A new medical award worth double the Nobel Prize has been established to give researchers a dose of what being a celebrity feels like. The prize money for the award is $3 Million.
Eleven scientists will receive, for the first time, the world's richest academic award for medicine and science, reports the New York Times. The prize money is worth $3 million each, which is more than twice the amount for the Noble Prize.
The award has been established by four Internet titans led by Yuri Milner, a Russian philanthropist and entrepreneur and has been titled "The Breakthrough Prize In Life Science."
The other donors include Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the genetics company 23andMe and Brin's wife. An official statement released by them states that the Award will be given to five scientists annually.
These five scientists will be among the few "who think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives," Wojcicki said.
The first 11 scientists who will be receiving the award include:
* Cornelia I. Bargmann, who investigates the nervous system and behavior at Rockefeller University.
* David Botstein of Princeton University, who maps disease markers in the human genome.
* Lewis C. Cantley of Weill Cornell Medical College, who discovered a family of enzymes related to cell growth and cancer.
* Dr. Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, who has studied how processes in adult stem cells can go wrong and cause cancer.
* Dr. Napoleone Ferrara of the University of California, San Diego, whose work on tumor growth has led to therapies for some kinds of cancer and eye disease.
* Titia de Lange, who works on telomeres, the protective tips on the ends of chromosomes, at Rockefeller University.
* Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leader of the Human Genome Project.
* Dr. Charles L. Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who has investigated the signaling pathways that drive a cell to cancer.
* Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, who discovered a protein that suppresses the growth of tumors and devised a model for the progression of colon cancer that is widely used in colonoscopy.
* Robert A. Weinberg of M.I.T., who discovered the first human oncogene, a gene that when mutated causes cancer.
* Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, who has done groundbreaking work in developing stem cells.
