By David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle
Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire, and his high-tech Silicon Valley friends have awarded $21.5 million to seven scientists, a high school student, and a huge team of physics researchers for their varied science achievements.
Milner’s third annual Breakthrough Prizes were financed by his foundation with contributions from Sergey Brin of Google and his ex-wife, 23&Me founder Anne Wojcicki; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; and Jack Ma of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The winners were named by Milner and his colleagues during a black-tie dinner Sunday night inside a tent next to the landmark aircraft hangar at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Milner said he hoped scientists in general would be seen as glamorous as “movie stars or Albert Einstein.”
Two of this year’s Breakthrough award winners for physics had won Nobel Prizes this year. They are Takaaki Kajita, a leader of Japan’s underground neutrino detector called the Super-Kamiokande, and Arthur B. McDonald, director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory located nearly 7,000 feet deep inside a Canadian nickel mine.
Together with five other colleagues they had led research teams of 1,300 scientists and technicians who in years of research solved one of the great mysteries of nuclear physics by discovering that the fleeting subnuclear particles called neutrinos can alter their identities as they fly through lead or the solid Earth, and thus possess measurable mass.
The entire group will share one $3 million Breakthrough prize. It amounts to about $2,300 apiece.
Three of Sunday’s Breakthrough awards went to Bay Area scientists, including Kam-Biu Luk, a physics professor at UC Berkeley and leader of the Daya Bay neutrino research center in China. In the life sciences, Karl Deisseroth, Stanford professor of bioengineering and psychiatry, won for developing the science of optogenetics that uses light signals to control the activity of brain cells in neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease.
The third was Ian Agol, a UC Berkeley mathematics professor recently named to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Agol is noted for proving two famously “impossible” conjectures in the obscure field of topology — an area of math that deals with the changing shapes of objects.
A special “junior challenge” award of $100,000 went to 18-year-old Ryan Chester of North Royalton, Ohio, whose research topic on special relativity won out over 1,000 teenage semifinalists from 86 countries.
Other prizes went to Ed Boyden, now at MIT, who was Deisseroth’s partner at Stanford developing optogenetics; Helen Hobbs, a University of Texas physician who discovered the roles that variant genes play in cholesterol and lipid levels leading to heart disease; John Hardy, a neuroscientist at University College in London, who discovered genetic mutations in the amyloid genes causing Alzheimer’s disease; and Svante Pääbo, the famed anthropologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, who sequenced the genes of Neanderthals and discovered traces of the vanished humans called Denisovans.
Milner has devoted part of his fortune to various fields of scientific research. In July, he announced he is also giving $100 million for a new SETI effort based at UC Berkeley to detect signals from civilizations on planets in distant solar systems.
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
