Since 1986, Susana López, a professor at the National University of Mexico, has been spearheading the scientific assault on a universal problem, a rotavirus that attacks nearly every child on earth under the age of five causing severe intestinal diseases. It is responsible for the death of some 600,000 children a year in developing countries and makes 2 million more seriously ill every year. With her colleagues, she has examined the workings of the rotavirus from a wide variety of angles, including the way it spreads in human populations, the immune response to it and its replication cycle. Along the way they have developed new diagnostic tests, isolated several new rotavirus  strains and contributed to efforts to find a vaccine.

Jill Farrant, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is the world’s leading expert on resurrection plants, which ‘come back to life’ from a desiccated, seemingly dead state when they are rehydrated. Professor Farrant is investigating the ability of many species of these plants to survive without water for long periods of time from a number of angles, from the molecular, biochemical and ultrastructural to the whole-plant ecophysiological, using a unique comparative approach and working with many different species of resurrection plants and a variety of tissues. The ultimate goal is to find applications that will lead to the development of drought-tolerant crops to nourish populations in arid, drought-prone climates, notably in Africa, and her research may have medicinal applications as well.

In 1984, Frances Ashcroft discovered a protein (a tiny pore called an ion channel) that acted as the link between blood-glucose levels and insulin secretion. As a result, people with a rare inherited form of diabetes can now relieve their symptoms simply by taking an existing drug in pill form, rather than by daily insulin injections. The drug has improved their blood glucose control and so reduced the risk of diabetic complications, such as blindness and kidney disease. She is now studying why 25% of patients with this disease also have neurological problems, and continues to explore what goes wrong with insulin secretion in type 2 diabetes, which affects 336 million people worldwide.

Ingrid Scheffer, a paediatric neurologist and professor at the University of Melbourne, is helping to transform the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy, a brain disorder characterized by seizures and other symptoms that can be extremely disruptive to the lives of the 50 million people affected by it. She has described several new forms of epilepsy and her research group was the first to uncover a gene for epilepsy and subsequently, many of the genes now known to be implicated. These revolutionary findings, which have already improved diagnosis and treatments for many patients and may lead to the development of new therapies, can also be used for genetic counselling. Professor Scheffer’s goal is to ‘make a major difference to patients and families through science’.

Bonnie Bassler has devoted herself to studying the revolutionary notion that bacteria are not simply tiny individual organisms working on their own for better (helping us digest food, for example) or for worse (causing disease). In fact, as she discovered, they are ineffective on their own and must work as coordinated ‘armies’ to be able to be successful at both keeping us healthy and making us sick. It would be impossible for groups of bacteria to act in unison, however, if they did not communicate with each other. Bassler has shown that bacteria ‘talk’ using chemicals as their words. These startling discoveries may someday lead to the development of new antibiotics that interfere with bacterial conversations as well as many other applications, such as infection-resistant surgical implants.