A theoretical physicist who has never held a regular job has won science’s most lucrative prize for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computing.
David Deutsch, who is affiliated with the University of Oxford, shares the $3m (£2.65m) Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics with three other researchers who laid the groundwork for the wider discipline of quantum information.
Deutsch, 69, became known as the “father of quantum computing” after proposing an exotic, and until now impossible to build, machine to prove the existence of parallel universes. His 1985 paper paved the way for the rudimentary quantum computers that scientists work on today.
“It was a thought experiment involving a computer, and that computer had some quantum components,” Deutsch recalls. “Today it would be called a universal quantum computer, but it took me another six years to think of it as that.”
Described by its Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, the Breakthrough Prizes are awarded annually to scientists and mathematicians deemed worthy by committees of past winners. This year there is one prize for physics, three for life sciences and one for mathematics. Each is worth $3 million.
A life sciences award recognizes researchers who traced narcolepsy to brain cells that are eliminated by wayward immune responses. The discovery has opened the door to new treatments for sleep disorders.
Princeton’s Clifford Brangwynne shares a life sciences prize for work on proteins. Photography: Dee Sullivan
A second prize goes to Clifford Brangwynne at Princeton and Anthony Hyman at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden for discovering that proteins, the workhorses of cells, form teams that look like to flashmobs, with implications for neurodegenerative diseases. A team from DeepMind in London won the third prize in life sciences for AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program that predicted the structures of almost every protein known to science.
The mathematics prize goes to Daniel Spielman of Yale University for work that helps high-definition TVs handle messy signals, delivery companies find the fastest routes, and scientists avoid biases in clinical trials .
Deutsch was born in Israel to parents who survived the Holocaust, and grew up in North London, where his family ran a restaurant. For his PhD, he worked on quantum theory with Dennis Sciama at Oxford, who previously supervised Stephen Hawking and Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal. While delving into the foundations of the theory, Deutsch became a fan of the Many Worlds interpretation proposed in 1957 by American physicist Hugh Everett III. Believe in Everett, though many struggle, and the events unfolding in our universe spawn invisible parallel worlds where alternate realities unfold.
Deutsch, who makes his living from books, lectures, grants and awards, pushed quantum computing forward with descriptions of quantum bits, or qubits, and wrote the first quantum algorithm that would outperform its classical equivalent.
He shares the award with Peter Shor at MIT, an expert in quantum algorithms, along with Gilles Brassard at the University of Montreal and Charles Bennett at IBM in New York, who developed unbreakable forms of quantum cryptography and helped invent teleportation quantum, a way of sending information from one place to another.
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It took years of painstaking work by Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University and Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Tsukuba to discover the cause of narcolepsy, a serious sleep disorder, for which they share a biology prize. Mignot’s studies of narcoleptic dogs traced the disease to mutated receptors in the brain. Yanagisawa, meanwhile, discovered orexin, a neurotransmitter, that worked through the receptor. At first, Yanagisawa thought that orexin played a role in appetite, but mice lacking it seemed to eat normally. It was only after he decided to record the animals at night (mice are nocturnal) that his team noticed that they suddenly fell asleep. “This was truly a eureka moment,” Yanagisawa said.
Later work by Mignot found that humans with narcolepsy lack orexin in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Clusters of orexin-producing cells are thought to be wiped out by wayward immune reactions, which is why narcolepsy spiked in the “swine flu” pandemic of 2009. The work paved the way for new drugs that treat narcolepsy mimicking orexin.
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis shares life science prize for work on protein folding
A third life sciences award went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of the Alphabet company DeepMind. The team set out to solve a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, namely predicting how proteins fold. Since the shape of a protein determines its function, this is of immense importance in understanding diseases and finding drugs to treat them.
Earlier this year, the DeepMind team released the 200m protein structures, spurring work in areas as diverse as malaria and plastics recycling. Hassabis calls it both “the most significant thing done with AI in the sciences” and a starting point: a proof-of-principle that puzzles expected to outlast our lifetimes can be solved with AI.
Before the pandemic, winners of the Breakthrough Awards, founded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and others, received their awards at a glittering, star-studded event in Silicon Valley. If the ceremony goes ahead this year, Deutsch, who gave a TED talk via a robot, is unlikely to attend, at least in this universe. “I like conversations,” he said. “But I don’t like going anywhere.”