Nine scientists were recognized on Wednesday with a "Breakthrough Prize," a three-million-US-dollar Silicon Valley-funded award meant to confer Oscars-style glamour and prestige on the basic sciences.
The prizes in physics, life sciences and mathematics went to six men and three women, including four researchers who shared two prizes and five who get the full reward to themselves.
Vincent Lafforgue, of France's National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), was awarded the prize in mathematics for groundbreaking work in multiple areas.
France's Vincent Lafforgue won the 2019 Breakthrough Prize for his work in the filed of mathematics. /AFP Photo
Five US-based researchers who won prizes in the life sciences included Frank Bennett and Adrian Krainer, from companies in Carlsbad, California and Long Island, New York.
They were recognized for their discovery of a DNA-linked process that led to a treatment for a rare infantile disorder, spinal amyotrophy.
They were joined by Chinese-born scientists Zhuang Xiaowei from the Harvard University, who developed a new tool for super-resolution molecular imagery, and Chen Zhijian from the University of Texas, for his discovery of a DNA-sensing enzyme that could be associated with auto-immune disorders.
The US-based contingent was completed by Angelika Amon, an Austrian researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, when a cell does not have the normal number of chromosomes.
Professor Angelika Amon from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences category. /AFP Photo
The physics prizes went to Charles Kane and Eugene Mele from the University of Pennsylvania and Jocelyn Bell Burnell from the Oxford University, an astrophysicist who was the recipient of a special prize in fundamental physics.
Six 100,000-US-dollar awards also were given to 12 researchers for promising early career work.
"The winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Science show us all how it's done," said Cori Bargmann, chair of the selection committee. "Through creativity, innovation, persistence, and skill, each of them brought about an advance that was previously unimaginable."
The "Breakthrough Prize" is only six years old but it is far more lavish than the coveted Nobel, which comes with prize money of around one million US dollars and is often shared by two or three laureates.
The prizes will be presented at a star-studded red carpet ceremony in November, hosted at a NASA research center in Silicon Valley by actor Pierce Brosnan.
(Top image: Picture taken during the presentation ceremony of 2017 Breakthrough Prize at NASA Ames Research Center in California, December 4, 2016 /AFP Photo )