Will pricey prizes create a new genre — Oscars for science?

The old joke goes: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? It depends. First you have to determine that the light bulb really wants to be changed.”

The Breakthrough Prizes, the socalled Oscars of Science, asks the question: How much money, glam and glitz does it take to change a scientist into a celebrity?

Begging the question: Do scientists really want to be celebs?

Two Chinese scientists have just been awarded Breakthroughs, which seem to come with a hidden agenda.

The awards were created in 2012 (and are still funded) by a veritable Who’s Who of Silicon Valley rock stars — Sergey “Google” Brin and his wife Anne “23andMe” Wojcicki, Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, and philanthropists Yuri and Julia Milner. (Their ranks were reportedly recently joined by Pony “Tencent” Ma.)

The stated goal of the prizes — touted as “the most generous” of their kind (roughly three times a Nobel cash wise) — is “to recognize paradigmshifting research” and “celebrate the achievements of the world’s top scientists and inspire the next generation of research’’.

But Julia Milner described it for the Hong Kong Tatler like this: “Scientists are completely unknown to most people,” she said. “We wanted — to put it very literally — to make them celebrities too, and in this way popularize science.”

In other words, we want to make them just as awesome and enviable as us, I guess.

The prizes are handed out in a gala star-studded awards ceremony — this year’s host is the movie actor Pierce Brosnan — and streamed live through trendy platforms — the perfect venue for the three categories — life sciences, mathematics and fundamental physics.

This year’s two Chinese scientists won in life sciences.

Zhuang Xiaowei, of Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, won for discovering hidden structures in cells by developing super-resolution imaging — a method that transcends the limits of light microscopes to see unimaginably small things.

Zhuang was a child prodigy. Born in Rugao, Jiangsu province, at age 6, she identified the atmospheric forces acting on a glass of water, blowing away her parents, who were both professors at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Through a post-doc at Stanford and in her lab at Harvard now, she has channeled her passion for physics and imaging into exploring biological systems, inventing a technique called Storm. Stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy allows us to see things — read molecules — believed for years to be too small ever to be seen by conventional light microscopes.

Storm revealed previously unknown cellular structures, such as “skeletons” in the brain’s neurons.

The other Chinese winner is probing the same world, but from a different angle.

Chen Zhijian, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was cited for describing how an innate or “inborn” immune system triggers the body’s fight against viruses and other invaders.

He is now trying to find ways to harness this powerful healing force to stop diseases like cancer.

Chen grew up in a remote mountain village in Fujian province. Early in his childhood, he demonstrated a keen curiosity about nature and was encouraged by his parents to pursue a career in science.

He earned his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and believes that science has no borders, and that disease is the common enemy of people everywhere.

So far, Zhuang said, she hasn’t contemplated how to spend the $3 million that comes with the prize.

“My broad interest is in understanding the nature of living things — how life arises from the collective actions of molecules, i.e., the molecular basis of life,” she said.

I guess it helps if you can see them.

There will be special performances at this year’s awards ceremony on Sunday.