Returning to the 2020 Winners of Giving Pledge Signatory Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize

Once again, the prestigious Breakthrough Prize has announced winners in three categories: Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics.

Julia and Yuri Milner founded the Breakthrough Prize with other notable individuals in 2012 as part of their Giving Pledge, a commitment to donate their wealth to scientific, philanthropic causes.

Through the Giving Pledge, Julia and Yuri Milner encourage established and budding scientists to celebrate the world’s biggest research developments and promote dialogue around key questions in the science arena.

Here, we’ll introduce the latest Breakthrough Prize winners and return to the 2020 laureates’ achievements.

2023 Breakthrough Prize Winners

The 2023 winners of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize each won $3 million in prize money and appeared at a televised awards ceremony in Silicon Valley last year. A committee of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates selected the winners, who are:

• Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, David Deutsch, and Peter W. Shor, who won a Fundamental Physics prize for their pivotal work in the quantum information space.
• Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman, who won a Life Sciences prize for discovering “a fundamental mechanism of cellular organization mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membrane-less liquid droplets.”
• Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, won a Life Sciences prize for coming up with a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) method that predicts proteins’ 3D structures from their amino acid sequences, both quickly and effectively.
• Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa won a Life Sciences prize for their research into narcolepsy, which led to them discovering its cause and laying the groundwork for sleep disorder treatments.
• Daniel A. Spielman won a Mathematics prize for his contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics developments, including numerical linear algebra, optimization, coding theory, spectral graph theory, and the Kadison-Singer problem.

2020 Breakthrough Prize Winners

While the world celebrates the achievements of the latest Breakthrough Prize winners, we’ll reflect on the groundbreaking research and discoveries that the 2020 laureates achieved, now three years ago.

Five scientists received a Life Sciences prize:

• Arthur L. Horwich and F. Ulrich Hartl, for uncovering functions of molecular chaperones in preventing protein aggregation and mediating protein folding.
• David Julius, for discovering mechanisms, cells, and molecules behind pain sensation. Julius went on to win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in the discovery of receptors for temperature and touch.
• Virginia Man-Yee Lee, for identifying TDP43 protein aggregates in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. She also discovered that some forms of alpha-synuclein in different cell types underlie Multiple System Atrophy and Parkinson’s disease.
• Jeffrey M. Friedman, for unearthing an endocrine system through which adipose tissue cues the brain to regulate food intake. Last year, Friedman’s lab at Rockefeller University identified neurons in the region of the brainstem that co-ordinates the urge to refuse meals and rest when we’re ill. The lab scientists discovered that it’s possible to provoke or inhibit these neurons to trigger or prevent the sickness response.

Alex Eskin won the Mathematics prize for his pioneering discoveries in the geometry and dynamics of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, such as the proof of the “magic wand theorem,” which he worked on with Maryam Mirzakhani.

The 2020 Fundamental Physics prize went to 347 scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. These scientists arranged for the first photograph of a supermassive black hole to be taken by linking radio dishes around the world to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope. The results appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2022.