Exceptional prizes reward $ 22 million for new treatments, materials, maths and more – GeekWire

The program known as the "Oscars of Science" revealed who would be in the spotlight – and receive a prize of nearly $ 22 million – at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony to be held next month in the Silicon Valley.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its sponsors have named nine researchers as recipients of the Breakthrough Award for their significant accomplishments in life sciences, basic physics and mathematics, as well as 12 early career scientists who will be awarded New Horizon prices.

Each of the exceptional awards represents $ 3 million, which exceeds the $ 1.1 million value of the Nobel Prize, which has lasted longer. Each New Horizon prize is worth $ 100,000. In some cases, several researchers share the prize.

The Breakthrough Prize program, now in its seventh year, is sponsored by Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner and his wife Julia; CEO and co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andMe; and the CEO and co-founder of Tencent Holdings, Ma Huateng.

The winners will be honored at a lavish ceremony on November 4 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, hosted by actor Pierce Brosnan and broadcast live on National Geographic.

Last month, the award organizers announced that British physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell will receive a special award for her role in pulsar discovery and her leadership in the scientific community throughout her career. Here are the additional winners announced today:

Revolutionary Life Science Award

C. Frank Bennett of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Adrian Krainer of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory share a $ 3 million award for the development of a gene therapy drug to treat a rare but deadly childhood disease called spinal muscular atrophy:

Angelika Amon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wins the award for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, a disease that involves an abnormal number of chromosomes and disrupts the cell's genetic error-correction system:

Harvard's Xiaowei Zhuang Wins the Prize for Hidden Cell Discovery by Developing Super-Resolution Imaging, a Method that transcends the fundamental spatial resolution limit of traditional light microscopy:

Zhijian "James" Chen of the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas to learn how DNA triggers immune and autoimmune responses from inside a cell through the discovery of cGAS, an enzyme that detects DNA:

Revolutionary Prize in Fundamental Physics

Charles Kane and Eugene Mele, of the University of Pennsylvania, share the same award for developing new ideas on topology and symmetry in physics, which allows for a new class of materials leading to electricity only on their surfaces:

Revolutionary Prize in Mathematics

The French research agency CNRS and the Fourier Institute, Vincent Lafforgue, won the award for his contribution to several fields of mathematics, particularly the Langlands program as part of field research. The global theory, developed by award-winning Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands, has been called the "unified theory of mathematics":

New Horizons Awards

• Columbia University's Brian Metzger wins a physics award for his groundbreaking predictions of the electromagnetic signal from a fusion of neutron stars and for his leadership in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy.
• Rana Adhikari of Caltech shares physics prizes with Lisa Barsotti and Matthew Evans of MIT for their research on current and future ground-based gravitational wave detectors.
• Daniel Harlow of MIT, Daniel Jafferis of Harvard and Aron Wall of Stanford share a physics prize for their knowledge of quantum information, quantum field theory and gravity.
• Chenyang Xu, MIT, and the International Center for Mathematical Research, Beijing, receive a prize in mathematics for making significant advances in the minimum model program and applying this work to modules of algebraic varieties.
• Karim Adiprasito of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and June Huh of the Institute for Advanced Study share a mathematics prize for contributing to the development of Hodge's combinatorial theory, leading to the resolution of the log-concavity conjecture of Rota.
• Kaisa Matomäki, from Turku University, and Maksym Radziwell, Caltech, share a mathematics award for their advances in understanding local correlations of multiplicative function values.