$22m science prize winners announced

Twenty-nine current and past UBC researchers will each take home a modest share of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics announced yesterday at NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t Billy Crystal, but he was one of the most famous celebrities at Sunday night’s “Oscars of science”, where almost $22 million in prizes were handed out.

Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Edward Boyden received a Breakthrough Prize award for their work in optogenetics, a field where genetically modified cells in the body can be manipulated with light.

The life sciences prizes are given to scientists working on “understanding living systems and extending human life”.

Helen Hobbs of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, for discovering the human genetic variants that give rise to the variation in t he levels and distribution of cholesterol and other lipids.

Svante Pääbo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has been recognised for leading the charge in sequencing ancient DNA and ancient genomes.

Overall, the Breakthrough Prize award bash was a fitting and often overlooked homage to the science community that drives the progress of our modern world.

Together with five other colleagues they led research teams of 1,250 scientists and technicians who in years of research solved one of the great mysteries of nuclear physics by discovering that the fleeting sub-nuclear particles called neutrinos can alter their identities as they fly through lead or the solid earth, and thus possess measurable mass.

He said he was very grateful for the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, because one of the constant challenges of theoretical cosmology is that no matter how lovely your calculations might be, proving them through experiment can be exceedingly challenging.

The T2K collaboration consists of more than 400 physicists from 59 institutions in countries including Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom. It is hosted jointly by the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo (ICRR). “Queen’s University is proud to have supported their groundbreaking research”. Meanwhile, in physics it was Takaaki Kajita, Yoichiro Suzuki, Yifang Wang, Kam-Biu Luk, Koichiro Nishikawa, Arthur B. McDonald and Atsuto Suzuki.

The prize for physic went to neutrinos.

Andre Arroja Neves, Imperial College London: for outstanding contributions to several areas of differential geometry, including work on scalar curvature, geometric flows, and his solution with Coda Marques of the 50-year-old Willmore Conjecture. It was won by Ryan Chester, a high-school student, for a video explaining Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Although scientific breakthroughs and discoveries are moving at a breakneck speed today, McFarlane said people still show a wary “distrust for science”, fearing vaccinations and denying climate change.

$100,000 was also given to eight early-career physicists and mathematicians. Deisseroth will join this year’s other Breakthrough Prize winners in giving lectures November 9 at a symposium at the University of California Berkeley.