In a year that saw Britain suffer double-dip recession; when crippling debt has risen to threaten a record number of households; when the nation faces losing its triple A credit rating; and the economy of the entire planet continues to flounder, it is hard to find many reasons to be cheerful. The human species, which has made so much of its sparkling intellect in recent decades, could fairly be accused of having made a recent hash of global affairs. It is a justifiable criticism, though it ignores some intriguing contradictory evidence. We forget that some affairs went well in 2012. Indeed, when it came to scientific achievements, the year turns out to have been a sparkling one. Interplanetary space probes, sub-atomic particle accelerators, stem cell science and the reconstruction of the genomes of extinct species vividly demonstrated the power of modern technology and the might of the scientific method. All is not yet up for our species, it would seem.
Consider the Higgs boson. The particle was first postulated by UK physicist Peter Higgs almost 50 years ago while working on a theory that attempted to explain why objects in the universe have mass. Finding it proved to be an awkward business, however, and required the construction, by Cern, of one of the world's most extraordinary instruments, the Large Hadron Collider, under the Jura Mountains near Geneva. Around 10,000 scientists and engineers collaborated for several years to build the £5bn device, which is constructed on the scale of London's Circle line but designed to a billionth of a metre accuracy. Streams of protons were fired at colossal energies round the collider's 26-mile circular tunnel before being battered together. From the resulting sub-atomic debris, scientists last summer eventually found clear evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson. The once unfathomable heaviness of being had been explained at last. The discovery was, deservedly, hailed as a milestone in physics and was named last week as the scientific breakthrough of the year by the journal Science. "The feat marks an intellectual, technological and organisational triumph," it noted.
Then there was the arrival of Curiosity, Nasa's $2.5bn robot rover on the surface of Mars, in July. After an eight-month journey through space, the probe reached the edge of the atmosphere of the Red Planet travelling at a speed of more than 13,000mph. For the following seven minutes, onboard computers directed the craft through a series of choreographed manoeuvres that cut its speed until a rocket-powered platform, known as a sky crane, was able to pick the rover and gently lower it into Mars's Gale Crater. Since then, it has been trundling over the Martian landscape using lasers to burn and analyse rocks.
It also has a robot arm that can reach up to two metres and hold up to 30kg of equipment to drill holes and pulverise rocks. It even has an oven in which soil and rock samples will be baked while mass spectrometers will analyse the gases given off. The aim of all this is to show, once and for all, that Mars possesses organic materials, amino acids and sugars, which would demonstrate that conditions in the soil of Mars could support living organisms. For the next two years, Curiosity will slowly trundle up the mountain at the centre of Gale Crater and will have provided scientists with a complete geological history of Mars by the end of its operating life – another, quite staggering intellectual achievement.
Both Curiosity and the hunt for the Higgs have been long in the planning. By contrast, the work on the hominid species Denisova by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has proceeded with astonishing speed.
Working on a fragment of bone found in Denisova cave in Siberia, the group revealed two years ago that preliminary genetic tests indicated it belonged to a previously unknown species of human being, the Denisovans. Last year, the Leipzig group announced that they had now sequenced its entire genome. Given the effort that was needed to sequence the genome of Homo sapiens, this was a striking development. For the first time, a species of human has been described not from its anatomy but from its DNA. There is only a sliver of bone of one member of the species. Yet from the DNA taken from it, we already know it belonged to a young woman who probably had dark hair, eyes and skin and lived between 74,000 and 82,000 years ago.
The work also indicates that at one time Denisovan people must have interbred with the ancestors of modern people who now live in South Asia. All this from a fragment of bone smaller than a finger nail. It is a quite extraordinary achievement that reveals just how powerful the science of genetic diagnostics has become.
Finally, there was the achievement of Japanese researchers who managed to produce eggs from multipurpose stem cells, research that was also hailed as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2012 by Science. The work, carried out researchers led by Professor Michinori Saito of Kyoto University, "provides a powerful tool for studying genes and other factors that influence fertility and egg cell development" the magazine added.
In fact, the work – carried out on mice – goes further for it demonstrates the potential held out by stem cells for repairing all sorts of human woes, including diabetes, heart failure and, in this case, infertility. In their experiments, the Kyoto scientists succeeded in using mice to generate ova – eggs – from stem cells and then used these ova to produce mice offspring through in vitro fertilisation. Ethical problems currently limit the use of this technique in humans. On the other hand, the insights offered by Saito's work is already helping researchers understand some forms of infertility. Most of all, it once again demonstrates the enormous potential of stem cell science.
The four examples quoted above give an indication of the breadth of the extraordinary endeavours now being pursued by scientists and reveal how far they are pushing the limits of their fields. Humans have never revealed their ingenuity with such flair. We will need it. Just as we make new breakthroughs and uncover new materials and sources of energy, our planet is assailed by rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and increasing ecological degradation. We face a future in which we are going to become increasingly reliant on science to save us. The good news from 2012 is that its practitioners appear to be up to the job.