Young scientists, I have good news: Nearly all of the 2015 winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences pledged to devote at least some of their new-found riches to education programs that encourage budding scientists. No details yet, as the prizes were less than a day old when the researchers announced their plans at the Breakthrough Prize Life Sciences Symposium hosted by Stanford yesterday.
"The Breakthrough Prize winners have done such amazing things," said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the School of Medicine. Minor lauded the founders of the award, Silicon Valley luminaries Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. "They have put together this wonderful way of rewarding and awarding scientists for the work they are doing. It's a real privilege for us at Stanford to host the symposium."
The six scientists, who each won a $3 million award, fielded questions and let the audience in on a secret: the path toward scientific success wasn't always easy.
"I would have never, ever in a million years have predicted I would have been sitting up here," said C. David Allis, PhD, a professor at The Rockefeller University who was honored for his discoveries in chromatin biology, or the study of the proteins associated with DNA. Chromatin was once thought to be useless and Allis said he received plenty of criticism about his research focus.
Jennifer Doudna, PhD, a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at UC Berkeley, said she didn't know any scientists growing up in Hawaii. It wasn't until a cancer researcher visited her high school, giving Doudna her first glimpse at her future career. Doudna, who is also affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, won along with microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, for their work on genome editing. Charpentier leads the department of regulation in infection biology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany.
Gary Ruvkun, PhD, said that although he's a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, he still hasn't mastered the art of mentoring. "I've had people in my lab refer to me as the least grown up," he said. Ruvkun was recognized — along with molecular biologist Victor Ambros, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School — for their work on microRNAs, small pieces of RNA that regulate gene expression.
All of the winners thanked their family, mentors, colleagues, but Alim Louis Benabid, MD, PhD, thanked his patients as well. Benabid, board chairman of the Clinatec Institute in France, said many patients are embarrassed when their doctor asks them to take off their clothes. His patients let him stick his fingers in their brains, he joked. Benabid was honored for demonstrating that deep brain stimulation can alleviate some symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
In the full-day symposium, several former Breakthrough Prize winners spoke, and Bay Area graduate students and postdocs hosted a poster session.
Previously: Are big-money science prizes a good thing?, Funding basic science leads to clinical discoveries, eventually and Why basic research is the venture capital of the biomedical world
Photo by Petras Gagilas
