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Every year, Nature selects ten people whose work sits at the heart of the most important scientific stories, and the 2025 edition is unusually personal. It includes not only leading researchers and policy shapers, but also a six-month-old baby and a civil servant fired for refusing to abandon scientific integrity.

One of the most striking stories is that of KJ Muldoon, a baby born with an ultra-rare metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency, which prevents the body from safely handling ammonia. At just six months old, KJ became the first person to receive a hyper-personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy designed specifically for his mutation, developed and manufactured in a matter of months. The case shows how rapidly gee editing is moving towards tailor-made treatments for rare diseases that previously had almost no therapeutic options.

Scientific integrity also takes center stage. Susan Monarez, briefly director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lost her job after refusing political pressure to change vaccine recommendations and dismiss experts “irrespective of the scientific evidence”. Her story underlines how fragile evidence-based public health can be when it collides with ideology, and why institutional safeguards and independent expertise are so critical.

The list spans the globe. Brazilian researcher Luciano Moreira helped scale up Wolbachia-infected mosquito programs, backed by a new “mosquito factory” able to produce around 100 million eggs per week to fight dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. In China, geoscientist Mengran Du documented the deepest known animal ecosystems in the hadal trenches, while DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng disrupted the AI landscape with a frontier model built at far lower cost than many Western competitors.

Nature’s 10 also reaches from pandemics to the cosmos. South African health leader Precious Matsoso co-chaired the negotiations that led to the first global pandemic treaty within the World Health Organization framework, aiming to strengthen preparedness and equity in future crises. Physicist Tony Tyson, meanwhile, saw three decades of work culminate in the first images from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, a facility designed to map the dynamic sky and shed light on dark matter and dark energy.

Other honorees include neurologist Sarah Tabrizi, whose work with gene-targeting therapies offers hope for slowing Huntington’s disease, and immunologist Yifat Merbl, who uncovered a hidden antimicrobial role for proteasomes in the cell’s “trash-processing” system. Indian scientist Achal Agrawal rounds out the group by exposing the scale of research retractions in his country, at considerable personal and professional risk.

Taken together, the 2025 list is a snapshot of science in motion: intensely technical, deeply political, and profoundly human.

Link to the full feature in Nature: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-03848-1/index.html