Jennifer Doudna, cosmology teams named 2015 Breakthrough Prize winners
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
BERKELEY —
UC Berkeley structural biologist Jennifer Doudna and two teams of cosmologists led by Nobel Laureates Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, a former UC Berkeley post-doc, were named 2015 Breakthrough Prize winners in life sciences and physics, respectively, at a star-studded gala in Silicon Valley Sunday, Nov. 9.
The annual Breakthrough Prizes, which include a trophy and $3 million to each laureate in fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics, are sponsored by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, a founder of the genetics company 23andMe; Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma and his wife, Cathy Zhang; Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner and his wife, Julia; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The goal is to celebrate scientists and generate excitement about the pursuit of science as a career.
The 2015 Breakthrough Prize winners in all three categories — life sciences, physics and mathematics — will be celebrated Monday, Nov. 10, during a series of three symposia taking place at Stanford University and streamed live to UC Berkeley from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with social media conversations through the Twitter hashtag #BreakthroughPrize.
The other recipients of the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences are Doudna’s research colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umeå University, Alim Louis Benabid of Joseph Fourier University, C. David Allis of The Rockefeller University, Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Gary Ruvkun (B.A. ’73) of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Doudna and Charpentier received the award for their discovery of a revolutionary DNA-editing technique that has upended the world of genetics, finally making possible dreams of gene therapy. The prize announcement lauded them “for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine.”
Doudna, who holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, is a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist.
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About The Breakthrough Prizes
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The prizes aim to celebrate scientists and generate excitement about the pursuit of science as a career. Breakthrough Prizes are funded by a grant from Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki’s foundation, The Brin Wojcicki Foundation; a grant from Mark Zuckerberg’s fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; a grant from Jack Ma Foundation; and a grant from Milner Foundation. Laureates of all prizes are chosen by Selection Committees, which are comprised of prior recipients of the prizes.
Laureates of each prize are chosen by its respective Selection Committee, comprised of previous recipients of the prize.
The Selection Committee for the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the New Horizons in Physics Prize included: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Lyn Evans, Fabiola Gianotti, Michael B. Green, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Joseph Incandela, Juan Maldacena, Alexander Polyakov, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen, John H. Schwarz and Edward Witten.
The Selection Committee for the 2015 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences included: James P. Allison, Cornelia I. Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis C. Cantley, Hans Clevers, Titia de Lange, Mahlon R. DeLong, Napoleone Ferrara, Michael N. Hall, Eric S. Lander, Robert Langer, Richard P. Lifton, Charles L. Sawyers, Alexander Varshavsky, Bert Vogelstein, Robert A. Weinberg and Shinya Yamanaka.
For more information on the Breakthrough Prizes: www.breakthroughprize.org.
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https://breakthroughprize.org/?controller=Page&action=news&news_id=21
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