Five Silicon Valley 'aristocrats' create €25-millions science award
They are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sergey Brin of Google, with their respective wives, and Arthur Levinson of Apple. The group also includes Russian magnate Yuri Milner.
By Biocat
Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Arthur D. Levinson and Yuri Milner have presented the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the most well-endowed science award in history, with €2.25 millions per laureate. To compare, this is nearly triple the amount received by Nobel-Prize laureates.
This initiative, according to the founders, was created to support excellence in research around the world to cure currently intractable diseases and extend human life. The prize is administered by a foundation (Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation) headed up by Art Levinson, president of Apple and of biotechnology firm Genentech.
The eleven winners of the first edition, which were announced at an event held in San Francisco on 20 February, are from the United States, Japan and the Netherlands:
- Cornelia I. Bargman (Rockefeller University): genetics of neural circuits and behavior.
- David Botstein (Princeton University): linkage mapping of Mendelian disease in humans using DNA polymorphisms.
- Lewis C. Cantley (Harvard Medical School): discovery of PI-3-kinase and its role in cancer metabolism.
- Hans Clevers (Hubrecht Institute): describing the role of Wnt signaling in tissue stem cells and cancer.
- Napoleone Ferrara (University of California): discoveries in the mechanisms of angiogenesis that led to therapies for cancer and eye diseases.
- Titia de Lange (Rockefeller University): role of telomeres in genome instability in cancer.
- Eric S. Lander (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): discovery of general principles for identifying human disease genes.
- Charles L. Sawyers (Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center): cancer genes and targeted therapy.
- Bert Vogelstein (Johns Hopkins University): cancer genomics and tumor-suppressor genes.
- Robert A. Weinberg (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): characterization of human cancer genes.
- Shinya Yamanaka (Kyoto University): induced pluripotent stem cells.
The prize is open to researchers from around the world, there is no age restriction and anyone can nominate another person as a candidate (on the website) when the call is open. Moreover, the prize can be shared by an unlimited number of scientists and can be received more than once. The founders have assured that at least five awards will be given out in each edition. The winners then join the committee to select future laureates.