This morning Facebook billionaire Yuri Milner – and some friends – announced a new prize for biological achievement: the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, a $3 million award ”recognizing excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” This year, there are 11 recipients, meaning a total $33 million payout, but in the future five annual awards will be planned, totaling $15 million. The other sponsors included Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin, who talked to my colleague Ryan Mac.
Organizing this effort: the former chief executive of Genentech, who is also the chairman of Apple: Arthur D. “Art” Levinson. I got a chance to chat briefly with him.
Milner shot Levinson an email six months ago asking if he had time to talk. “Of course I said yes,” says Levinson. The former biotech exec and biochemistry Ph.D. was aware of the awards the billionaire was giving to physicists. “P hysics is a hobby of mine, as much as a person of limited intelligence can understand physics,” Levinson quips. His instant, instinctive reaction was that such a prize would be good for science.
Why, I wanted to know, had this prize focused so much on well-established – in may cases graying – figures? “A good part of the answer and maybe all of the answer is it often takes years before an individual's work is recognized as being as important as it is. We didn't want to penalize people just because they might be 63 or 70 years old.”
The new $3 million prize was given to 11 people. If the idea was to draw attention, why so many?
“You could easily add another 20 to this list,” says Levinson. “Yuri and we wanted to make a big statement. The point of arbitrariness raises its head further and further. The bickering and debate about almost every Nobel Prize reaches a crescendo, at least in scientific circles. We thought if we cast a much wider net that would be a good thing.”
