From the first surgeries to the state-of-the-art technologies in today operation rooms, medicine has been the most impactful science in our lives for ages. No one can estimate the number of lives that have been eased or saved by medical progress. And yet, we keep on discovering new treatments, finding new cures and inventing leading - edge techniques that could save even more lives in the future.

This year, doctors and researchers from China to Brazil, from Israel to Tanzania, came up with the foremost breakthroughs, and Reuters witnessed them all. The ongoing fight against cancer won some battles: in Spain, Egyptian mummies have revealed new clues, in the U.S., a simple vaccine has boosted life expectancy in brain cancer and Dutch robotic biopsy could change forever cancer screenings.

Diseases like malaria, Parkinson or even HIV could soon become ancient memories thanks to the efforts of scientists from all over the world. Even ageing revealed its secrets through the mathematics of wrinkles. But medicine is not just about curing, it is also the world of knowledge. No organ hides its secrets like the human brain. In the UK, neurologists have been testing the unbounded capacities of the babies’ brains while Swiss repaired spinal cords to make paralyzed rats walk again.