The scientific advances to cheer in 2023 – and what 2024 could bring
2023 brought a lot of bad things: wars, coups, earthquakes, and what’s likely to be the hottest year on record. It’s natural to focus on the negative, but for a change we’re going to do the opposite: we’re going to look at some of the most exciting scientific progress that was made this year.
Here’s a (very incomplete) list of the biggest discoveries and breakthroughs of 2023 – advances that have already made the world a better place, or will likely do so in the near future.
Artificial intelligence
Let’s start with the biggest story of the year: AI. Suddenly, at the beginning of the year, decades of research on so-called large language models came to fruition, and we had several AI chatbots that could produce huge volumes of uncannily human-seeming text within seconds, about any topic you cared to ask about. Did an AI write the paragraph you’re reading right now? No, it didn’t. But it might’ve!
The scarily quick development of the large language models – the most famous being OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which stunned the world with its fourth version in March – has incredible potential for automating endless boring organisational tasks, but it’s so much more than that: the technology underlying the models could help us discover new drugs, truly understand our brains and the earth’s climate, and generally reshape science, the economy, and the world at large.
It’s not all positive. Nobody, even the scientists who designed them, really knows what’s happening under the bonnet of these AI models. As they become smarter and smarter – perhaps vastly smarter than the smartest human – will we still be able to control them? Much ink was spilled in 2023 about how we should deal with the risks of AI, in the short term (making misinformation and scams much easier), the medium term (replacing people’s jobs), and the long term (you’ve seen The Terminator, right?).
It is perhaps reassuring, then, that in hosting its AI Summit in November 2023, the UK became a leading voice in AI safety – the movement to mitigate these potential harms and realise the massive benefits that AI could have for us all.
The malaria vaccine
This is the most important story of the year in terms of sheer numbers of lives saved. Malaria is among the worst existing scourges of humanity, and it’s killed millions since the first vaccine against it – called “RTS,S” – was invented in 1987. It’s taken until now – a decades-long, tortuous process – for us to properly trial RTS,S in Africa.
The data tell us some fantastic news: the vaccine reduces severe malaria by 22 per cent, and decreased toddler deaths by 13 per cent. Once the vaccine is properly rolled out – that’s in progress right now – it’ll save tens of thousands of lives every year. Not only that: an even better, cheaper vaccine (called R21) is on the way.
The development of a vaccine against one of the biggest killers in human history is pretty much the best imaginable science story – and you lived through it in 2023.
Even more medical progress
Malaria wasn’t the only disease we successfully fought back against in 2023. In March, we saw major progress towards a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which kills hundreds of children and thousands of elderly people every year, and is also one of the major causes of the common cold.
In August, scientists described a new drug that successfully extended the lives of patients with a specific kind of brain cancer – something we’d been struggling for decades to treat effectively.
In November, researchers reported a trial of a remarkable new intervention to reduce dengue fever, the super-common mosquito-borne tropical disease, in Colombia. They inserted a special kind of bacteria into the eggs of mosquitoes that blocks the dengue virus. It quickly spread to all the mosquitoes in the region, and eventually reduced cases of dengue by up to 97 per cent.
Those are just a few of the medical advances we’ve made. And we’ve also made incredible progress for non-disease medical conditions: for example, in May, scientists reported a new “brain-spine interface” that helped a tetraplegic man (that is, with paralysis of all four limbs; also known as quadriplegia) to stand and walk again. The future: you’re living in it.
Weight-loss drugs
Dieting sucks. That’s effectively the summary of all the research into techniques like calorie-counting, intermittent fasting, and the rest. It’s an enormous amount of effort for often small benefits, like losing something like 5 per cent of your body weight if you’re very successful.
That all changed this year. While many in the media moaned ineffectually about “ultra-processed foods”, 2023 saw the widespread availability of powerful weight-loss drugs: semaglutide (marketed for diabetes as Ozempic and for obesity as Wegovy) led to 15 per cent weight loss in trials with only very mild side effects. The drug suppresses the appetite, meaning users can still enjoy food but no longer have the constant urge to snack – described in one memorable article as a background “food noise” – or to have a second helping.
I wrote “widespread availability” just above, but that wasn’t quite right: the understandably massive demand for semaglutide caused a global supply crash that’s only just beginning to be addressed. Happily though, new drugs like tirzepatide (17.5 per cent weight loss) and retatrutide (more than 20 per cent weight loss) are coming soon. 2023 was the beginning of the end for the obesity epidemic – with no need for heavy-handed government bans on certain types of food.
To infinity and beyond (or at least to the Moon)
Although Elon Musk became more famous in 2023 for his erratic behaviour on Twitter – or, as he renamed it, “X” – it’s easy to forget that one of his other companies, SpaceX, was making advances in rocket science.
Both of its Starship rocket launches – in April and November this year – had engine failures, but this was kind of the point: the idea is to run lots of experimental test launches to learn where any problems lie. It all represented progress towards the eventual goal of sending super-heavy, reusable rockets to carry humans and satellites into space.
SpaceX was hardly alone: this year scientists made many more exciting innovations in space technology. For example, in June, scientists at Caltech showed for the first time that they could collect solar power using a satellite in space and then beam it back to Earth – which in future could lead to much more efficient solar power that isn’t affected by clouds and the Earth’s atmosphere.
August 2023 saw India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully carrying its Vikram lander to the rarely-explored south pole of the Moon. It heralds much more moon exploration in future: Japan’s lander is currently en route, and next year a US-led manned mission from the Artemis programme will see humans return to the Moon for the first time since the early 1970s.
The dawn of a new era of space exploration is a great metaphor for how optimistic we should be about the future. Yes, we’re facing some serious challenges, but who could look at all the scientific advances we made in 2023 and not feel positive about our ability to face them?
There’s a lot more progress to be made in 2024 – let’s get to it.