Scientists honored for work
Researchers from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz among winners at Mountain View event
MOUNTAIN VIEW — Expanding the universe of science awards, the $25 million Breakthrough Prizes were awarded to biologists, physicists and mathematicians Sunday in an Oscar-style ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center.
Movie stars Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Vin Diesel, Bryce Dallas Howard and musician will.i.am presented trophies in tents next to Moffett Airfield’s cavernous Hanger One, a former naval airship site transformed into a glamorous red carpet promenade.
Morgan Freeman was the host of the awards presentation, with music by Alicia Keys and food catered by Thomas Keller of the French Laundry restaurant.
But the real stars of the night were the scientists — including local researchers Harry F. Noller of UC Santa Cruz and Roeland Nusse of Stanford University — who received up to $3 million each for their transformative work. For those keeping track, that’s twice the sum of the Nobel Prizes and three times what the MacArthur Foundation pays out in “genius” grants.
The awards, conceived by
theoretical physics dropout and entrepreneur Yuri Milner, are funded by Milner and his wife, Julia, and several Silicon Valley tech titans: Sergey Brin, of Google; Anne Wojcicki, of 23andMe; and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician at UC San Francisco.
In tuxedos and evening gowns, they credited basic scientific research for building today’s Silicon Valley.
“If you think about the important fundamental research 100 years ago — from quantum theory leading to semiconductors, leading to integrated circuits — that is what we built everything we do on,” said Brin. “If those people weren’t developing their theories 100 years ago, we’d be living that same life today.”
The event is driven by two goals, said Milner, who abandoned a Ph.D. track in particle physics at Moscow State University but whose investing acumen has earned him an estimated $2.9 billion.
“One is to reward science and intellectual achievement,” he said. “The second is public outreach — so as many people as possible know about these people and their contributions.”
It’s essential to celebrate, not just celebrities, but the lives of the people behind the pivotal discoveries that make our modern lives possible, he said.
“If you look at Facebook or Twitter or any other social media, and measure the followers of certain celebrities, you’ll find hardly any scientists in the top 200,” said Milner. “But everything that goes on around us was, at some point, discovered or invented.”
Zuckerberg commended the advances in medicine, science and technology that are “moving so fast we have the opportunity to do more in this century than at any other time in human history.”
The winners were chosen by a committee of the previous year’s winners.
Noller, director of the Center for Molecular Biology of RNA at UC Santa Cruz, received $3 million for his role in unraveling the complicated structure of the ribosome, the body’s assembly line for manufacturing proteins.
He imaged the ribosome using X-ray crystallography, to reveal its detailed molecular structure. He also discovered that ribosomes are made of RNA, the sister to DNA. Long considered a crackpot idea, it is now standard in biology textbooks.
By understanding the intricate twists and folds of a bacterial ribosome, drug-makers can pinpoint exactly where a drug should attack to avoid side effects.
“Ribosomes are wonderful molecular machines,” he said, adding that scientists now believe life on Earth originated 3.5 billion years ago in an “RNA world,” before DNA and proteins.
Nusse, professor of developmental biology at Stanford University and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, won $3 million by tackling this medical mystery: How do the billions of cells in an embryo organize themselves to become the right tissues during development?
One particular gene, called Wnt, plays a critical role in organizing embryonic development, he found. The gene controls the pace of cell division and regulates the regeneration of tissue. This can be essential to normal human development and injury repair. But if it triggers excess amounts of a substance called “growth factor,” it can lead to cancer.
Nusse’s lab at Stanford is now studying different organs, trying to identify their common principals of growth and repair.
The scientists credited the Bay Area with much of their success.
“The Bay Area is one of the greatest science centers in the whole world,” said Noller, an East Bay native whose grandfather paid his tuition to UC Berkeley — two payments of $54 per year. “Growing up in the Bay Area, I was constantly aware of cutting-edge science emerging from around here.”
Other winners in the field of Life Sciences, receiving $3 million each:
Stephen J. Elledge, n of Harvard Medical School. He shed light on how some animal cells respond to damage in their DNA, a key process for those analyzing the development and treatment of cancer.
Yoshinori Ohsumi, of n Tokyo Institute of Technology. Ohsumi elucidated a process known as autophagy, the recycling system that cells use to generate nutrients from their own inessential or damaged components.
Huda Yahya Zoghbi, n of Baylor College of Medicine. By studying a pair of disorders known as spinocerebellar ataxia and Rett syndrome, Zoghbi yielded new understanding of the development of neurodegenerative and neurological diseases.
In the field of Fundamental Physics, three winners will share a $3 million prize for their transformative advances in quantum field theory, string theory, and quantum gravity: Joseph Polchinski, of UC Santa Barbara, and Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa, both of Harvard University.
The winners of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics will share a $1 million award — and their 1,012 team members will share $2 million — for their observation of gravitational waves, a discovery which opens new horizons in astronomy and physics. They are Ronald Drever and Kip Thorne, of Caltech, and Rainer Weiss, of MIT.
Jean Bourgain, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, will get $3 million as the winner of the mathematics prize. Bourgain was rewarded for his contributions in areas including combinatorics, partial differential equations, highdimensional geometry and number theory.