would be by helping as many companies as possible to manufacture them and by setting up systems of distribution to get them where they’re needed...
...This May, Byanyima and her colleagues celebrated an unexpected victory when the United States — historically a strident patent defender — threw its weight behind a proposal from South Africa and India to waive the IP protections surrounding COVID-19 vaccines in the hope of bolstering manufacturing capacity...
...Byanyima says it was this thirst for justice that caused her to leave her career in aeronautical engineering soon after the overthrow of Uganda’s former authoritarian president Idi Amin. In 1981, she joined a guerilla movement fighting to restore democracy and human rights to Uganda. They prevailed, and by 1994, she was elected to Uganda’s parliament. She was appointed head of UNAIDS in 2019, where she is putting equity at the centre of the programme’s work around the world. Global-health-policy researcher Matthew Kavanagh took leave from a position at Georgetown University in Washington DC, to work for Byanyima because of the way she targets underlying inequalities that foster the spread of HIV...
...This May, Byanyima and her colleagues celebrated an unexpected victory when the United States — historically a strident patent defender — threw its weight behind a proposal from South Africa and India to waive the IP protections surrounding COVID-19 vaccines in the hope of bolstering manufacturing capacity...
...Byanyima says it was this thirst for justice that caused her to leave her career in aeronautical engineering soon after the overthrow of Uganda’s former authoritarian president Idi Amin. In 1981, she joined a guerilla movement fighting to restore democracy and human rights to Uganda. They prevailed, and by 1994, she was elected to Uganda’s parliament. She was appointed head of UNAIDS in 2019, where she is putting equity at the centre of the programme’s work around the world. Global-health-policy researcher Matthew Kavanagh took leave from a position at Georgetown University in Washington DC, to work for Byanyima because of the way she targets underlying inequalities that foster the spread of HIV...
I recently commented elsewhere at DU on efforts of scientists and engineers in Uganda to participate in the fight against climate change: The International Atomic Energy Agency Has Reviewed Uganda's Nuclear Infrastructure.
Timnit Gebru:
Timnit Gebru, a researcher who studies the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), says her past year has been — in a word — horrible. Last December, she lost her job at Google after a row over the tech giant’s vetting of her work. The highly publicized ousting shocked scientists, including some in the firm, and thousands of researchers rallied to support her, amplifying her concerns around anti-Black discrimination in AI, and around the harms that the technology can cause to marginalized groups in society.
Now, Gebru has forged her own path. On 2 December this year, exactly 12 months after her split with Google, she launched a research institute to study AI independently of big tech companies. The events of the past year, she says, reflect a growing realization that the faults of AI should not be framed as technical problems: they are a symptom of the flawed environment in which the technology is developed...
Born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, Gebru fled the region during civil war as a teenager and eventually arrived in the United States as a refugee. During her PhD at Stanford University in California, she co-founded a ‘Black in AI’ group with computer scientist Rediet Abebe. And while working at Microsoft, she and computer scientist Joy Buolamwini reported that facial-recognition software performed less well at identifying the gender of people who were not white men — a finding that drew more attention to bias in AI...
Now, Gebru has forged her own path. On 2 December this year, exactly 12 months after her split with Google, she launched a research institute to study AI independently of big tech companies. The events of the past year, she says, reflect a growing realization that the faults of AI should not be framed as technical problems: they are a symptom of the flawed environment in which the technology is developed...
Born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, Gebru fled the region during civil war as a teenager and eventually arrived in the United States as a refugee. During her PhD at Stanford University in California, she co-founded a ‘Black in AI’ group with computer scientist Rediet Abebe. And while working at Microsoft, she and computer scientist Joy Buolamwini reported that facial-recognition software performed less well at identifying the gender of people who were not white men — a finding that drew more attention to bias in AI...
Tulio de Oliveira:
On 25 November, Tulio de Oliveira announced the discovery of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2. Omicron, detected in samples from Botswana, South Africa and Hong Kong, had a Swiss Army knife of mutations that de Oliveira and other leading scientists feared might help it to evade immunity from previous infection or vaccinations.
For de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), it was eerily reminiscent of the previous year, when his team had discovered another SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in South African samples. Beta, as that variant became known, led foreign governments to curb travel to and from South Africa many months after its discovery. Both variants were spotted after doctors and laboratory workers flagged unexpected rises in infections in areas that had already been hit hard by COVID-19.
De Oliveira knew that by reporting yet another concerning variant, he ran the risk of incurring fresh sanctions, which would economically penalize countries in southern Africa. But he also knew it was the right thing to do. “The way that one stops a pandemic is by quick action,” says the Brazilian-born bioinformatician. “Wait and see has not been a good option...”
...The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first time that genomic sequencing has been used to trace outbreaks in Africa; scientists used it in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. KRISP, created in 2017 with de Oliveira at the helm, has tracked pathogens behind diseases including dengue and Zika, and more common scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis. But never before have so many different samples of the same virus been sequenced in such a short period of time — both in Africa and around the world...
...The centre will work to control epidemics in Africa and the global south, and will house Africa’s largest sequencing facility. The coronavirus pandemic has fuelled these investments, but the momentum is already spilling over into surveillance on other diseases, says de Oliveira. “The main thing we have shown the world is that these things can be done in developing countries.”
Not that those countries have been rewarded for it — quite the opposite. De Oliveira says he was extremely disappointed when rich countries imposed travel bans on southern Africa simply because the country had the scientific skill to discover new variants. The scapegoating of South Africa “was almost a smokescreen for the vaccine hoarding, and for rich countries losing control of the pandemic”, says de Oliveira. “Of course I expected more...”
For de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), it was eerily reminiscent of the previous year, when his team had discovered another SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in South African samples. Beta, as that variant became known, led foreign governments to curb travel to and from South Africa many months after its discovery. Both variants were spotted after doctors and laboratory workers flagged unexpected rises in infections in areas that had already been hit hard by COVID-19.
De Oliveira knew that by reporting yet another concerning variant, he ran the risk of incurring fresh sanctions, which would economically penalize countries in southern Africa. But he also knew it was the right thing to do. “The way that one stops a pandemic is by quick action,” says the Brazilian-born bioinformatician. “Wait and see has not been a good option...”
...The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first time that genomic sequencing has been used to trace outbreaks in Africa; scientists used it in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. KRISP, created in 2017 with de Oliveira at the helm, has tracked pathogens behind diseases including dengue and Zika, and more common scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis. But never before have so many different samples of the same virus been sequenced in such a short period of time — both in Africa and around the world...
...The centre will work to control epidemics in Africa and the global south, and will house Africa’s largest sequencing facility. The coronavirus pandemic has fuelled these investments, but the momentum is already spilling over into surveillance on other diseases, says de Oliveira. “The main thing we have shown the world is that these things can be done in developing countries.”
Not that those countries have been rewarded for it — quite the opposite. De Oliveira says he was extremely disappointed when rich countries imposed travel bans on southern Africa simply because the country had the scientific skill to discover new variants. The scapegoating of South Africa “was almost a smokescreen for the vaccine hoarding, and for rich countries losing control of the pandemic”, says de Oliveira. “Of course I expected more...”
I added the bold here.
I especially applaud de Oliveira for the admittedly difficult decision he made to put humanity above economic interests of his already economically challenged country.
We could use his example more broadly, specifically with respect to climate change. Humanity should include future generations, but in most "economics first" calculations future generations are routinely not included.
I cannot here avoid referring to my personal bête noire, morally withered people announcing in extreme ignorance - ignorance apparently not found in Uganda, by the way - that nuclear power plants are "too expensive." These assholes run around saying that it is desirable to trash wilderness with unreliable wind farms that become landfill in 20 years, rather than nuclear plants, which are now designed to last 60 to 80 years and thus, represent gifts to future generations. It will not do to leave future generations with abandoned wind parks and an atmosphere destroyed by the accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.
When presented with this insipid "too expensive" remark I am inspired to ask, "Too expensive for whom?"
Here's hoping you've completed your, um, Christmas shopping, and, um, will have a nice weekend.
