Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner arrives on the red carpet during the second annual Breakthrough Prize Awards at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California November 9, 2014.
REUTERS/STEPHEN LAM
Academia just turned a little more glitzy for a select group of scientists.
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner handed out $21 million Sunday in seven Breakthrough Prizes, the award for scientific accomplishment he created three years ago alongside technology giants including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 23andme founder Anne Wojcicki and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The prizes are worth $3 million, around three times the sum a Nobel Prize winner receives.
For one group of Breakthrough recipients, the honor will carry more prestige than cash. Some 1370 physicians are being honored as part of a single $3 million prize for their work confirming the theory of neutrino oscillation, a phenomenon in quantum mechanics.
Seven team leaders will split two-thirds of the prize. That leaves $1 million to split among the others, or around $700 to each physicist.
“I would love to give $3 million to each one, but we’re not there yet,” Milner said in an interview on Friday. Increasingly, he added, breakthroughs are made through vast consortiums rather than a handful of scientists working in relative isolation, raising the chances of such shared prizes in future.
Five prizes went to researchers in life sciences for advances in areas ranging from optogenetics to sequencing of ancient genomes. A prize in mathematics went to a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for work in low dimensional topology and geometric group theory.
Eight scientists early in their mathematics and physics careers won awards of $100,000.
Milner has set his sights on giving the sciences the same cultural resonance as sports or entertainment, but on Friday, he said it was too early to see if his work was having any effect. He pointed to the ceremony’s broadcast on a major U.S. network, Fox, for the first time as a sign things were moving in the right direction.
A onetime physics PhD student in Moscow who dropped out to move to the United States in 1990, Milner has backed some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Facebook.
Seth MacFarlane, creator of the hit TV series “Family Guy,” is expected to host the black-tie ceremony, held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.
Earlier this year, Milner said he would spend $100 million looking for intelligent life in space by searching for radio and light signals.
(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Factbox: Science’s ‘Breakthrough’ prize winners
The following is a list of winners of the Breakthrough Prizes, worth $3 million each, announced on Sunday in Mountain View, California.
Life Sciences:
Karl Deisseroth, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry at Stanford University, and Ed Boyden, Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute
The two will each win a separate $3 million prize for developing and implementing optogenetics – the programming of neurons to express light-activated ion channels and pumps, so that their electrical activity can be controlled by light, potentially opening a new path to treatments for Parkinson’s, depression, Alzheimer’s and blindness.
Helen Hobbs, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Internal Medicine and Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Hobbs discovered human genetic variants that alter the levels and distribution of cholesterol and other lipids, inspiring new approaches to the prevention of cardiovascular and liver disease.
John Hardy, Professor of Neuroscience at University College London
Hardy discovered mutations in the Amyloid Precursor Protein gene (APP) that cause early onset Alzheimer’s.
Svante Pääbo, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Pääbo pioneered the sequencing of ancient DNA and ancient genomes, illuminating the origins of modern humans and our relationships to extinct relatives such as Neanderthals.
Mathematics
Ian Agol, Associate Professor Department of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley
Agol contributed low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtual Haken and virtual fibering conjectures.
Physics
The prize will be shared among 1370 physicists representing five international teams, who will share $1 million, and their seven team leaders, who will share $2 million.
The teams built technically challenging experiments in underground caves to trap the neutrino, and thereby confirmed the theory of neutrino oscillation.
The teams are:
Super-Kamiokande, led by Takaaki Kajita of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and Director at Institute of Cosmic Ray Research, and Yoichiro Suzuki, Director at Institute of Cosmic Ray Research Daya Bay, led by Yifang Wang of the Institute for High Energy Physics and Kam-Biu Luk, Professor, Department of Physics University of California, at Berkeley K2K and T2K, led by Koichiro Nishikawa of K2K – from KEK to Kamioka – Long-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment SNO, led by Arthur B. McDonald, Director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute KAMLand, led by Atsuto Suzuki (KAMLand), Director General of KEK
(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Andrew Hay)
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