Science: the one bright hope

 I was gratified and saddened by turns at the general tone of New Year's Eve's BBC correspondents look ahead. (Incidentally, Lyse Doucet seems to have made this annual review her own; long may it continue.) People who really have their fingers on the pulse of current affairs were also pessimistic about 2022. Surprisingly, nobody mentioned Northern Ireland which looks to become a flashpoint this year.

However, viewing the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures offers some hope. The strides in vaccine technology, after years of graft by an under-funded university team in the UK and work by pioneering immigrants in Germany but given impetus by SARS-C0V-2, look like leading to the prevention of that perennial world-wide killer, malaria. Last October, the World Health Organisation approved the first anti-parasitical. Its success rate is said to be 30%, much less than the 75% which is the gold standard, but it is a start and should save hundreds of lives. Yet more promising are the initial results from large-scale trials in Mali of an Oxford University vaccine, claimed to be 77% effective in the children so far inoculated. One trusts that the current unrest in Mali does not disrupt the completion of the trials in adults. There is also work on a vaccine which targets the relatively-unchanging coat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus rather than the mutable (witness Omicron) spike. If this succeeds, it opens the way for a vaccine against other coronaviruses which have been with us for a long time, causing, along with adenoviruses and rhinoviruses, the common colds which bring misery to many each year, not to mention their effect on productivity.

2022 should also see the first results from the James Webb Space Telescope. The only part of the project for which there could be no dress rehearsal, the launch, safely completed, the NASA team is, as I write, preparing to complete the deployment of the sun shield. There will also be a steady flow of data from probes of asteroids and planets, including a virtual circus on Mars. It will be surprising if the increase in investigate robots does not produce at least one new unexpected item of information.

Nationalism cannot be kept out of scientific endeavour altogether. We have seen how nations have poured money into competitive space exploration, and there has been indulgence in vaccine diplomacy by at least one major nation. Scientists themselves, though, are more intent on gaining knowledge for its own sake, and to that end share findings with colleagues across borders. That is our big hope for the future.