Most of the citizens do not know them but thanks to their work, our life improves year after year. Of course, those who are in Bilbao these days will be able to see their faces throughout the city. The space usually reserved for artists or politicians during an electoral campaign is now occupied by the 18 winners of the XV BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, who yesterday received their awards after several days of events and tributes that have turned the Basque capital into a knowledge festival.

And it is that if to the work of the winners we add that of the prestigious international researchers that make up the Juries of the eight categories of these awards born in 2008, we have a global representation of the value of science and culture when facing the great challenges of humanity.

With a pandemic and a war in Europe that, moreover, has once again unleashed the risk of a nuclear confrontation and has unleashed a serious energy crisis, many citizens feel that we are living in an era of uncertainty and even have an apocalyptic vision of the future of our species. A vision that with “his enlightened optimism” was once again challenged by Steven Pinker, awarded with Peter Singer in the Humanities category. The Harvard cognitive psychologist recalled during his speech one of his best-known arguments: the main indicators of well-being have improved on a global scale over the last centuries despite the fact that, he maintains, our image of the world is distorted by news about “the worst things that happen every day.

The reduction of violence, extreme poverty and infant mortality and, on the other hand, the increase in life expectancy, literacy and the number of countries with democratic governments are some of the examples that he mentioned to demonstrate that “the ideal of progress is not a matter of optimism or idealism”, but an empirical fact that can be demonstrated.

In this sense, Eloísa del Pino, president of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), highlighted how the work of the winners has contributed to solving “problems such as the fight against disease, the conservation of biodiversity, the adequate distribution of wealth or the stability of democracy”.

“Knowledge is the best instrument we have to understand the world and ourselves, and to take advantage of the present and future opportunities of our society”, summarized, for his part, the president of the BBVA Foundation and the BBVA Group, Carlos Torres Vila, host of a gala attended by a thousand guests, including the Lehendakari, Íñigo Urkullu or the mayor of Bilbao, Juan Mari Aburto.

Knowledge that frequently has applications that improve people's lives but that on many occasions, as Anne L'Huillier, awarded in Basic Sciences together with Paul Corkum and Ferenc Krausz, pointed out, has its seed in pure curiosity and in the eagerness to know from scientists.

As recognized by the professor of atomic physics at the University of Lund (Sweden), awarded for making it possible to observe the movement of subatomic particles in the shortest time scale captured by humans, her research “in the science of attoseconds [the time it takes light to travel through an atom] has been, and still is, driven by curiosity, by the desire to learn new things and push the frontiers of knowledge.”

The scientist predicted that with this new physics of attoseconds (called attophysics) the same thing that happened with lasers could happen, which “were not invented to solve a problem”, but have meant a revolution for many fields.

Figuring out how proteins fold was a central issue in biology for decades and a puzzle that, after decades of research, has not only been solved, but also thanks to the combination of this branch of science with artificial intelligence ( AI), the three winners in Biology and Biomedicine -David Baker, from the University of Washington, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, from the company DeepMind- are applying it to the development of new drugs and medical treatments, in addition to envisioning different uses in other areas such as the environment. The AI tools developed by both teams, called RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold respectively, are capable of determining the shape of proteins with great reliability in just a few minutes.

'A different world'

The world we live in today is very different.. We are now living longer, which is why new conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, are important. We are heating up and polluting the planet, so we need to find cleaner ways to generate energy and break down plastics and toxic compounds.. We could wait for the evolution of new proteins, but that would take many millions of years, and we don't have that much time,” said Baker, whose work is precisely making it possible to design new proteins.

The Italian engineer from the University of California at Berkeley, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, awarded in the category of Information and Communication Technologies, also addressed in his speech artificial intelligence and the potential risks of these disruptive technologies that from his point of view view, they must not cross moral limits: “When it comes to conceiving ideas and bringing them to life, we must take ethics into account and make sure that our creations do not harm humans or the environment,” said the engineer who revolutionized the chip design by automating the process. «I am convinced that, to be solid, scientific and technical training cannot forget the humanities; many mistakes made in the development of technological systems could have been avoided if we had stopped to think about the scope of their consequences,” said Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.

Ethics must also always be present in our relationship with animals, as Peter Singer has been defending for half a century. The philosopher recalled how his book Animal Liberation, a pioneering work in the ethical consideration of animals, was received in 1975 “with hostility and even mockery”.. “Pain is pain, regardless of which species is experiencing it, and there is no justification for ignoring or downplaying it because it is not the one being suffered by a member of our species,” he argued.

Because the progress of a society is not only measured in terms of the well-being achieved by its citizens, but also in the way animals are treated, and in this sense, Singer applauded measures such as prohibiting the overcrowding of chickens in cages wire.

This respect for animals is also translated into the boom in research on animal behavior and conservation.. This year the prize in Conservation Biology and Ecology went to Susan Alberts, Jeanne Altmann and Marlene Zuk for helping to identify the most effective actions to conserve a wide range of animals including primates, birds and insects.. “We have tried to push the boundaries of knowledge about how non-human primates, and by extension ourselves, function in the complex social and physical landscapes in which we live.. We hope that such knowledge has contributed to the conservation of these species,” said Susan Alberts.

Aurresku in tribute to the FBBVA winners

Research of the past is often a mirror to the present and future of humans and other species, as the work of the laureates in the climate change category shows.. Ellen Thomas, from Yale University, and James Zachos, from the University of California at Santa Cruz, found evidence of a natural climate change that took place 56 million years ago due to large volcanic eruptions and that is serving to study the current climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. “It is arrogant to say that we must save the Earth…My hope is that we really learn from the study of microscopic fossils in the deep ocean to learn not how to save the Earth, which we cannot do, but how to save ourselves.” themselves,” said paleoclimatologist Thomas.

And if the force of nature is great, so is the force of music, as assured by the maestro Thomas Adès, awarded in the category of Music and Opera: «As a young man I discovered that the force of music was as great as nature, the greatest of all powers. I discovered that composing was necessary for my physical survival and could also give me access to that power.. And I learned that although times change, the problems are the same.

Torsten Persson (Stockholm University), Timothy Besley (London School of Economics), and Guido Tabellini (Bocconi University), winners of the Prize in Economics, Finance and Business Management for transforming the field, have investigated how to address problems in society. of political economy: “The data clearly show the existence of groups of strong and weak states, both in the history of today's developed countries and in broad cross-sections of today's countries,” said Persson, who assured that “the strongest states they are also richer and less violent than the weaker ones.”