The Breakthrough Prize – 2021
The names of the laureates of one of the world's largest scientific prizes – The Breakthrough Prize – 2021 have been announced
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, founded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new winners of the award, which is awarded in three categories: life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. Every year, new laureates are honored at a solemn ceremony with the participation of world cinema stars, outstanding musicians, athletes and innovative entrepreneurs.
However, this year, due to the pandemic, the celebrations were postponed to March 2021. As noted in the Foundation's message, at a time when the importance of scientific achievements is more obvious than ever, "The Breakthrough Prize continues its nine-year tradition of honoring the most profound and innovative discoveries, noting the merits of both established researchers and those who are at the very beginning of their scientific journey." A special prize, the New Horizons Prize, has been established for the latter, as well as the New Frontiers Prize, awarded for the first time this year by mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.
The range of scientific interests of the new laureates, as well as their predecessors, is wide: from the creation of methods for elucidating the spatial configuration of a protein, the so-called folding, or stacking, of a protein, and the design of completely new proteins, including those that can neutralize the virus that causes Covid-19 disease, to the creation of sensitive devices for solving the mysteries of the dark energy and verification of Einstein's theory.
Among the laureates are the developer of a non–invasive test for embryonic genetic screening used by millions of potential parents around the world, and the compiler of a map of neural pathways that control parental behavior at the level of special brain cells, and a mathematician describing random processes - from fluctuations in the stock market to the movement of sugar in a cup of tea. The award fund in each nomination is 3 million US dollars, the total amount this year is about 19 million dollars.
Among the laureates in the life sciences nomination, Denis Lo (Yuk Ming Dennis Lo) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong deserves special attention, who discovered the presence of germinal DNA in the mother's bloodstream, which allows prenatal screening to detect Down's disease and other genetic diseases without taking amniotic fluid.
One of the New Horizons Prize winners is our compatriot mathematician Alexander Logunov from Princeton University, who has developed new approaches to the study of solutions to elliptic equations and their application in nodal geometry.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru