Around this time last year (2019) I made a post doing a personal review of the year. Something I have been doing for many years now. This year in 2020 I want to do the same but… oh boy! what a year this was!
2020 is a year for the history. A year when the World stood still and begun a battle against a virus which has cost about 1.8 million lives (up today) and has shown up the great and bad of us. I am reading what I have just written and sounds like a science fiction novel or movie… but it is real. That is the feeling when something happens that will be marked in history.
I am not going to dive too much into this topic (we are overwhelmed already) but obviously this is the event that most impacted me this year (like everyone). The drama is too much to cope in any country; no matter colour, politics or approaches to fight against. Really no measure has been proven better than another and giving the same results: uncontrolled situation, race against the clock to try to fix things, surprisingly a lack of scientific view (this is the most concerning on my view) and lots of deaths.
What happened then? Well… I am not the best to tell; global leaders should stand forward already and answer this question. But humbly I think one of the main reasons I could see is that governments and health systems were not ready for something like this. At some point this year a lot of people were surprised by an old video that went viral where Bill Gates made a speech in a TED conference warning, with an eye-opening accuracy, that a global pandemic like this can happen very soon and almost no country had the minimum plans with tested measurements to safely overcome the situation. It was back on 2015 and that was just a clever conclusion from one of the best minds we have after lots of time researching, reading, consulting to high-end scientists and experts on the subject. That’s all. Not a super conspiracy to rule the world with George Soros and bla bla… The worst is that the World did not listen to him and others with similar conclusions…: “Science? yeah… great, but let’s talk about it later…”. Until things happens. When studies like this will be put in the front line of parliaments discussions? Until 2020 they were considered almost like miscellanea… And we must not forget the increase concern of astrophysics about the difficulty to detect on time middle and high risk meteorites that can impact Earth! Will we do the same ignoring it until the worst happens?
Time to move on… (I said I will not dive too much!). In 2020 I saw a society going through big changes and, guess what, adapting generally well. That is good news! It shows the enormous adaptation capacity that humans have and we can prevail through the toughest difficulties. I hope the people will realize this because it can be the first step to greater changes such global warming acknowledgment, more tolerant politics and laws and better society in general. Crisis like the one we are living now can be the trigger to better changes so we must take the opportunity.
For a more personal stuff, there is something that has surprised me on 2020. In the similar post of last year I talked about how I pushed forward my creativity. Two years ago was the creation of this blog, last year was to start experimenting with electronic music and this year I pushed myself to something I wanted to try for some time: become a streamer on Twitch and revamp my YouTube channel. I said surprised because I though that I was not made for it but… it turns out it is not that complex (after spending time to setup and I am still learning) and if you find your place to be confortable, anyone can do it. I have a lot of hopes on this new version of my creativity and I cannot wait to make great things on 2021 about this!
On the professional side, 2020 has been a complex one: we moved to work 100% from home since April (not very big deal as we are used to work remotely), we had the most complex issue we ever had to fix on our platform (my area) and we have pushed other areas of business. Overall we had multiples ups and downs, more than in previos years, but we manged to go through with good work and this is very valuable in these times… so kudos.
To finish, I would like to mention a couple of books that more have impacted me this year.
Yo confieso. 45 años de espía from Mikel Lejarza and Fernando Rueda. This book collects the memoirs of Mikel Lejarza (also know as “El Lobo”) written by Fernando Rueda, a well known Spanish writer expert in intelligence agencies and secret services. Mikel Lejarza is a living history of the battle against ETA in Spain. He was the man who, under Spanish secret service, undercovers inside ETA organization earlier on its beginnings and helped on the greatest operations against the terrorist band. In this book, “El Lobo” shares details about some of his missions, how was his live with the terrorists and the relations with the Spanish secret services. I knew some of his story but this book impacted me on the human side; how someone can leave ALL behind for a major purpose and still go through. Although with the high compromises for the rest of his life (still today he needs to remain anonymous).
Editando genes: recorta, pega y colorea: las maravillosas herramientas CRISPR from LLuís Montoliu. With this book I made a marvellous discovery: did you know that the CRISPR tools have a common source discovered by the Spanish microbiologist Francis Mojica? I did not! Him with his team discovered the mechanisms of how bacteria can replicate/copy DNA sequences and he named it CRISPR. Later this was the base to develop the famous and well known genome editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9. This book goes through Francis discovery back in 1993 and explain how this tool works in a very easy and divulgate way. Very recommended to read if you are interested on how CRISPR tools work and specially to know who is the person who named them and probably will be first Spanish Chemistry Nobel prize in the near future after 2020 Nobel prize was given to the CRISPR-Cas9 developers: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.
