The Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2022

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Derek Thompson, thanks for joining us. So, why do this list, why do this sort of breakthrough of tech? What’s important about it?

DEREK THOMPSON, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: I think it’s important to recognize just how extraordinarily quickly we’re pushing the frontier of scientific technology. And I wanna pay attention to stories that are positive and long, and the long arc of science and technology is really interesting because it’s not as if it’s entirely positive. There’s lots of horrible things that have happened with science and technology, but these are stories that don’t end. Electricity is invented and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The software revolution begins, and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so I want to, as a journalist, pay more attention to stories that do not end. And this way of paying, of identifying the most scientific, the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs of 2022, I think is a good way of doing that.

SREENIVASAN: Now, you know, one of the first big topics that you tackle is artificial intelligence. And we’re not necessarily talking about the kind that, you know, takes over the world and runs your spaceships for you. But this was really the first year, as you point out, that a lot more people got to play with an evolutionary step of AI.

THOMPSON: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Open AI is one of these extraordinary companies that’s working on the frontier of AI, and they’ve unveiled some absolutely extraordinary tools. Dal-e 2 is a text to image tool. So you can say something like, you know, I wanna see a television host wearing a space helmet on the surface of Venus in the style of Van Gogh. And it will produce that, which is fairly extraordinary, and it’ll produce sometimes pretty wonderful, beautiful images. It can produce some janky images as well, but that’s sort of part of the fun. Maybe most interestingly for me is this new technology called GPT, Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, and Chat GPT, a new program from open AI, which essentially allows me to talk to, or anybody to talk to this AI as if it’s this super brain disembodied chatbot. You can ask it to summarize Wikipedia articles. You can ask it to summarize complex medical journals. You can ask it to do parodies, you know, write me a story of a man falling down the hill in the style of the King James Bible, and it will do these things with pretty extraordinary facility. And I think this entire frontier is so interesting for identifying the ways that artificial intelligence is starting to retrace the outer bounds of human creativity.

SREENIVASAN: I am imagining this conversation being watched by maybe an eighth grader or a sophomore in college, salivating saying, oh, I hate writing essays. I would really love to get a very good headstart on my essay, thanks to chat GPT. How does this kind of, what are the ripple effects here?

THOMPSON: It’s a big wonderful philosophical question. What do we do when we invent technology that does that, which we believe to be important for humans to do? We think it’s important for people to be able to learn. We think it’s important for the eighth grader watching this to be able to write an essay about Brave New World. But what if rendering a future where it’s easier to simply prompt a Chat GPT to write that essay for the student that maybe the student can edit or maybe even not edit before he or she turns it into the professor. This sounds like a machine for plagiarism. I get that. What if though, one of the important skills of the next generation is learning how to prompt, you know, research has changed a lot in the last 50 years. It used to be that to be a great researcher, you had to understand the Dewey Decimal system and go to a library. But then we realized that no, actually being a great researcher is about synthesizing information you can get on your computer by being a good Googler. Well, what if being a good AI prompter is the next generation of being a good Googler? That might not be so dystopian. That might be a positive way of reframing this sort of next generation of research. I also think it’s useful to flip it to say, not only is this a way for students to do their homework faster, what if it’s also a way for teachers to do their work faster? How fast is it to create a lecture about Brave New World? How fast is it to create an eighth or ninth grade curriculum for English? Give me a list of 20 books published in the last 50 years in the style of Brave New World, that yada yada yada. And this AI can do that as well. So I think we’re gonna be seeing a revolution on both sides of education in the next few years.

SREENIVASAN: One of the subtitles that you had for a breakthrough technology was “the power to reverse death – kind of.” Explain that.

THOMPSON: So this year, this is really extraordinary. A group of scientists at Yale took some pigs that had been dead for an hour and injected them with a substance that brought their heart and organs back to life, cells jostled as if they were alive. This is spooky. I know this is going to sound to a lot of people like Frankenstein or Monkey’s Paw or Pet Cemetery, any number of terrifying stories of the dead being brought back to life in ways that haunted humanity. And so I don’t want to go all the way to say that this is clearly a technology that points only to the good, but let’s also recognize that there are many, many deaths on battlefields or in nursing homes in houses that are quite sudden, whether it’s a sudden cardiac arrest or a stroke. And what if we had technology, you know, sitting in people’s homes, at nursing homes, at hospitals on battlefields that could reverse certain organ deaths very, very quickly. We might be at the very beginning of that kind of revolution. And even before we get there, we might be able to keep organs alive so that people who need a liver, need a kidney in order to survive. We save that life because of a technology to preserve cellular activity in the organs of the recently deceased.

SREENIVASAN: Well, a lot of people became very aware of the rapid pace at which vaccines were being developed, especially in the context of the pandemic. But the technologies underneath them are now starting to show off some different use cases besides just to fight COVID. What are some of those advances?

THOMPSON: It’s really exciting what we’re seeing. I mean, we very well might be in a golden age of vaccinology right now. In September, we got a new malaria vaccine developed by Oxford University, a small clinical trial in Burkina Faso. 450 people saw extraordinary results for a four dose vaccination against malaria. This is a disease that kills very few people in America, but it kills almost half a million people, more than 400,000 people every single year. Many of them are children. This still might be one of the worst scourges of the world, and if we have the ability to vaccinate against it, that would be an extraordinary mitzvah. We’ve also seen experimental vaccines against individual cancers. Pfizer is working on, and Moderna is working on individual cancer vaccines, the same way that the mRNA vaccines taught our body to recognize the spike on the coronavirus. These vaccines would get our bodies to recognize and fight against a biomarker of a cancer that we have so that we attack specifically rather than use something like chemotherapy to ransack our entire biological system. And then finally, we have experimental flu vaccines every year when people get a flu shot, they’re getting a flu shot against a very specific strain, but there are 20 lineages of influenza. And within those lineages, there are many strains. And if we have the ability to come up with a pan influenza virus that reduces mortality for all of those strains, it means we might never have a terrible flu season again. We’ll have no way of having another Spanish influenza. It’s so, so important, I think, to recognize that yes, the last pandemic was a coronavirus. The next one might be a super flu if we get ahead of it with the pan influenza vaccine, my God, we could save millions if not tens of millions of lives. So in all, just an extraordinary year for the frontier of vaccines.

SREENIVASAN: You also write about a happy accident in the weight loss revolution. What happened this year?

THOMPSON: Well, so it’s interesting. In the last few years we’ve had diabetes medication that’s had this side effect of the patients losing a ton of weight. And as a result, some of the companies that developed these diabetes medications, looked into it and said, oh my God, now this side effect is an effect. And so we’ve taken our knowledge of the way that some diabetes medication can shift our hormones in such a way that it increases satiety, it slows the pace at which our stomach’s empty. And it can be really, really effective as an obesity medication. This isn’t bunk science – these are clinical trials showing that these medications reduce people’s weight by 15 to 20% in a matter of months. That’s extraordinary when you think about all the various side effects, all the various downstream effects of the fact that 40% of Americans today are clinically obese and tens of millions of people around the world, especially in advanced countries, are clinically obese as well. So this too, you know, just like this golden age of vaccines you might be entering, we might also be entering a golden age of obesity therapies, which could be really wonderful.

SREENIVASAN: One of the big images that started to make its way around the world were some of the first pictures from space on the James Webb Telescope. What, what was interesting or surprising to you about what we saw?

THOMPSON: I think what’s most thrilling about these images is that they’re not just the greatest camera zoom function ever invented. They’re a time machine. They’re a time machine that allows us to look 13 billion years into the past. And if we have enough Polaroid snapshots, so to speak, of our universe 13 billion years ago, we can flip through them and see a movie of what it was like for the universe to unfold. The other thrilling thing about these photographs is that it’s not just that we can see into the deep past. We can maybe spy on an exoplanet. We can see into its atmosphere the same way that, you know, you get those camera zoom ups when you’re watching Star Wars or Star Trek of that sort of, that new planet sort of coming into view. We can see into their atmosphere and maybe be able to guess what are the gasses that are present in this atmosphere? How does it compare to ours? If we see evidence of life, does that expand our sense of what kind of conditions are necessary for life to begin? So we’re just at the beginning of being able to understand life throughout the cosmos, meaning and time and matter, and all these big questions of how did it all begin? We’re just beginning to see that, but you have to have images first.

SREENIVASAN: Just recently the Department of Energy had a press announcement that at the Lawrence liberal War National Laboratories, we’ve created the first experiment with fusion where it generated more power than we put into it. And that was one of the sort of holy grails. Now the level at which this was generated and how much power went into it, et cetera doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen next week, but why was this such a big deal?

THOMPSON: It’s a huge deal because the dream of limitless power has been popular within science, certainly for the last 70 years since we had our first nuclear breakthrough. This is something we’ve been working toward, and it is a massive breakthrough, but you contextualized it beautifully. Just because you have an invention, just because you have a breakthrough doesn’t mean you’ve actually done anything for anybody’s life. You know, the fact that we created essentially this little mini hydrogen bomb in a lab – extraordinary, and at scale, cheap enough, efficiently enough, reliably enough, it could begin to help us solve the issue of climate change. But, that technology is not gonna be available for people to use to light their rooms and light their light bulbs for decades. In the meantime, global warming still exists. So I think it’s important to be optimistic and realistic here, optimistic about the fact that science is pushing forward, the energy frontier and realistic about the fact that by the time that fusion has any contact with our life, we are continuing to choke the planet and we still need to do other things rather than just invent in this space.

SREENIVASAN: And it’s interesting that one of the types of responses that I saw to that announcement, people who were skeptical of what science can do, were looking at this and saying, look at how much this costs just to get us to this point. Shouldn’t we spend money in the coming decades towards other types of mitigation strategies of what climate change is gonna impact on us? And then there were the people that were looking at this and saying, this is actually the absolute justification for why we should spend more on trying to find something like this. Right. So it’s, it’s kind of, you look at the same data, and you have very different interpretations of what to do with that.

THOMPSON: Yeah. It’s a rorschach absolutely. You know, I think you could tell a parallel story with the history of the solar cell, right, of solar technology. The solar cell, a modern silicon photovoltaic cell, was invented in Bell Labs in 1954. If you tried to use those first silicon solar cells to light the typical American House today, it would cost approximately one to 2 million dollars to light and warm your house every single day of the year. So 365 million, that’s your energy bill, right? So you could say in 1954, 1955, well, this technology doesn’t do anything. We’re spending all this time and using all of this, you know, all this brain power, all these resources in order to invent something that isn’t useful. Well, yeah, it wasn’t useful then, but since the 1970s, the cost of solar energy has declined by a factor of 200. Today, in many cases, it’s cheaper than oil or gas to install and use. So you need many different kinds of revolutions on the full path of progress. You need breakthroughs, but then you just solve the price problem and you have to solve the reliability problem, and you have to solve the transmission problem, and you have to solve the regulatory problem. It’s an obstacle course. There’s a bunch of hurdles that you have to overcome. I think it’s okay to be happy that you’ve overcome the first hurdle and say, there’s more to come, now we have to solve the next problem that’s up.

SREENIVASAN: So there’s ideas and then there’s sort of execution, right? Every venture capitalist will tell you like, well, how do you actually get this to market? And when you look at the kind of long arc of technological evolution in the United States – we win so many Nobel prizes, we win so many research awards. We’re fantastic at discovering lots of things. But you also point out that the rest of the world catches up and sometimes passes us even if they didn’t invent the stuff.

THOMPSON: Yeah, the US is the global champion of inventing, but we’re not the global champion at building what we invent. The US invented nuclear power, but we’ve closed more nuclear power plants than we’ve opened in the last 20 years. The US invented solar power, but the technological frontier for building photovoltaic cells clearly went to Asia and to Germany. The US invented elevators and skyscrapers, but we also have a housing crisis because we don’t build enough tall apartment buildings in downtown metro areas of places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Boston. So we invented the technology, but we don’t make enough use of it. And I’m fascinated by this discrepancy. I don’t know that I have the full answer to what exactly is going on here, but I do think it’s possible that the answer to what’s going on here is one of the more important mysteries of the 21st century. Why doesn’t America build what it invents? I’m frankly still working on this answer. I have a couple theories, but I think it’s just important to foreground that reality. We have all the Nobel prizes for science and physics and technology. We lead the world in Nobel Prizes, but we, if there is a Nobel Prize for building or deploying what we invent, we would not necessarily be at the top of the world. We have a lot of interesting barriers, a lot of interesting biases against building, and I’m very curious to figure out what those are.

SREENIVASAN: So tell me, if you had to pick which of these breakthroughs that you wrote about and researched do you think is going to impact people most directly?

THOMPSON: It’s a great question. I don’t have a strongly confident answer, but I’ll propose an answer. I think it’s AI. The reason it’s AI is that a cancer therapy can’t write an essay, but a sophisticated AI that writes an essay can also assist a vaccinologist in identifying new molecular combinations that can create the next cancer therapy. Does that make sense? Yeah. AI might be upstream of everything. If we are building for the human race a kind of second disembodied brain, a disembodied super brain that can sit alongside us like a little companion and help us be super brilliant at answering and super fast, but answering all these complicated questions, not just about, you know, the themes of Brave New World, but actually inventing new molecules and proteins and synthetic mRNAs. I mean, we’re opening an entirely new kingdom of human potential here. I think that’s probably what I’m most excited about.

SREENIVASAN: Derek Thompson, the article is called “Breakthroughs of the Year” in the Atlantic. Thanks so much for joining us.

THOMPSON: Thank you.