At the fifth annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony last night, 12 scientists received a total of $25 million in science prizes for fundamental contributions to human knowledge.

The ceremony, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, featured all the glitz and glam of the Oscars: a red carpet, musical guests such as Alicia Keys and will.i.am, and Morgan Freeman as host.

“This project is really mostly about public outreach,” says billionaire internet investor Yuri Milner, who co-founded the prize. “That’s why we have a televised ceremony and everything around it, because the founders want to send a signal that fundamental science is important.”

The Breakthrough Prize was founded in 2012 and is financed by Silicon Valley billionaires such as Milner, Google’s Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.


One of the prizes was already announced earlier this year. The physicists behind the LIGO experiment, which revealed the first detection of Einstein’s long-sought gravitational waves in February, will share the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics. Of that, $1 million will be split between three of LIGO’s founders: Ronald Drever and Kip Thorne at the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other $2 million will be equally split between 1012 contributors to the experiment.

Another $3 million prize in fundamental physics will be split between three physicists. Joseph Polchinski at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was recognised for his theories of what happens at the event horizons of black holes, and Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa at Harvard University were honoured for contributions to quantum gravity and string theory.

The Breakthrough Prize in mathematics – another $3 million – went to Jean Bourgain at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for his contributions to analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, high-dimensional geometry and number theory.

Awards for life sciences

Five prizes of $3 million each went to researchers in the life sciences. Stephen Elledge at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, received a prize for insights into how cells sense and respond to damage in their DNA, and how that relates to the development and treatment of cancer.

Harry Noller at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was recognised for discovering how central RNA is in the fundamental machinery of protein synthesis in all cells, connecting modern biology to the origin of life and explaining how many natural antibiotics work.

Roeland Nusse at Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was honoured for pioneering work on the Wnt pathway, which encourages cells to divide and is one of the crucial intercellular signalling systems in developmental, cancer and stem cell biology.

Yoshinori Ohsumi at Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan received a prize for his discovery of the mechanisms behind autophagy, a fundamental process in which cells degrade, recycle and repair themselves. Ohsumi also received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The fifth life-sciences prize went to Huda Yahya Zoghbi at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, for her discoveries related to the genetic causes and biochemical mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurological diseases, including Rett syndrome and spinocerebellar ataxia.

The final $1 million in prize money will go to six “New Horizons” winners for early-career achievements in physics and maths, and one Breakthrough Junior Prize for a teenager’s original science video.

After five years of pushing for scientists to be treated like celebrities, Milner thinks the project is off to a good start.

“If a few kids in a high school will get inspired by those incredible people, I think this effort is worth pursuing,” he says. “I think it’s really about the priorities of society: where we should put more resources in, and where the smartest people should go. If we can reach even half the audience of the Super Bowl globally, that would be amazing. But that’s a high bar.”