Award mints millionaire biologists
March 7, 2013
A team of entrepreneurs has awarded its first round of a $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Nature News Blog reports.
Last summer, Russian social media magnate Yuri Milner awarded the first Fundamental Physics Prizes, a series of $3-million awards to theoretical physicists.
Now he has decided to invite biologists to the party, uniting with former Genentech chief executive Art Levinson, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to sponsor five annual $3-million prizes.
This year’s winners include those working in genomics (David Botstein and Eric Lander), cancer (Lew Cantley, Hans Clevers, Napoleone Ferrara, Charles Sawyers, Bert Vogelstein and Robert Weinberg), telomeres (Titia de Lange), stem cells (Shinya Yamanaka) and neurobiology (Cori Bargmann).
“Only one, to my knowledge, also has Gangnam Style (video here),” reveals the blog.
Comments (7)
by Gabriel
How wonderful; I love the idea of X-Prize style prizes like these…they incentivize, and award, beneficial progress on many different fronts.
by SmartAndSober
The picture resemble a Dyson Sphere (with openings, which I guess are reserved for communication purposes).
by SmartAndSober
And the “spirals” inside the Sphere resembles “Topopolis”.
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4cea908020d1e
The pic serves as a good blueprint for megastructure, it seems.
by GatorALLin
Awards like this are so cool to me that Entrepreneurs are the ones granting them (not governments, or presidents…. or countries like you might expect). So cool to see those that have changed the world and also been so successful that they give back in new and empowering ways. The Gates foundation….. the wealth from those mega rich that can do so much good…. just amazing. It should all give us a new sense of hope on where the future might by shaped by….
by SmartAndSober
the wealth from those mega rich that can do so much good
I hope they use their money to mass-purchase desktops and run programs like SETI@Home, Folding@Home and Boinc.
by Aaron Wright
It is good to see more prize money going into biology. However, we need to ensure that the money funds science that is being done for the sake of discovery, and not necessarily just for business applications. You never know what discovery could end up being a paradigm-shifting discovery.
by Bob Blum
I applaud Art, Sergey, et al for recognizing these stellar talents (it’s truly a great list of researchers) with this money.
BUT here’s an even better use of this money in biology. Please consider making similar awards (many but smaller amounts) to young researchers (say, under age 32) at the start of their careers (eg to post-docs). I want to see the NEXT generation’s research nourished.