Breakthrough for UCSF professor — and a princely $22 million award

Research could open pathway for non-opioid-based painkillers — a timely scientific advancement

David Julius, a professor at UC San Francisco, spends his days studying the molecules and mechanisms underlying pain sensation.

His research could lay the foundation for a new class of non-opioid-based painkillers, a timely need as communities across the country are hit harder than ever by the opioid crisis.

On Nov. 3, Julius will receive a 2020 Breakthrough Prize, which this year awards $22 million in prize money to researchers in math, physics and life science. The honorees are celebrated with a starstudded, red- carpet gala at NASA Ames designed to create a cultural shift by treating scientists like celebrities, with the hope that their groundbreaking contributions will receive the type of recognition bestowed on movie stars, athletes and rock music legends.

The recognition is magnificent, but Julius is worried that in the current political climate, no one will pay attention.

“The current lack of faith in scientific advancement and expertise is really sort of chilling for those of us who do research,” he said. “If we came up with a great advance, would people cast it away because they have a non-factbased view of science?

“We need to let people know that society should and does value not just individuals who do the work but the work that we do.”

The prizes were conceived by theoretical physicist and entrepreneur Yuri Milner, who founded the Breakthrough Prize Foundation in 2012. Milner and his wife, Julia, fund the awards, along with Chinese entrepreneur Ma Huateng and several Silicon Valley tech titans: Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

The scientists’ prize-winning discoveries, announced Thursday, include the first image of a supermassive black hole, the biological basis of food intake and weight, and the common mechanisms behind neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

Two of the winners have Bay Area ties. In addition to Julius, Stanford visiting professor Daniel Freedman was a co-recipient of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his 1976 discovery of supergravity.

Freedman shares the $3 million prize with his colleagues Sergio Ferrara of Cern and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook University.

Supergravity, which com

bines principles of general relativity and supersymmetry, brings the field of physics a step closer to a unified theory of nature and the cosmos. Freedman says any potential applications are still years away, but illuminating the underlying theory is just as important.

“What we do generates knowledge about the universe on a fundamental level,” Freedman said.

With their victory, Julius and Freedman join an elite group that includes the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. The other 2020 laureates, chosen to win $3 million each by a committee of past winners, are:

• The 349 astrophysicists of the Event Horizon Telescope Team for the first image of a supermassive black hole.

• Jeffrey Friedman of the Rockefeller University for the discovery of a new endocrine system that regulates how much we eat and weigh.

• Franz-Ulrich Hartl of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and Arthur L. Horwich of Yale University, for the discovery of the intra-cellular machinery that supports protein folding and prevents protein aggregation, which can lead to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

• Virginia Man-Yee Lee of the University of Pennsylvania, for identifying common mechanisms and proteins that play a major role in neurodegenerative brain disorders.

• Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago for his discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces, including the proof of the “magic wand theorem” with famed Iranian mathematician and Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani.

The Breakthrough Prize also awards six New Horizons Prizes of $100,000 each for early- career achievements in physics and math and $250,000 in educational prizes to the winner of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which asks students to create a short video explaining an important scientific concept. The student winner’s science teacher will receive $50,000, and his school will receive a new laboratory valued at $100,000.

Educating young people “on how science works at its best” is vital, Julius says: “Without that, we’re down the tubes.”