Breakthroughs of the Years

 Since 1996, Science magazine has named a single "Breakthrough of the Year" as well as several runners-up. This year's is the growth of renewable energy, especially solar. But what about the past thirty years, can we see any themes or a bigger picture? Here is a quick look at the categories, as roughly laid out by me:

• Life sciences: 17
• Human health: 8
• HIV (understanding, treatment as prevention, lenacapavir): 3
• Cancer (immunotherapy): 1
• Other (stem-cell therapy, genetic variation, COVID-19 vaccine, GLP-1): 4
• Evolution (evo in action, Ardipithecus ramidus): 2
• Other bio/life sciences (cloning Dolly, whole-genome sequencing, RNA interference, reprogramming, CRISPR, single-cell sequencing, AlphaFold): 7
• The physical universe: 9
• Cosmology and "deep" astronomy (accelerating universe, dark energy, gravitational waves, neutron star merger, black hole VLBI, JWST): 6
• Exploring the solar system (Spirit, Rosetta): 2
• Particle physics (Higgs): 1
• Technology: 3
• Nano/quantum tech (nanocircuits, quantum machine): 2
• Energy tech: 1
• Mathematics (Poincaré proof): 1

That's thirty years of astounding science, for the benefit of humankind as well as sheer curiosity.

It would be worthwhile to compare to the annual list at Physics World, and also to look at the runners-up and the "busts" of the year, which Science also reports, but that would be more work than I care to put in this morning.

It's humbling to be reminded that quantum information is at best a small corner of the global science and technology effort. Even the broader field of computing, with all it has done in the last thirty years, makes the list above only once, and at that for its contribution in understanding proteins rather than the technology itself. Of course, technology is very often about incremental accumulation of small advances, rather than "breakthroughs". Still, time invested in thinking about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going would be well spent.