$15.75 million in prizes awarded for predicting protein structure with deep learning, pioneering field of quantum information and discoveries with applications from treating neurodegenerative diseases to optimizing video streaming
Breakthrough Award in Life Sciences awarded to Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman; Demis Hassabis and John Jumper; Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa
Breakthrough Award in Mathematics awarded to Daniel A. Spielman
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded to Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, David German and Peter Shor
Six New Horizons awards given to early career achievements in physics and mathematics
Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes awarded to women mathematicians for early career achievements
SAN FRANCISCO , Sept. 22, 2022 /CNW/ — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors, Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner and Anne Wojcicki, today announced the recipients of the 2023 Breakthrough Prize, recognized for their groundbreaking discoveries in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics, along with early career scientists who have made significant contributions to their fields.
Breakthrough Award
Three Breakthrough in Life Sciences awards are given to: Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman for discovering a new mechanism of cellular organization; Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts protein structure; and to Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa for discovering the causes of narcolepsy. The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics goes to Daniel A. Spielman, for multiple discoveries in theoretical computing and mathematics. The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is shared by Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, David Deutsch and Peter Shor for their fundamental work in quantum information. And significant contributions by early-career scientists are also recognized, with six New Horizons Prizes in Physics and Mathematics and three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes awarded to women mathematicians who have recently completed their Ph.D.
“Advances in neurodegenerative diseases, quantum computing, AI to solve protein structure and more…” said Sergey Brin, “These are incredible advances that deserve to be celebrated.”
“Congratulations to all the Breakthrough Award winners, whose incredible discoveries will pave the way for scientific discovery and spur innovation,” said Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders and co-directors of CZI. “These awardees and early career scientists are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in research and science, and we are thrilled to honor their achievements.”
“The laureates honored today embody the remarkable power of fundamental science,” said Yuri Milner, “both to reveal profound truths about the Universe and to improve human lives.”
“The 2023 laureates have produced absolutely stellar science,” said Anne Wojcicki. “The creativity, ingenuity and sheer perseverance that went into this work is impressive.”
In life sciences, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are the leaders behind AlphaFold 2, the AI system that has largely solved the protein structure prediction problem, one of the biggest challenges in biology Proteins are the nanomachines that make cells work, and predicting their 3D structure from their amino acid sequence is critical to understanding how life works. With their team at DeepMind, Hassabis and Jumper conceived and built a deep learning system that accurately and rapidly models the structure of proteins. AlphaFold has already had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences: This summer, DeepMind uploaded the structures of 200 million proteins, nearly every known protein in the entire tree of life, to a public database. The program cuts the time scientists typically spend determining protein structure from months or years to hours or minutes. It holds immense promise for future benefits, from drug design to synthetic biology, nanomaterials and the fundamental understanding of cellular processes. You can find a short video about their success here.
The discovery of a new cellular process is recognized by another Life Sciences prize. Until recently, it was thought that most of the work in a cell takes place in organelles, specialized subunits enclosed by membranes. But Anthony Hyman and Clifford Brangwynne discovered an entirely new physical principle that concentrates cellular interactions between proteins and other biomolecules, in the absence of membranes. They described dynamic liquid-like droplets that form rapidly by phase separation, similar to oil droplets that form in water, producing temporary structures shielded from the molecular confusion of the aqueous cell interior. Since their discovery, they and others have shown that these membrane-free liquid condensates play a role in numerous cellular processes, including signaling, cell division, the nested structure of nucleoli in the cell nucleus, and DNA regulation. Their discovery is a fundamental advance in our understanding of cellular organization and is likely to lead to clinical applications in the future, including neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS. You can find a short video about their success here.
Another neurodegenerative disease, narcolepsy, was understood shortly before Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa, running separate laboratories and conducting different research programs, converged on a new understanding of its causes. They showed that the center of the disease is the protein orexin (also called hypocretin), which normally regulates wakefulness. In some animals, such as dogs, narcolepsy is caused by a mutation affecting the neural receptor to which orexin binds; whereas in humans, the disease is triggered by the immune system attacking the cells that produce orexin (probably “mistaking” it for a viral particle). Mignot and Yanagisawa’s discoveries have led to treatments proven to relieve the symptoms of narcolepsy, as well as allowing the design of sleep-inducing drugs. They revealed that narcolepsy is a neurodegenerative disease of autoimmune origin and raise the possibility that other neurodegenerative diseases may be caused by the selective loss of neurons. And they shed light on a central mechanism of sleep and wakefulness, an area of behavior that still holds many mysteries. You can find a short video about their success here.
In mathematics, Daniel A. Spielman’s insights and algorithms have been significant not only for mathematics, but for highly practical problems in computer science, signal processing, engineering, and even clinical trial design. Among many other results, he and his collaborators solved the Kadison-Singer problem, which arose in quantum mechanics but turned out to be equivalent to important unsolved problems in numerous mathematical fields, from linear algebra ( the study of equations with vectors and matrices) to higher-dimensional geometry, combinatorial optimization (eg versions of the traveling salesman problem) and the mathematics of signal processing. You can find a short video about their success here.
In Fundamental Physics, the prize goes to four pioneers in the field of quantum information.
With their BB84 protocol, Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard, building on Stephen Wiesner’s seminal but impractical idea of quantum money, pioneered quantum cryptography by devising a practical way to send secret messages between users who initially did not they share secret information. Unlike the methods commonly used in e-commerce, it cannot be cracked even by a hacker with unlimited computing power. His 1993 discovery, with collaborators, of quantum teleportation showed that entanglement is a useful quantifiable resource despite having no communication capability of its own, helping to launch the new science of quantum information processing.
David Deutsch laid the foundations of quantum computing. He defined the quantum version of a Turing machine, a universal quantum computer, and showed that it could simulate with arbitrary precision any physical system obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. He showed that this computer is equivalent to a network of surprisingly few quantum gates: logic gates that take advantage of the quantum phenomena of entanglement and superposition of many states at once. And he designed the first quantum algorithm that can perform a calculation faster than the best equivalent classical algorithm.
Peter Shor invented the first quantum computer algorithm that was clearly useful. Shor’s algorithm can find the factors of large numbers exponentially faster than is thought possible for any classical algorithm. He also designed techniques for error correction in quantum computers, a much more difficult feat than in classical computers, where simple redundancy will suffice. These ideas not only paved the way for today’s rapidly developing quantum computers; now they are also at the frontiers of fundamental physics, especially in the study of metrology – the science of measurement – and quantum gravity.
A short video about the physicists’ success can be found here.
Beyond the top prizes, 6 New Horizons prizes, each worth $100,000, were awarded to 11 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact in their fields. In addition, 3 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes, of $50,000 each, were awarded to women mathematicians who have recently completed their PhDs and produced significant results.
The Breakthrough Prizes are the largest scientific awards in the world. Each of the five top prizes is $3 million, and the addition of the early career prizes brings this year’s prize total to $15.75 million.
Full citations for all 2023 honorees can be found below:
Breakthrough 2023…