If it had not been for coronavirus, the headlines in 2020 might have been made by other triumphs. In March, a man in London became the second person in history to be cured of HIV/AIDS. On August 25, after four years without a case, Africa was declared free of the wild polio strain, a disease that had once crippled 75,000 children every year. In November, the computers of a British AI company successfully predicted a protein’s 3D shape from its amino acid sequence, promising a huge acceleration in drug development.6
