In 2024, 1.3 million people contracted HIV, 40.8 million were living with the virus, and 630,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses. These figures are in addition to the 92.3 million people in total who’ve been infected since the start of the pandemic, according to estimates. 

More than forty years have passed since the first cases were detected and, although steady progress has been made, we still can’t class HIV as a disease of the past.

So what have we learned after four decades of fighting HIV? What stigma does it carry today? Which scientific challenges remain to be solved? And what social transformations are essential to envisage an AIDS-free future?

Long before the first robot hoover existed, the laws that would shape its relationship with humans had already been imagined. Almost a century before Sputnik 1 became the first artificial satellite in history, someone had dreamt it up in the pages of a book. Even cloning and the ‘de-extinction’ of species were conceived in the mind of a writer before science labs. Throughout history, science fiction has fuelled the imagination of researchers on countless occasions, driving advances that have come to change the world.

The laws of robotics in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), space flight in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and genetic engineering in H.G.

“Spanish girls want to be #ASTRONAUTS. It’s not a dream; it’s a reality” posted Sara García Alonso after the publication of the Annual Adecco Survey, which asked over 1,100 children about what they dreamed of doing as a job.

Sara, a molecular biologist at Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and the country’s first candidate to become an astronaut for the European Space Agency, has managed to make travelling into space seem possible and has fired the imagination of young girls. Because when a woman is visible, when she forges a path, many more girls can see themselves in her place. 

That’s why today, to commemorate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science,