2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Now in their sixth year, the Breakthrough prizes are backed by Yuri Milner, a Silicon Valley tech investor, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and his wife Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki from the DNA testing company 23andMe, and Google’s Sergey Brin. Launched by Milner in 2012, the awards aim to make rock stars of scientists and raise their profile in the public consciousness.

The annual ceremony at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California provides a rare opportunity for some of the world’s leading minds to rub shoulders with celebrities, who this year included Morgan Freeman as host, fellow actors Kerry Washington and Mila Kunis, and Miss USA 2017 Kára McCullough. When Joe Polchinski at the University of California in Santa Barbara shared the physics prize last year, he conceded his nieces and nephews would know more about the A-list attendees than he would.

Oxford University geneticist Kim Nasmyth won for his work on chromosomes but said he had not worked out what to do with the windfall. “It’s a wonderful bonus, but not something you expect,” he said. “It’s a huge amount of money, I haven’t had time to think it through.” On being recognised for what amounts to his life’s work, he added: “You have to do science because you want to know, not because you want to get recognition. If you do what it takes to please other people, you’ll lose your moral compass.” Nasmyth has won lucrative awards before and channelled some of his winnings into Gregor Mendel’s former monastery in Brno.

Another life sciences prizewinner, Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute in San Diego, was honoured for three decades of painstaking research into the genetic programs that flip into action when plants find themselves plunged into shade. Her work revealed that plants can sense when a nearby competitor is about to steal their light, sparking a growth spurt in response. The plants detect threatening neighbours by sensing a surge in the particular wavelengths of red light that are given off by vegetation.

Chory now has ambitious plans to breed plants that can suck vast quantities of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a bid to combat climate change. She believes that crops could be selected to absorb 20 times more of the greenhouse gas than they do today, and convert it into suberin, a waxy material found in roots and bark that breaks down incredibly slowly in soil. “If we can do this on 5% of the landmass people are growing crops on, we can take out 50% of global human emissions,” she said.

Three other life sciences prizes went to Kazutoshi Mori at Kyoto University and Peter Walter for their work on “quality control” mechanisms that keep cells healthy, and to Don Cleveland at the University of California, San Diego, for his research on motor neurone disease.

The $3m Breakthrough prize in mathematics was shared by two British-born mathematicians, Christopher Hacon at the University of Utah and James McKernan at the University of California in San Diego. The pair made major contributions to a field of mathematics known as birational algebraic geometry, which sets the rules for projecting abstract objects with more than 1,000 dimensions onto lower-dimensional surfaces. “It gets very technical, very quickly,” said McKernan.

Speaking before the ceremony, Hacon was feeling a little unnerved. “It’s really not a mathematician kind of thing, but I’ll probably survive,” he said. “I’ve got a tux ready, but I’m not keen on wearing it.” Asked what he might do with his share of the winnings, Hacon was nothing if not realistic. “I’ll start by paying taxes,” he said. “And I have six kids, so the rest will evaporate.”

Chuck Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, led a Nasa mission known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to map the faint afterglow of the big bang’s radiation that now permeates the universe. The achievement, now more than a decade old, won the 27-strong science team the $3m Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics. “When we made our first maps of the sky, I thought these are beautiful,” Bennett told the Guardian. “It is still absolutely amazing to me. We can look directly back in time.”

Bennett believes that the prizes may help raise the profile of science at a time when it is sorely needed. “The point is not to make rock stars of us, but of the science itself,” he said. “I don’t think people realise how big a role science plays in their lives. In everything you do, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, there’s something about what you’re doing that involves scientific advances. I don’t think people think about that at all.”

Ian Sample