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THE 2019 BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE AWARDS CEREMONY

The annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony was attended by the who’s who of Silicon Valley

In celebration of space, science and the future, a group of talented entrepreneurs from the Generation T lists across Asia converged in Silicon Valley for a multi-day experience, where the climax of the weekend was the Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony. Silicon Valley’s most glamorous event, which was staged at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre, boasted a unique coterie of personalities— such celebrities as host Pierce Brosnan, singer Lionel Richie, actors Julianne Moore, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Mcadams and Thandie Newton, as well as founders and CEOS of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi. Highlights of the evening included a special tribute to the late Stephen Hawking, a Breakthrough Prize laureate, by Eddie Redmayne, who played the cosmologist in the film The Theory of Everything, and a stunning performance by Chinese pop star Gem. The true stars of the evening, however, were the 2019 Breakthrough Prize laureates. The recipients of the world’s biggest cash prizes for life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics represent, in the words of founder Yuri Milner, the “pinnacle of humanity’s intellectual achievement”. They are trailblazers whose works are driving human evolution by curing diseases, inventing new technologies, discovering answers to the universe’s mysteries and more. A special emotional tribute was paid to two recipients of the life sciences award, Frank Bennett and Adrian Krainer, who developed a gene therapy drug to treat a deadly infant disease called spinal muscular atrophy. The parents of Emma Larson, a young patient the pair had successfully treated with their experimental drug, took to the stage to salute the doctors “who spent time away from their families so they could help ours”.