Science Prizes: The New Nobels
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Alan: The next time you want Science to save your life -- or the life of a loved one -- ask a Heisman Trophy Winner to help. Then look in the mirror.
Winners Announced For The World's Richest Science Award: The $3 Million Breakthrough Prize
Some people change the world by following dreams of fame and fortune. But others start with more modest quests: To better understand the development of flatworms or the way yogurt culture bacteria protect themselves from viruses.
Those are the kinds of inquiries that led to paradigm-changing discoveries for many of the winners of the 2015 “Breakthrough” prizes, announced this week. The $3 million award amounts to more than twice the pot that comes with a Nobel.
This newcomer to the arena of science prizes is an outgrowth of theFundamental Physics Prize, which entrepreneur Yuri Milner first awarded in 2012. He has since teamed up with Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and extended the prize to life sciences and, most recently, mathematics. (Perhaps they are announcing next year’s winners this year to appear forward thinking and cutting edge).
In a story that ran last June when the 2015 math winners were announced, science writer Phillip Ball expressed some doubts about the premise. He quotes Milner saying about scientists: “They should be modern celebrities, alongside athletes and entertainers. We want young people to get more excited…
And yet, the winners were not trying to be stars. Some were pushed by curiosity into arcane, even unpromising areas. Breakthroughs aren’t something scientists achieve through advance planning. As Ball ponders, “…can there be a single mathematician, in particular, who has chosen their career in the hope that they will get rich and famous? (And if there is, didn’t they study probability theory?)”
Some scientists, on the other hand, said the point should be to increase public support for the kind of research that’s not aimed at curing cancer or other lofty goals. They say we need more support for people who just want to understand basic biology using relatively simple systems such as flatworms, yeast and bacteria. Most dramatic cures for diseases rely on the findings of basic biologists, even if they couldn’t know themselves where the studies would lead one day.
The Life Sciences Winners:
C. David Allis, The Rockefeller University: “Smart Storage: Chromatin”
Allis is considered the father of one of the hottest fields in 21st century science. Called epigenetics, it is the study of a phenomenon that 20th century biology said shouldn’t exist – changes in molecules that are outside the DNA but can nevertheless be passed from cell to cell or even from one generation to the next.
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