Scientists can make an enormous difference in the world.<\/p>\n
Take the researcher Sarah Gilbert, who has dedicated her career to developing vaccines. Over the last two decades, she has contributed to vaccines against the flu, MERS, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley fever. When she heard about the outbreak in China in January 2020, she began working on a vaccine, just in case. By the end of that year, the vaccine against COVID-19 was approved, saving an estimated 6.3 million lives in the following year alone. Without this effort, we would have faced a much darker reality, marked by lockdowns, overwhelmed health systems, and widespread suffering.<\/p>\n
This chart lists many such scientists whose work saved many people\u2019s lives. The estimates are taken from the web publication Science Heroes, where you can find profiles of these scientists.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s difficult to estimate the exact difference particular innovations have made, and I take all such estimates with a grain of salt. None of these scientists did their work in isolation; their innovations were achieved thanks to collaborative efforts and the earlier work of other researchers.<\/p>\n
Our team spends much of its time counting deaths, but it\u2019s equally important to know the number of lives saved \u2014 even though it is harder to estimate and involves much larger uncertainty. It\u2019s inspiring to be reminded that creative, enterprising, and tenacious people can enormously contribute to our lives.<\/p>\n
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented synthetic fertilizers, are at the top of this list. My colleague Hannah Ritchie wrote an article about the difference their work has made: How many people does synthetic fertilizer feed? \u2192<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists can make an enormous difference in the world. Take the researcher Sarah Gilbert, who has dedicated her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-102423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}