The bioinformatician Tulio de Oliveira, director of the team that discovered the variant in South Africa, did not hesitate to warn of its danger. However, the country’s harsh penalties left it without reagents for the tests. He has been recognized by ‘Nature’ magazine as one of the ten most influential people in science in 2021
On November 25, the Brazilian bioinformatician Tulio de Oliveira knew that he had to give the world some bad news. His team at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) in South Africa had discovered a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, soon to be named Omicron. The disturbing set of mutations led to the suspicion that the new version could evade the immunity achieved by previous infections or by vaccination, so the scientist did not hesitate to alert the World Health Organization (WHO). And he did it despite the fact that, as had happened with the Beta variant, also detected in South African samples by the same group last year, the risk of harsh sanctions imposed on South Africa by different governments would be a serious blow. For the country’s economy and, paradoxically, for the very scientists who sounded the alarm. The travel ban left Oliveira’s laboratory without reagents to diagnose Covid-19 and other viruses.
But the bioinformatician knew that his decision was the right one. “The way one stops a pandemic is by quick action “, he tells the magazine ‘Nature’, which has chosen him as one of the ten personalities who have most influenced science this year. “If you wait, you will see that it has not been a good option,” he insists.
KRISP, created in 2017 with De Oliveira at the helm, has tracked pathogens behind diseases like dengue and Zika, and more common scourges like AIDS and tuberculosis. But never before have so many different samples of the same virus been sequenced in such a short time, not in Africa or anywhere else in the world. From the discovery of the variant, its confirmation in hundreds of samples throughout the Gauteng province, the communication to the South African government, and, finally, its public presentation, only about thirty-six hours elapsed.
A smokescreen
What followed afterward was a great disappointment for De Oliveira. Rich countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, have imposed travel bans on southern Africa simply because the country had the scientific knack to discover the new variant. In his opinion, South Africa became a kind of scapegoat, “almost a smokescreen for hoarding vaccines, and for rich countries losing control of the pandemic.” “Of course, I expected more,” he reaffirms in ‘Nature’. On his Twitter account, he has referred to the sanctions as “discriminatory.”
But the most painful thing for De Oliveira was finding himself in his laboratory without the reagents, the chemical substances necessary to detect new cases of the variant, due to the stoppage of travel. And all this in the midst of a chilling increase in cases.
Although the South African government, scientists, and international bodies such as the WHO have expressed outrage at the targeted restrictions, calling them racist, unscientific, and counterproductive, the bans continue. In an interview with ‘The New Yorker, De Oliveira even expresses his fear that the “violent reaction” against South Africa means that other developing countries are reluctant to share information.
The bioinformatician also noted the resentment in his own country. When Ómicron’s announcement brought new travel bans, some South Africans, including politicians, asked him if he had the right to make such pronouncements. Some even saw genomic surveillance as the enemy. “We are not the enemies, we are quite the opposite,” he assures.
‘Nature’ recalls that De Oliveira’s work has also influenced the formulation of policies. The KRISP way of working combines state-of-the-art molecular technology with close ties to doctors and nurses on the front lines, to report what is happening in real-time. For example, his mapping of an early hospital outbreak of Covid-19 enabled new guidelines to be designed for designing safer hospital wards. “Tulio has done an incredible job of pioneering a new way of science responding to epidemics,” admits Christian Happi, molecular biologist and director of the African Center of Excellence for Infectious Disease Genomics at Redentor University in Ede, Nigeria.
De Oliveira has also been director of Stellenbosch University’s Epidemic Response and Innovation Center since July, which will house the largest sequencing facility in Africa. “The bottom line that we’ve shown the world is that these things can be done in developing countries,” he says.
The ten personalities of ‘Nature’
The magazine ‘Nature’ has published this Wednesday its list of the ten people who have made a difference in science in 2021. As also happened last year, many of these protagonists have contributed to the fight against Covid-19. In addition to Tulio de Oliveira, the magazine has recognized Winnie Byanyima, director of the United Nations program on HIV (UNAIDS), as one of the main critics of rich countries and pharmaceutical companies that ignored calls to distribute vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 more equitably. Also to epidemiologist Meaghan Kall, for helping to spread crucial information about the virus easily on social media, and to Janet Woodcock, director of the US Food and Drug Administration during a very difficult year that included controversial decisions about vaccine boosters and a drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
The list also includes climate scientist Friederike Otto, who studies whether human action is leading to climate events. And to activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, for her work with indigenous peoples in the Philippines. Also recognized is Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of the mission that made China the second country to successfully land a rover on Mars. Timnit Gebru stood out for launching a research institute to study how artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be developed more ethically (without racial discrimination), after his controversial departure from tech giant Google a year ago. Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanacdiscovered thousands of misleading scientific publications containing nonsense text generated by the software and helped alert the world to the problem. Finally, John Jumper and his colleagues at DeepMind in London shook up the field of structural biology by publishing the code for AlphaFold, which uses artificial intelligence to predict protein structures with remarkable accuracy.
