The awards were presented at a Saturday ceremony in Los Angeles and are cofounded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, among others. But unlike the Oscars, which recognizes only film achievements from the last calendar year, recipients of the Breakthrough Prizes can be honored for any major scientific leaps that sometimes took years or over a decade to complete.
Stuart Orkin
Orkin, who runs a stem cell biology lab affiliated with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, was honored for his gene research which enabled development of the first FDA-approved gene-editing cure for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, two painful blood disorders impacting millions worldwide.
The treatment, Casgevy, developed by CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, has been “transformational,” in the lives of patients, Orkin said, though so far it has only been used to treat roughly 60 people in its two years on the market.
Orkin said he hopes the recognition from the award can benefit the next generation of work being undertaken by his lab to create a pill version of the treatment.
He shares his award with Swee Lay Thein of the National Institutes of Health.
“At a time when people are questioning the value of science, this is a good example … to counter whatever arguments are out there,” Orkin said.
Lee Roberts
Roberts was recognized for his part in conducting groundbreaking particle physics experiments that increased research precision and understanding of the muon, a “heavy, unstable, cousin of the electron,” according to a news release.
Doing so, Roberts said, helps researchers probe for new understandings of physics beyond what is currently known in standard representations.
Roberts was involved with the two latest iterations of this research, at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in the 1990s and early 2000s, and most recently at Fermilab near Chicago, conducting research from 2013 through last summer. The research brought together over 170 scientists from 34 institutions in seven countries, including students from Boston University and other colleges.
“Most experiments, but certainly the ones I’ve been in, it’s the young people and their enthusiasm and excitement that really helps push things along,” said Roberts.
Dillon Brout
Brout was recognized for his work building and analyzing the largest and most precise supernova datasets modernly available, including Pantheon+, which helps cosmologists map the expansion of the universe, according to a news release.
“The challenges that we face is that we get one experiment, and that experiment is the universe,” Brout said. Research like his is helping to increase the precision of cosmological understanding, Brout said, while providing “the most rigorous treatment of uncertainty,” in its dataset.
Shu-Heng Shao
Shao worked alongside other researchers to develop the theory of “generalized symmetries” in quantum field theory, which helped create a “new language” of possibilities in the field beyond the traditional understanding of symmetries, he said.
He began researching the topic in 2017, with significant breakthroughs coming in 2021 and 2022.
“I feel very honored and privileged that our work in the past few years can be recognized by the community,” he said. “All these new symmetries have given us new consequences in theoretical physics [and] surprising results that we didn’t know before.”
Bryan Hecht can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @bhechtjournalism.
