Some of the winners of the 2015 Breakthrough prizes
Hollywood glamour and science collided at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony last night, where seven prizes, each worth $3 million, were awarded to rising stars in three categories – fundamental physics, mathematics and life sciences.
The glitzy ceremony at NASA Ames in Moffett Field California – hosted by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and with performances from Grammy-award winner Pharrell Williams – is a very deliberate attempt to make scientists as famous and talked about as David Beckham or Kim Kardashian.
Advertisement
“The Oscars and Emmys play a big role in popularising actors,” says prize founder Yuri Milner. “We are trying to do the same with our prize, though we apply a rigorous scientific process to selection.”
Founded in 2012, Breakthroughs are the richest prizes in science, bankrolled by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Google’s Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and DST Global’s Milner.
So who are these new science celebrities? Karl Deisseroth of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Ed Boyden at MIT Media lab each take home $3 million for their work on optogenetics, a technique that allows individual neurons in the brain to be turned on and off by a light switch (at least, in fruit flies, mice and other mammals). As well as enabling neuroscientists to learn more about how the brain works, optogenetic tools might eventually be used to treat blindness in humans and a host of brain disorders, from depression to Parkinson’s disease.
The sciences prize also went to three other biologists. John Hardy (pictured below) of University College London was honoured for his discovery of mutations in a gene that causes early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Hardy’s work has also shed light on other neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and motor neuron disease.
John Hardy was honoured for his discovery of mutations that cause Alzheimer’s
Parkinson’s strikes a chord with Brin because he has a genetic mutation that increases his chances of contracting the disease. He discovered the rare mutation in a 23andMe gene test. His mother and her aunt had Parkinson’s too.
Helen Hobbs, also at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was awarded for her discovery that genetic mutations can raise or lower cholesterol levels and play an important role in fatty liver disease. Her work is inspiring new ways to prevent cardiovascular and liver disease.
And Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, won for founding the field of paleogenetics and sequencing the mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. His work has revealed much more about these extinct relatives than bones alone can, including their language abilities and how they interbred with early humans.
Taking shape
The Breakthrough prize in mathematics went to Ian Agol at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for his work on topology, the branch of mathematics that deals with how shapes transform into each other. His work solved outstanding problems in the field of 3-manifolds. These include three-dimensional shapes like spheres and cubes, plus less familiar objects embedded in higher dimensions.
By coincidence, the work on neutrino oscillations which won the prize for fundamental physics was also awarded this year’s Nobel prize. Painstaking research carried out by five experimental teams in Japan, Canada and China showed how neutrinos produced in radioactive decays that take place in stars and nuclear reactors morph from one form of neutrino to another on their journey through space.
Yuri Milner (left) and Christina Aguilera (right) presented an award to Svante Pääbo
Their work has blown a hole in the standard model of particle physics, suggesting that neutrinos might represent our best chance of finding answers to outstanding questions in physics. For example, where did antimatter go in the early universe, and how can quantum mechanics and gravity be united?
Next month, the Nobel committee will fete Art McDonald, who led the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory team in Canada, and Takaaki Kajita, leader of the Super Kamiokande experiment in Japan. By contrast, the Breakthrough prize money will be shared by all five teams of physicists – around 1300 people in total.
“Our prize recognises the collective effort of science,” says Milner. “It sends a different message to the Nobel prize.”
Tomorrow’s stars
In raising awareness of fundamental science, Milner hopes the Breakthroughs will inspire the science stars of tomorrow. That’s why this year’s awards include a Breakthrough Junior Challenge worth $400,000 in educational prizes.
Pharrell Williams performing at the Breakthrough Awards
Teenagers aged between 13 and 18 years were asked to make a short video explaining a challenging concept in less than 10 minutes. More than 2000 entries were received from 86 countries. View the finalists’ videos here.
The winner is Ryan Chester, 18, from Ohio in the US. He receives a $250,000 scholarship, as well as a $50,000 grant for his teacher and a $100,000 science laboratory for their school. His video explains Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
“Time dilation has been in science TV shows and movies like Interstellar so often that I’ve just accepted it without understanding why it was true. So when this challenge came around I thought this area was a great one to dig into,” he says.
As the televised ceremony, presented by stars including Russell Crowe and Lily Collins, drew to a close, Milner defends its glitzy format. “If we can reach 50 to 100 million viewers that will be inspirational to young people,” he says.
Image credits: First, second and fourth photos: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize; John Hardy: Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
